I have indeed finished grading (and given them to the Department Office Assistant, to be uploaded your grades to the UCUPS system). Feel free to go and check your grades.

If the grade you have received is a surprise, then consider the following questions:

1. Did you submit every piece of assigned homework? How well did you do on your homework. (In most cases, a V+ ranking is a high ranking, a V is an average ranking, a V- is a very poor ranking, and a V++ is an outstanding ranking. In a scale out of 3, V-=1; V=2, V+=3, and V++=3.5 (a bonus mark of 0.5).
2. Did you attend consistently? Were you often late?
3. Did you participate in course discussions? Were you active in our classes, to the extent possible for the course?
4. If there were quizzes offered in the course, did you score well on the quizzes?
5. Were you well-prepared for any instances in which you were expected to lead or participate in a discussion for the whole class? (ie. leading a discussion, or a panel discussion)
6. Did you fulfill all the online portions of the course, such as participating in course forum discussions online, or completing blog postings?
7. Did you submit the Feedback for the Presentation Contest that was assigned for your class?

If your answer is no to any of the questions, you may have discovered the reason why your grade is not what you expected. (Especially if it is lower than you expected.) As a note, #6 and #7 above were particularly a problem for some people.

A special note to students in my Understanding Anglophone Cultures Through Film: your performance on the course forum website led me, in a moment of mercy, to alter the ranking system of the grades in the following way: if you scored better on forum participation than on quizzes, then (as originally planned) the forum is worth 20% of your grade, and the quizzes only 10%. If, however, you scored better on the quizzes offered in class than on the forum, then the quizzes make up 20% of your grade, and the forum only 10%. Therefore, each of you got the highest grade possible for you. Nobody else’s grade affected yours, and in fact the ranking of students did not change through this modification. It just allowed the grades for the whole class to be a little less harsh overall.

In any case, if you think your grade is an error, then before emailing me to demand a change, I ask that you review the following two pages:

• On Grading
• Emailing Your Professors

These will help you decide whether, and how, to contact me with your concerns. I assure you, if you contact me in a reasonable and polite way, I will be happy to explain how you got your grade. If an error was made I will fix it. If not, however, I do not respond well to demands, or to begging. If your whole future depends on this grade, then  I expect you to have behaved that way during semester — preparing for quizzes, submitting all homework on time and as well-done as you could, never missing class without a good excuse, and so on.

Have a wonderful holiday, and feel free to check out the courses I am supposed to be teaching next semester here.

I have indeed finished grading (and given them to the Department Office Assistant, to be uploaded your grades to the UCUPS system). Feel free to go and check your grades.

If the grade you have received is a surprise, then consider the following questions:

1. Did you submit every piece of assigned homework? How well did you do on your homework. (In most cases, a V+ ranking is a high ranking, a V is an average ranking, a V- is a very poor ranking, and a V++ is an outstanding ranking. In a scale out of 3, V-=1; V=2, V+=3, and V++=3.5 (a bonus mark of 0.5).
2. Did you attend consistently? Were you often late?
3. Did you participate in course discussions? Were you active in our classes, to the extent possible for the course?
4. If there were quizzes offered in the course, did you score well on the quizzes?
5. Were you well-prepared for any instances in which you were expected to lead or participate in a discussion for the whole class? (ie. leading a discussion, or a panel discussion)
6. Did you fulfill all the online portions of the course, such as participating in course forum discussions online, or completing blog postings?
7. Did you submit the Feedback for the Presentation Contest that was assigned for your class?

If your answer is no to any of the questions, you may have discovered the reason why your grade is not what you expected. (Especially if it is lower than you expected.) As a note, #6 and #7 above were particularly a problem for some people.

In any case, if you think your grade is an error, then before emailing me to demand a change, I ask that you review the following two pages:

• On Grading
• Emailing Your Professors

These will help you decide whether, and how, to contact me with your concerns. I assure you, if you contact me in a reasonable and polite way, I will be happy to explain how you got your grade. If an error was made I will fix it. If not, however, I do not respond well to demands, or to begging. If your whole future depends on this grade, then  I expect you to have behaved that way during semester — preparing for quizzes, submitting all homework on time and as well-done as you could, never missing class without a good excuse, and so on.

Have a wonderful holiday, and feel free to check out the courses I am supposed to be teaching next semester here.

I mentioned that I would be asking you to fill out a self-evaluation for our Listening & Speaking course. There is an online form where you can fill out that evaluation here.

Your deadline is noon on 20 December. Don’t be late, as I’m hoping to hand in the grades that afternoon!

The videos for your midterm and final exams are now online and available to you (and the rest of the world) at Youtube.

I’ve created a playlist that contains four videos from the midterm (including most of you, but not everyone — Jiyoon says the last few speakers, who were filmed on her iPhone, got their videos from her…) and seven videos for the final exam. The playlist is here.

As for your Self-Evaluation, you can fill out the self-evaluation form here. You have until Tuesday, 20 December at 12:00 noon to do so. If you do not, it will affect your grade negatively, so please do make sure to fill out the self-evaluation form.

I just got word from the office that we will be having the midterm exam for Reading & Writing 2 in our regular classroom. (Which I’m told is IH338. If that’s wrong, let’s meet there anyway.) We will meet during our regular classtime, ie. from 12:00-2:00pm on Wednesday, 14 December.

Remember what I said in our last class: if you cannot write a proper 5-paragraph essay, I will be obliged to hold you back — ie. to give you an F grade.

A “proper 5-paragraph essay” for the purposes of this exam includes:

• a hook of some kind in the opening paragraph
• a strong thesis in  the opening paragraph, which is re-expressed (preferably in slightly different form) in the concluding paragraph
• three body paragraphs with topic sentences
• a proper body paragraph structure where the paragraph begins with a topic sentence, moves to support the topic sentence with examples, explanation, or evidence (like statistics) and then returns (full circle) to the large theme of the topic sentence

In addition to the 5-praragraph essay structure, you will be responsible for skills related to responding to another text (ie. both of the writing templates we explored, and your ability to paraphrasing another’s writing), and other skills like outlining, drawing a Venn diagram, using proper structure and punctuation for quotations from other texts, and so on.

That sounds like a lot, but you’ve been working on it all semester. Meanwhile, I’m working hard to get some responses to your blog postings. If you wrote fewer than ten essays, you still have time until the 19th of December to get them done. Remember, you need to write ten five-paragraph essays on the blog in order to pass the course as well. I’ll continue writing feedback today, and hopefully finish.

However, if you wrote fewer than 8 essays by today (as of 12 December), you will get feedback on only one of your essays.

El Empleo / The Employment from opusBou on Vimeo.

http://vimeo.com/32966847

Feel free to share the link with others!

Also, here’s the quotation from Dante I mentioned and asked you to think about — in Italian and English too:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,

I found myself within a shadowed forest,

for I had lost the path that does not stray.

Finally, since it came up in discussion, here’s a little history about the Spencerian form of Social Darwinism in the past, and another the resurgence of Social Darwinism in today’s world.

The movie

The subtitle

Note: the subtitle is not a complete English subtitle, but it does have important dialog bits… it shows what the dog is saying to the man. If you don’t have the subtitle, some parts will make less sense to you.

For this week, we’re going to do things a little differently: we’re going to discuss two films:

1. The Beginners, which is currently playing at several theaters in and around Seoul, such as Daehakno, Guro, and Apkujeong.

2. Captain America, which is showing on Monday evening at the English Language and Culture Department’s Movie Night event.

I am asking you to watch both of these movies. I will not take attendance on Monday night, but aside from the amazing door prizes, I imagine Prof. Hurt will say a few things worth discussing in class. (And there will be free beer, just like at Mosaic.) I understand if you have a job, but if you have nothing else really special going on, it’s a good idea to show up.

The panel discussion will deal with The Beginners. Then we will have a group discussion of Captain America.

As for The Beginners, please make the time to see the film this weekend in the cinema. For the truly desperate, you might be able to find this film online, but I strongly urge you to see it in the cinema instead, as I’d like to talk a little bit about the experience of going to a cinema, as compared to watching a film at home.

Events, announcements, and more will be posted on our Facebook page in the future, so joining up is a good idea… even if you’re just taking one course in our department, and majoring in some other area, this page will let you know about important events, some of which are related to courses. So make sure you join up!

Also, this is a reminder that Monday night is MOVIE NIGHT at CUK. Professor Hurt has arranged for some wonderful prizes, and you can find out more about those, and the films showing, on the event page over at Facebook. Go have a look, and sign up.

Sorry again for the delayed posting. Our next film for discussion is Midnight in Paris, directed by Woody Allen. I don’t have a direct download link for you, but you can get a copy of the film via bittorrent if you look around online. This is one popular torrent for the film. You will need a program like Vuze or μtorrent to use this torrent file.

UPDATE: For those playing it  close to the line (ie. last-minute) the file is downloadable in full here.