Seoul, Job, Thoughts on North Korea

I wrote most of this as an update to people I haven't been in touch with since I've been here, so some of it will probably be things you've already heard from me, but there're also lots of heretofore unblogged thoughts. Here goes:

Seoul's fun, if a bit crazy. It's a huge city. I can get on the subway in downtown, ride for 50 minutes, and still pop up right in the middle of downtown. Pretty much anything I could possibly want is in this city, except maybe isolation and large green spaces. There's a national park on a mountain inside the city limits, and even that has been packed with people every time I've been there.

My job is usually really fun, but it's not much of an intellectual challenge. Certainly I put effort into keeping students' attention and helping them learn, but my deadlines are easy and there's not a lot of pressure. I think that's different for me than for a lot of teachers here, though. I competed in debate in college for four years, and now I'm teaching it to middle- and high schoolers, whereas most other teachers are teaching English without ever having taught English. I also work at a private school in a pretty affluent part of Seoul, which I think is reflected in the students at my school and their ability (and maybe willingness) to devote time and energy to academic work. I've talked to a few people who have taught English in more rural, less wealthy areas of Korea, and they seem to have infinitely more experiences with student violence and reluctance to cooperate in class than I do. I feel like I have a pretty easy time facilitating learning and mutual respect in my classes compared to most people I've talked to, but I don't know whether that's because I'm good at it, or I have a higher threshold for 'misbehavior' (whatever that means--how do we decide when someone goes from behaving correctly to behaving wrongly?) than other teachers, or just that my students are predisposed to enjoy debate. Maybe all of those? I have no idea.

Experiencing the results of the interactions between the governments of North and South Korea has been pretty strange at times. I write "the governments" because to me that's where this conflict seems to lie. An island 60 miles away from Seoul was shelled by North Korea, four South Koreans were killed, and no one seemed to care much. I was at work when the shelling began, and my boss turned around at her desk to tell us what was happening and then turned back around and went back to work. A few weeks later there was a country-wide air raid drill that the government described as "mandatory" but, in my experience, was widely ignored. I came here a pretty staunch non-interventionist, but I think I've changed my mind, I just don't know what I think intervention should look like. The South Korean government publishes estimates, based on information from North Korean defectors, that 20-30 thousand North Koreans starve to death every year. That, coupled with the terrible indignity of malnutrition and the ruthless suppression of dissent, creates a situation that I think needs to be changed, but is not going to change itself. Popular uprising becomes a lot less popular when the consequence is almost certainly death. The South Korean (and for that matter, American, Chinese, or Russian) government seems to worry most about the potential for North Korea to develop nuclear weaponry. I care less about North Korea developing nuclear weapons in the future than I do about the persistent repression of people living there now.

I feel safe here. Almost everyone I've talked to feels safe here, despite seemingly consistent portrayals of the situation by governments and most news media as "tense," or "volatile," or "unstable." My life is fun, but it's weird living so close to the territory of a state that seems to me the most repressive in the world.

Two weeks ago I read a study from Princeton ("Fortune favors the Bold and the Italicized: Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes," summarized in a BBC article here) which concluded that ". . . information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than information transmitted in easier fonts." Since then, much to the chagrin of my students, I've been using fonts like Lucida Calligraphy and Impact and Algerian for some of the worksheets and articles I hand out. I can't tell if it's working yet.

Hope things are fun, wherever y'all are.