Busan Journal, Day 26

The Rewards of Teaching

One of the rewarding elements of teaching in Korea is hearing from students who have connected with our reading or discussions in significant ways. That is, I suppose, always the rewarding part of teaching -- to see the light of understanding in student faces and to hear excitement in their voices.

My Korean students have rewarded me many times in this way.

After class a week ago one of my graduate students, whom I will call Mi-Won, mentioned to me what she had found so compelling about No-No Boy, the novel by John Okada that we had just finished discussing.  Interestingly, it was not the central character that she related to but his mother, whose role in the novel embodies a particular set of attitudes and characteristics.  She is an immigrant who, like much of the Japanese immigrant community, hopes to recreate the old country in the new. In this story she believes she can remain Japanese and raise her sons as Japanese.  Her dream is to return to Japan, with her family, as rich people who can live the life of the wealthy -- once the family has made its fortune in America.

Having lived for a number of years in both England and the United States as her own children were growing up, Mi-Won found the mother's plight both understandable and sympathetic in a way the rest of us had not. Mi-Won identified; she found a level of empathy that opened the story to her in a compelling way.

While the portrait in the novel treated the mother with dignity and sympathy, it also portrayed her as stubborn, aggressive, and enigmatic. The Japan she idealized and desired for her boys had been destroyed.

Mi-Won told of her own struggles to raise her children with a  Korean identity, even as they were being shaped by the English and then American cultures.  Her efforts led to misunderstandings and arguments with her son -- she arguing in Korean, he responding in English, using British and American vulgarities.  Mi-Won resonates with the mother's frustrations and sense of powerlessness as she loses her own children to their new culture.

Mi-Won's moments of illumination are what literature is all about.  And in the best of circumstances, those moments are what teaching is about too.

Busan Journal, Day 25

The Total Animal Soup of Time, Part II

Somehow the semester is nearly done.

Just yesterday I was wondering how to introduce "Howl" to students I did not know, who had no frame of reference for what I hoped to teach and brought unknown expectations of their foreign professor.  I was also wondering how well my new students would read English and understand my rapid-fire lectures.

Now we are finishing our last books and thinking about the final assessment.

On the first day of classes I worked hard to discover what my expectations should be so that I could attempt to bridge the gaps.  That first day the classes were quite big -- not the hundred I might have had in one classroom, but big enough. More significantly, I had no solution to the problem of getting affordable books in English, so my reading lists were tentative. I needed quite a bit of specific information quickly, but I was not sure how to get it.

Getting Korean students to talk, as a general rule, is quite difficult; most of them are accustomed to sitting without speaking in the classroom.The general idea is that the teacher lectures and students take notes.  It is, I suppose, flattering to think that I might have so much valuable information stored up. But all the same I prefer give and take.  My internal GPS functions on eye contact and body language, both of which Korean students have learned to keep under control.

By the second week, the classes were smaller.  I think some students, who were initially curious about the foreign professor, felt the work would be too hard or that there would be too much reading in English. Some may have found the prospect of facing me every week to be a bit daunting.  Perhaps it is true that I am intimidating, although the notion always strikes me as misplaced.

I was sorry to lose so many right off because I have been excited about the learning opportunities.  My learning opportunities, that is.

Whatever the reasons, it has been better with smaller classes -- fourteen in the undergraduate class on immigrant literature and nine in the graduate class on the literature of rebellion.  We have, at least in the graduate class, reached a point where interaction during class is common and fairly easy. I do not exactly teach through discussion, as is my preference, but we come close.



It is the graduate class where we used "Howl" as our first reading. That was a bit of chutzpah on my part, I suppose, but the choice actually worked well.  We spent a lot of time on "Howl."

It was not so much the objectionable stuff that concerned my students -- or me, after my initial what-have-I done!  Every language has its dirty words and every culture has its provocative behaviors, so these elements were not an obstacle to learning.  In fact, these things are part of a fabric of puzzling references and allusions that needed context and explanation, and the form of the poem can be dizzying.  All of this meant I had to approach the poem by explaining context and form. 

As Ginsberg graphically parades nearly every major American concern of the 1950s, I was free to discuss the historical circumstances that made the literature of rebellion necessary. As he speaks the unspeakable and reveals the hidden, we were in open territory.  In the process, the poem begins to make a great deal of sense. It becomes a map of the post-war American subconscious.

The undergraduate class has proven a different sort of challenge.  Part of that challenge is due to the size of the room;  there are fifteen of us in a lecture hall with 100 seats and with a raised stage for the professor. What this has meant is that the natural gaps are emphasized. It is more difficult to create the atmosphere of familiarity in which a Korean student might be encouraged to look up and, dare I think it, speak.

Now, as I have said, the semester is nearly gone.  We have reached the "end game" in both classes.  How shall we draw our studies to satisfactory conclusions?

In the Immigrant class we have finished our books and have begun what I call "ruining movies." We are watching The Joy Luck Club together over a period of three classes with suitable time before and after the segments for discussion.  I am  ruining this movie for my class both because the story is ideal for our topic and because it gives them time to write their final paper without the pressure of new reading for class.

The graduate class came over for lunch this week to see how the foreign professor lives, to meet his wife, and to enjoy a taste of American hospitality.  We had a good time.  We have reached a good point in this learning experience.



Too bad we are reaching the end.  If only we had world enough and time.

Busan Journal, Day 6

As I rounded the corner by the law building on my walk down from our hilltop dormitory, I heard the faint strains of music. It is early on a rainy day, our third in a row, and a national holiday, Sam Il Jul, so the streets were otherwise deserted. What a joy to hear what I took to be live music, a single instrument coloring a moment otherwise silent, damp, and gray.

The route to my new office takes me alternately downhill and then laterally across the face of the slope three times. As I approached an open, three layered parking garage that sits beside a series of tennis courts, I could tell that the music was coming from within the parking garage itself, then that it was a saxophone.

Immediately I felt affinity with the lone musician. I thought first of recent experiences hearing musicians in London, performing in walkways of tube stations or the pedestrian "subways" in the center of the city. Then I thought of the lone musician I had come across in Highbury Fields, our local park, practicing his trumpet in the cold twilight of mid-November. He was good, I must say, but no doubt the trumpet makes poor company indoors when you share thin walls, ceilings, and floors with a less tolerant audience.

Then I spotted him, or part of him, sitting on a folding chair on the lower deck of the parking garage, facing a fold-away music stand, practicing a classical piece unfamiliar to me, his huge bright brass horn almost touching the ground. I could not see his face and he did not stop while I stood for a moment in the rain, but I wanted to applaud. I would have tossed the coins from my pocket into his open case had he been closer and the way down accessible.

We have been here ten days. Life on campus has been quiet, although clearly campus life does not stop between semesters. Yesterday, new students arrived. The campus buzzed with life for the first time. A line of cars, bumper to bumper, snaked oh-so-slowly up the single narrow street toward the dorms; students armed with big yellow badges and light batons directed traffic; and hundreds of parents dragged suitcases and their somber kids toward their new rooms and this new life at college.

Now, this national holiday and a deserted campus. The lone musician with his over-sized saxophone filled the quiet air with notes we often call plaintive, melancholy, wistful. But what I hear is the joy of the introspective life, the shared emotion of this moment in which two lives understand something through music that we could not express in words.

I have been asked many times how the teaching is going. I would say it is going fine. I am having a great time with my saxophone, wailing away in the parking garage with its wonderful amplifying acoustics. On Thursday I get to do it again for my first real audience.

Day 3

Before my present teaching gig, which has lasted twenty-six years, I was a journeyman teacher, following that all too common practice of shopping for sabbatical replacement spots and adjunct openings. If you count my second go at graduate school, during which I continued adjunct teaching, I have been at this for thirty seven years. That is a big number.
I must be fairly easily impressed. As with a lot of things in life, if you stay at it, stay healthy, and do the work you are meant to do, you get the big numbers. Cal Ripken, the baseball major league iron man, played in 2,632 straight games simply by showing up for work every day. He needed talent, of course, over a long stretch of years; but lots of players with talent don't make it to the bigs or don't play long. My mother, who turned 90 this summer, has for years expressed surprise at how old she is. Marriages that last for many years do so because the couple determines to stay at it; in good marriages, both parties work at it. I have been married for 40 years this June just past. And it is probably fair to say we have both worked to make the marriage good, although it has not seemed like work.
It is only when I look hard at these numbers that they seem to impressive to me. Here, too, as with many things, you do the task at hand, the day's work, the study or talk that comes next. Maybe you have set the goal before you as motivation and objective, but you don't think about it every day. I never once thought, "OK, I'm part way to 40. Only XX more years to go." All of these things can be thought of, at least metaphorically, in terms of journey or as travel. To say as much is both obvious and necessary, for reasons I hope to explore little by little.
In a little more than a week, my wife of 40 years and I expect to set out on journey, a awfully big adventure (to echo Peter Pan). We will be traveling for the better part of a year, to England first and then to Korea, teaching because that is what I do, living in places different to us, and soaking in whatever we encounter like sponges. Like paper towels. Like a shammy.
And, in this space, I will be writing about it, both to note what we find and, I hope, to sort out why it all matters.