It's difficult

It's hard to keep up with this blog. Everything that was once novel is now simply part of regular life.

There isn't much of a community for this type of blogging either. The few expats in Korea blogs I do follow kind of suck too or no longer blog.

With that said, there's not much more I feel like writing about in this blog.

Peace out.

Music Critique

Today, I had a class on music critiquing. I taught the students some commonly-used phrases to critique music ("It's got a good beat", "It's catchy", "It's nothing special"). We then proceeded to watch 10 music videos of varying genres.

The songs I played were as follows:

1. Justin Bieber - Baby
2. Bach - Cello Suite #1 Prelude
3. Foo Fighters - Everlong
4. Miles David - Summertime
5. Benji Benassi - Satisfaction
6. Bob Marley - Stir It Up
7. My Chemical Romance - Helena
8. Kenny Chesney - She's Got It All
9. BB King - The Thrill is Gone
10. Usher - Yeah!

I instructed them to critique the music using the phrases we learned, but some opted to write their own individuals responses, to my delight:

Bach
-"sorry to Bach"
-"this music is trash"

Foo Fighters
-"he shake his leg too much"

Bob Marley
-"Musician's hairstyle were cool"
-"I like the beat and lyrics very funny"
'stir it up, little darling, stir it up'... I suppose it is a bit funny


My Chemical Romance
-"Bass guy makes me angry"
-"Don't you have any respect for the dead?!"
he noticed they were dancing at a funeral. nice comment

Usher
-"the girl is so sexy"
-"scary"
overall, the students liked this genre/song the best. hopefully this'll mean they are more familiar with hip hop and i won't have to see godawful Korean dancing at the clubs

Kenny Chesney
-"fuck"
there were surprisingly positive ratings for country music. americans-not-from-the-south probably don't have as high an opinion on country.

Justin Bieber
-"gross"

Bach
-"NOT AWESOME!!!!"

the one song that got the most shit dropped on it was BB King. the music wasn't well-liked and many students commented how he was making awkward faces (feelin the music ... just a tad too much).

BB King
-"he look stupid, sorry BB King"
-"singer appearance very dirty"
-"singer's voice is very embarassing"
-"let's fight"

Crossword Puzzles... you're doing it wrong.

I made a crossword puzzle for my students this week. Although they understand the concept clearly, they sometimes fail terribly when finding the answers to the clues (and when I say fail terribly, I mean that it's worse than Kirstie Alley trying to fit into a size 1 pair of jeans).

One class of students today were particularly lazy and did not feel like doing the puzzle. I looked at my one loud-mouthed student's paper in the back -- it was BLANK. I encouraged him to give it a try. I came back 5 minutes later and I saw that he filled out a couple of answers. I was actually surprised he got one in particular:

Clue 15 Down: The word "ad" is short for _____.

It was a 13-letter clue that I didn't expect the slacker to know. I looked at what he wrote and saw this:

"STEPHEN HAWKIN"

He was referring to the theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking. I burst out with laughter. The student who wrote it wasn't laughing at all though.

CROSSWORD PUZZLE FAIL.

Other worthy mentions:

Clue 7 Across: Edison made the first light bulb = Edison ____ the light bulb.

8 letters... "CUCUMBER"

Clue 2 Across: The Simpsons and Spongebob Squarepants are _____.

8 letters... "EHPSWOWO"

Clue 15.5 Down: What is the comparative form of "hot?"

6 letters... "HOTDOG"