Dispatches by John P. Gamboa

Well, I’ve been slacking a bit on the blogging lately. Namely because a lot things have been going around school (where I do most my blogging), like summer school and things.

I have three main blogs in progress. Most of them are longwinded topics like Korea’s exclusive use of Internet Explorer, The Korean War, and my trip to the DMZ. You can check out my photos on Facebook from said trips right here.

With half my day spent not teaching, I’ve started to geting into other endeavors (like video editing). Currently, I am remixing the video to Ratatat’s “Party with Children.”

An in-progress screenshot can be seen below:

The original video was just a 3:01 minute video of a bird in front of a green screen. It begs for people to edit it. Check it out here.

….Was from my friend Say, a major in the Republic of Singapore Navy. He is seen above flexing while eating some Southeast Asian cuisine in West Covina, California.

Yesterday I had my open class, which is a sort of evaluation of my teaching skills.  A group of teachers, the principal and the vice principal sat in on class. In my prep and brief feeling of anxiety, I remember Say’s  immortal words, which he imparted to me on the day before I left San Diego in February bound for Korea.

Don’t fuck up.

Short, sweet, profane and right to the point. Given the success of my open class, I feel Say’s words were spot on.

Yes, that’s John Wayne as Genghis Khan. It’s from a (terrible) Howard Hughes-produced biopic made in 1956 called, “The Conquerer.” You can watch it on Google Video here.

But Mr. Wayne’s method acting is not why I made this post. I wanted to share the fact that I finally made my plans for summer vacation!

It’s official: I’m going to Mongolia next month (for 10 days). After long debate on my travel plans, I opted for going to Mongolia for a myriad of reasons, but I’ll give you the main two.

One: I’ve never been there. Two: summer is really the only time I can make it out there. I wanted to go to Japan, but after some review, I realized that it’s still logistically feasible for me to go to Japan in the fall, winter or spring. I can’t say the same for cold, wide-open expanse of the north.

I’ll be flying into Ulanbaatar, the capital, on August 12, and it will be around 80 degrees. Nice and cool compared to the heat of  Thailand and The Philippines, where a lot of my friends are going for their break (and coincidentally, where I visited last year.)

I don’t have any major plans as of yet once I get there, but a friend I met in Hong Kong last year told me to just up at the guesthouses and poke around to find travel buddies for things out on the steppe (or accommodation at ger camps).

I am very excited to travel to (another) country and get into some wide-open spaces. After spending time in a very compact and dense country like Korea and briefly visiting the very large, overpopulated cities of Shanghai and Beijing, I’m ready for a change of pace.

This quote by Khan at his death perfectly sums up my reasons to travel there tool:

…[M]y life was too short to achieve the conquest of the world. That task is left for you.”
—Genghis Khan, to his sons at the end of his life.

This week is finals week at my school and as a result I’m not teaching at all. Last week I didn’t teach much, either, so I have some time to blog.

One thing I try to do as much as I can is teach students with music videos. This is especially the case when I have 15 minutes left over from speaking tests or a shorter lesson.  I don’t really expect them to follow along wit the lyrics, unless I supply them, like I have done in the past with “California Stars” by Billy Bragg & Wilco and “Thriller” by Michael Jackson (Directed by John Landis).  Sometimes I just give them songs with easy lyrics to see if they can understand them, like “Take On Me” by A-ha.

Sometimes I try to extract a student’s thoughts and point of view toward something with the videos. Other times I just want to freak them out (educationally).  One video I showed as of late is Peter Serafinowicz’s video for Hot Chip’s song “I Feel Better.” To me, I see it as a parody of pop singers, and in a way that the director didn’t necessarily intend, Korean pop songs in general.  The video plays out like the way the students are used to, young men dancing and looking sexy in front of a camera until a Mr. Burns on drugs-looking character comes in and zaps them to death.  They general response by students was 뭐, or “what…”

Other times I try to show them videos that are bizarre or funny and ask them why they think it’s funny and what it is about them that they enjoyed. In those cases I videos like “Two Weeks” by Grizzly Bear,  “Heaven Can Wait” by Charlette Gainsbourg and Beck or “The Polite Dance Song” by The Bird and The Bee.

On different occasions I present videos for songs that I really like and have some deeper meaning they can extrapolate. My example  is “No One Does It Like You” by Department of Eagles. The general response is, “War and people -go to heaven- dead.”  or “War is bad.”  I don’t expect full sentences on complex subjects like war, but I want to hear them try.  When they can deliver their feelings towards music and its message in English, or maybe look at music beyond  their K-Pop scope, it’s quite rewarding.

In that sense, music videos can be an invaluable teaching tool and not just a time filler for when lesson plans run short. It gives the students a peek into American and Western culture beyond what has been funneled to them from the charts. Part of our job as Native Speakers is to ease them into understanding Western cultures, not just teach the language.

And lastly, sometimes I show videos like the one I attached at the top. The song is  ”Marrow” by St. Vincent.  I like showing it because, well, I am completely entranced by Annie Clark’s eyes.  That, and she and her band was the last show I saw in San Diego and the last topic I wrote about for KPBS. My wallpaper on my Korean phone is even from some decent photos I took at the show.  So, yes, I have my ulterior motives to show some music videos, but they are pretty benign.

Recently, the Columbia Journalism Review posted an article on (the lack of) press freedoms in Singapore.

Walk the streets of Singapore and you may think you’re in the world’s most modern country. But Singaporeans you’re pacing alongside who wish to speak freely about their country might not feel that way.

“In the entire world,” Fareed Zakaria has written, “there is only one country that has reached a Western level of economic development and is still not a fully functioning democracy—Singapore.”

In Spring 2009 I studied abroad at Nanyang Technological University’s Wee Kim Week School of Communications. I had a good time and got to travel throughout the region quite extensively. I learned more about journalism outside my classes then, than I did in my classes. I wrote a very wordy account of my experiences studying journalism in Singapore and I thought I would also share them here on my blog. Because the comment is so long, make sure to click the “Click Here to Continue Reading” button.

Last year I spent a semester studying journalism (a crazy thought, I know) at a university in Singapore. I wrote for the area/campus newspaper, was a producer for the campus TV network and hosted my own radio show on the school radio band. All of the teaching staff in the communications department were foreigners. My newspaper teacher was a print man from England, TV head was Taiwanese and the radio adviser was an American who worked for Clear Channel as a Top 40 DJ.

…Click to Continue Reading or Comment »

With Team USA’s up-and-down matches, going into large city squares to watch the Republic of Korea matches and my good friend Peter visiting from Shanghai,  I have been pretty tired lately to say the least.

Too tired, in fact, to update blog as much as I want.  For the 2-0 Korea – Greece match I went into Seoul City Hall with about 100,000 other people to watch.

For the absurdly late USA-England anger-inducing match I went to a bar in Itaewon in Seoul. For Korea-Argentina, I went to Munhak Stadium in Incheon with 40,000 supporters.

And last night I went into Arts Center, the hangout place in Incheon, to watch USA beat Algeria with a group of rowdy American friends. It doesn’t help that the matches start really late out here. 8:30 pm, 11 pm and 3:30 am for matches over the last few weeks. Ughh…