Friday, July 15, 2011

Dankook University Class Begins


July 10th, 2011
I had a big staff meeting, meet the students, lunch event thing at Dankook University. Nothing much of any research related interest.

July 11th, 2011
I was really worried about how many students I'd get and also worried some of them might be just shopping around. We talked about the class, did an exercise to create a cultural literacy test for Korea, I gave a short lecture and we had our first practice of Bongsan Talchum. It seems I have seven students (two more were just checking out the class).

July 12th, 2011
The second day of class went much more smoothly as I wasn't worrying about who or how many would show up and just focused on teaching my lesson. I hadn't assigned anyone to present on the reading so I had prepared to foster a discussion myself—but only a couple of them had read it. I promptly assigned the rest of the readings to different students. At the end of class Abigail brought a friend in from another classroom and the girl, Jessica, asked to join my class as she'd fallen asleep in her other class. Abigail assured her it wouldn't happen in my class. The frustration for the day was finding out that they still hadn't made my reader, because they'd given me the originals the previous day—why did you give them back to me when I took them to you over a week ago, you could have just kept them! 

In the evening I went to a lecture on Buddhism by Robert Buswell, an amazing UCLA Buddhist studies professor who I really like. I just wanted to see him, fortunately since the talk didn't have much new (to me) information in it. He is an excellent speaker, though. 

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