Ex-Student Blogs Gypsy Scholar!

The Western Heritage

- Kagan, Ozment, Turner -

Ex-Student on my Teaching, my Blog, my Self

(Image from Pearson Education)

A couple of days ago, as I was checking my Site Meter, I noticed that someone had visited from a website hosted by Naver, a Korean internet service. Curious about that, I clicked and found that a certain 'Zhunbei,' a former Korean student of mine from my Western Civilization course at Korea University, had posted a February 2008 blog entry about me . . . in Korean!

Well, the Korean-language thing is not actually surprising, but as long-time readers know, I make absolutely no claims to expertise in Korean, so I asked my wife to read the post and tell me what it said. She quickly rattled off what the student had written, but she had no time to help translate it closely, and I had no time to write down what she'd said until now. I have therefore had to rely mostly on "Google Translate," assisted by my memory of what Sun-Ae had told me, and both are very faulty instuments in this instance.

You can go to the site itself if you are interested in the Korean original, which was written in response to a piece that I had composed for the Korea Herald way back in February of this year, a tongue-in-cheek "Expat Living" column that my former student posted under the remarks about me in Korean, for which I offer below this very approximate paraphrase in English:

The author of the column was my instructor at university two years ago in Western Civilization (The Western Heritage), but he usually teaches literature courses. His full name is Horace Jeffery Hodges.

Now a professor at Kyung Hee University, he is very unusual and humorous, so you don't forget him. He has an extraordinarily high, bulging forehead, and the wrinkles around his mouth are hidden by his moustache. On his head, as a covering, he always wears a Turkish-like cap to hide his lack of hair. He would never tell us his age, so I can't even guess how old he is. Having studied English Literature in the United States, he's now teaching it here.

He always made a thorough search for plagerism in our essays, which he seemed pleased to confirm through a few simple Google searches. He noted every error -- even spelling and punctuation -- on our essays, which he also returned to us.

Thanks to his blog, I've become a morning person, for he gets up every morning around 4-5 to write. Sometimes, you can read what he has written about English literature, but at other times, he tells stories about his childhood home. The writing is sometimes intimidating, but it is also witty and humorous as well as fun and informative.

Some additional information . . . he seems proud of American traditions . . . and also seems to have a certain pride for the rural area in the United States where he comes from. He seems to be a strong believer in Christianity . . . and he presented Nietzsche's ideas as a good lesson of how one thinks when one does not believe. Looking at the contents of the religious blogs on his blog roll, there seem to be many. And his anti-Islamist sentiment is strong. Sometimes, the entries are about problems in Islam.

Finally, he takes pride in English Literature, and his article in the Korea Herald argues for the purity of the right phrasing and rejects impure, sexually allusive language in English writing. This man wants people to pay much closer attention to purifying language, so he writes his critique.

Interesting . . . to me, anyway. I had to guess at the meaning of some parts because "Google Translator" garbles a lot of things in translating from Korean into English, so I've very likely misunderstood several points, probably many points, and I've had to leave some phrases out that I simply could not decipher.

From what I understand, however, I think, however, that the student overemphasizes my 'piety' and perhaps misses the irony in my language column for "Expat Living," but any readers who notice that I've misunderstood what the student wrote are welcome to post a comment and correct me.

The student's remarks seem generally positive, but I come across as a bit weird . . . which reminds me of a George Carlin driving joke, "Idiots and Maniacs," that puts my 'weirdness' into perspective:

Have you ever noticed that when you're drivin', anyone goin' slower than you is an idiot? And anyone goin' faster than you is a maniac? . . . . [I]t's a wonder we ever get anywhere at all these days, what with all the idiots and maniacs out there.

You see, it ain't me what's weird. It's everybody else . . . which to my mind explains a lot that's wrong in the world.