Ignorance is Matrimonial Bliss

Wedding Vowels?

Minister to Bride: Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?

Bride to Minister: Pardon, but I didn't quite catch the question.

Minister to Bride: Just say, "I do."

Bride to Minister: How's that spelled? D-u-e? D-e-w? Or d-o?

Groom to Minister: And what about e-y-e, a-y-e, or I? Which is it?

Minister to Couple: I now pronounce you incurably insane.

More Foreign Professors Coming to Korea?

Professor Jong-wook Lee

President of Sogang University

World Class University

(Image from The Chronicle of Higher Education)

David McNeill, writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education (February 27, 2011), offers a pertinent title for an interesting article: "South Korea Brings in Foreign Professors by the Thousands, but Is It Ready for Them?"

And are they ready for it?

For those of us already teaching in Korea, this is not exactly new news, but here goes:

Most observers expect the South Korean figure [for the percentage of foreign faculty] to grow sharply in the coming decade as the country's universities climb out of an academic ghetto that has kept them largely isolated from the global job market.

Probably true that the percent will rise . . . but sharply? I wonder. But there is the promise. For example:

Sogang, a private liberal-arts college set up by Jesuits from Wisconsin, is at the vanguard of this burgeoning internationalization. It plans to recruit 60 new foreign professors over the next four years, as it strives to push English-language teaching from 20 percent of its classes to 50 percent.

I keep hearing that Korean universities intend to do these things, and Sogang University can probably be taken seriously (based on my experience of the place), but the announced goal at Korean universities often exceeds the reality attained. I acknowledge the real changes, however, from the 'old days' in Korea:

Foreign professors in South Korea were once little more than exotic symbols of an aspiring globalization. Most were contract teachers who returned home after a few years, leaving little lasting mark on the higher-education system.

I reckon that's what I've often been. I even left once -- after a 1995/96 academic year at Daegu's Kyungbook National University -- for a postdoc in Australia and another in Israel, only to return in late 1999 to pursue my 'career' here in Korea . . . but leaving little lasting mark, I suppose. Might my fortunes change? Somebody's will:

But as the [South Korean] economy matures, colleges increasingly see foreign faculty and language programs as shortcuts to modernization, and the government is supporting them with millions of dollars in financing. The changes come as economists and other experts warn that South Korea risks falling behind its competitors unless it joins the world and overcomes a deficit in creative thinking and innovation.

That's quite a burden to put on newly-arrived foreign professors -- expecting them to teach creative thinking to Korean university students who are generally very passive in class after years of rote learning and in-the-box problem solving. And let's not forget the need for inculcating critical thinking among students, never an easy thing to do, and harder in a hierarchical social system like Korea's. I would hope that these professors receive an orientation from foreign faculty who've already taught in Korea for several years. New foreign faculty also need to know that if they are too rigorous in their grading and too intent on weeding out plagiarism, they'll receive low evaluations from students, which will be interpreted as evidence of poor teaching. I recall a student once complaining in an evaluation comment that I had been "too concerned about catching plagiarism," for instance. I had to chuckle, but some administrators might side with that student. Administrations do want to make sure that they're getting their money's worth, however, and there's a lot of money being invested in this proposed upgrade of Korea's university system:

The government's World Class University Project, which received 825 billion won ($752-million) last year, has fueled the process, pushing colleges to hire "outstanding foreign scholars." Seoul National University alone invited 59 foreign professors last year. Foreign hires are now a key criterion for government financial support, say experts.

Hey! I'm an "outstanding foreign scholar" -- just check out my blog! But maybe I don't really want one of those high-level posts:

The cost of recruiting from abroad has also come under fire in the South Korean news media. With salaries often pegged to the dollar, universities must find 80 million won (about $71,000) a year for a foreign hire, nearly twice the annual salary for a Korean professor at a public university.

European and American transplants often deal, however, with more profound problems than resentful Korean colleagues and uncomprehending parents. Some experience deep culture shock as they try to acclimatize to life in a still overwhelmingly homogenous and hierarchical academic culture.

That shock can even be 'electrocuting':

Many universities are coy about revealing how long foreign professors stay, but an Education Ministry survey of 288 foreign academics last year found it averaged just four months. Last fall a foreigner hired as a full professor at Seoul National packed his bags after just a month, "citing difficulties adapting," according to the university.

An average of merely four months! I'd never have guessed that. I wonder why they didn't feel at home. Perhaps they found that some promises that had been made were not being kept? Foreign faculty often complain of this. Or they find out that 'tenure' might not mean the same thing in Korea for foreigners as for Koreans. A Korean university where I once taught reinterpreted its rules to exclude tenure for foreign faculty, so those of us with what we'd been told was tenure discovered that we no longer had tenure. But four months is way too short for that sort of problem to arise, so other reasons must account for this very brief average stay. Perhaps a lot of foreign faculty were 'run out of town' for the moral hazard that they posed? There's a degree of distrust, and even fearfulness, among Koreans about the motives of some foreign faculty coming to Korea:

One indication of South Korea's lingering fears about an influx of foreigners can be found at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, where $100-million in government money has been spent developing robot English teachers. Prototypes of the robot are operated remotely from the Philippines, keeping the "moral problems" associated with non-Koreans at arm's length, says Mun Sang Kim, director of the institute's Advanced Robotics Research Center.

"There are some problems and some accidents in hiring native speakers at the schools right now," he says. "For example, the immigration system in Korea is not good enough to examine whether the foreign visitors are clean or not, or they did some crime," he adds. "That's the reason why the government thinks about such robot systems. They don't have any such social problems, they don't do the drugs."

Yes, one doesn't want any immoral "accidents" among the foreign faculty. Mr. Mun Sang Kim means "incidents," of course. To be serious for a moment, I don't think that one can lump the various 'teachers' into one group. There are the teachers at small-scale academies who need only a four-year university degree, teachers at schools who likely need a master's degree, instructors at universities who also need a master's, and professors at universities who need a doctorate. Academies would have the highest percentage of teachers prone to the aforementioned 'accidents' since too many of these academies will hire any featherless biped claiming to have a college degree. But schools and universities are more discriminating about whom they accept and will therefore be likely to hire fewer moral reprobates.

The article thus mixes some apples and oranges in its report by not distinguishing clearly enough among types of educational institutions and kinds of faculty, but the report will surely draw more foreign scholars' attention toward Korea and likely result in a greater number of applicants to these World Class University posts.

More competition . . .

Amy Chua on 'Educating' Children . . .

Chinese Mother?

Photo by Erin Patrice O'Brien

(Image from The Wall Street Journal)

I'm behind the curve in posting on this article, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior," by Amy Chua, but I did read it when it first appeared in the The Wall Street Journal on January 8, 2011. Ms. Chua explains how Chinese parents produce such prodigies among their children. Here's the good side:

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something -- whether it's math, piano, pitching or ballet -- he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.

Sounds good so far, but in practice (practice, practice!), this means:

Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn't get them, the Chinese parent assumes it's because the child didn't work hard enough. That's why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child. The Chinese parent believes that their child will be strong enough to take the shaming and to improve from it. (And when Chinese kids do excel, there is plenty of ego-inflating parental praise lavished in the privacy of the home.)

That sounds less good to me . . . though I guess that it can work. Sometimes. But what happens when it doesn't work? As I noted over at the Marmot's Hole:

Is Ms. Chua serious . . . or ironic? I caught some irony and even self-parody in her article, but she seemed, deep down, to be utterly serious.

I showed the article to my wife, who as a Korean mother pushes our kids to study, and she was appalled by Ms. Chua -- though sharing my question as to how seriously to take the article.

On one point, I would agree with what some have said, namely, creativity is also not easy and requires great effort and a lot of knowledge. But I doubt that Ms. Chua's method nourishes creativity.

Balance is necessary. Require children to study, and expect good grades from them, but let them play, too, and definitely allow them to have their own interests. Their interests can be incorporated into education.

For instance, my son, En-Uk, is currently a fanatic about soccer and is always asking where some country or city is located. I showed him how to use Wikipedia, and he’s now looking up countries, cities, and teams on his own, so he learns spelling, reading, and geography, among other things.

I could say much the same about my daughter, Sa-Rah, who’s passionate enough about music to enjoy reading together with me a New York Times article on the rage for melisma in pop music and its recent decline. She was fascinated.

I have always tutored my kids in English and had them reading from a young age, and I expect their best, but I don't expect them to be the best. That approach leads to children who will always consider themselves failures if they aren't the best . . . which will be almost all of the time.

Some of those failures end up committing suicide. This certainly happens here in Korea, where mothers raise their children by Ms. Chua's principles. Korea has a very high rate of teenage suicide, and a number of graduating seniors kill themselves every year for not having done well enough on the college entrance exam. An earnest application of Ms. Chua's principles will have the same results, and the full article is so extreme that I have to wonder if it's self-parody. But she seems to be describing with approval, and by implication prescribing, the following sort of reaction by a Chinese mother to a less than optimal grade:

If a Chinese child gets a B -- which would never happen -- there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A.

If a child doesn't measure up, Ms. Chua thinks that the parent is justified in calling the kid "garbage," "stupid," "worthless," and "a disgrace" as a means of motivation -- or so I infer, but go read the entire article. For criticism of Ms Chua's views by other Chinese, as well as by non-Chinese, see the website Quora. Or for something completely different, see my other take on the article, from over at Kevin Kim's blog, where I weigh in on whether or not Ms. Chua is serious or ironic:

Chua's article was too difficult to figure out, so I gave up and stopped reading.

Like I like to say, "If something's too hard, you can always just give up."

That helps make life easier.

I hope that every reader will take my philosophy of life to heart.

In short, learn my philosophy by heart, i.e., memorize it!

Finlandization of Education?

Pasi Sahlberg

(Image from The Hechinger Report)

I noted yesterday (and even earlier) that Chinese students in Shanghai performed very well last year on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). They did not, however, do significantly better than Finland, as I've known for some time but perhaps haven't yet mentioned. Indeed, Finland has consistently placed well on the PISA.

To my surprise, though, Finland was below average in math and science only 25 years ago, according to Pasi Sahlberg, "Learning from Finland," The Hechinger Report (December 27, 2010), but managed to transform itself:

As recently as 25 years ago, Finnish students were below the international average in mathematics and science. There also were large learning differences between schools, with urban or affluent students typically outperforming their rural or low-income peers. Today, as the most recent PISA study proves, Finland is one of the few nations that have accomplished both a high quality of learning and equity in learning at the same time. The best school systems are the most equitable -- students do well regardless of their socioeconomic background. Finally, Finland should interest US educators because Finns have employed very distinct ideas and policies in reforming education, many the exact opposite of what's being tried in the United States.

Finland has a different approach to student testing and how test data can or should not be used. Finnish children never take a standardized test. Nor are there standardized tests used to compare teachers or schools to one another. Teachers, students and parents are all involved in assessing and also deciding how well schools, teachers, or students do what they are supposed to do. Politicians and administrators are informed about how well the education system works by using sample-based learning tests that place no pressure on schools, and by research targeted to understand better how schools work. Parents and politicians think that teachers who work closely together with parents are the best judges of how well their children are learning in schools.

Another difference is that Finland has created an inspiring and respectful environment in which teachers work. All teachers are required to have higher academic degrees that guarantee both high-level pedagogical skills and subject knowledge. Parents and authorities regard teachers with the same confidence they do medical doctors. Indeed, Finns trust public schools more than any other public institution, except the police. The fact that teachers in Finland work as autonomous professionals and play a key role in curriculum planning and assessing student learning attracts some of the most able and talented young Finns into teaching careers.

Americans generally don't trust teachers and schools, nor would teachers, students, and parents likely work together to assess how a school is doing. But still, how does the Finnish system work in the classroom? Sahlberg doesn't precisely say, though he alludes to this in remarking that "the Finnish experience shows that consistent focus on equity and cooperation -- not choice and competition -- can lead to an education system where all children learn well." That doesn't tell me much about what's meant by "equity and cooperation," nor does it even hint at what's deficient about "choice and competition."

A couple of my students, however, have previously written research papers on Finnish education and have emphasized that it is discussion-based education in which students can openly question teachers and in which better students assist those students who lag behind. I think that we can see through this how cooperation is stressed more than competition, but I don't recall anything in my students' research that reveals how "choice" and "equity" are at odds. Also of interest -- if I rightly recall my students' papers -- is that Finns consistently score high on PISA's measure of creativity, and this fine showing, as well as fine Finnish showings overall, is achieved by students who attend fewer hours of school than the student average in most highly developed countries.

Maybe the Finnish education system has something to teach us all . . .

Shanghaied, After All?

Shanghai Students

Photo by Ryan Pyle

(Image from New York Times)

In a recent blog entry, "Chinese Students Shanghaied into PISA Stunner?", I speculated about reasons for Shanghai's top showing on the PISA competition (Program for International Student Assessment). Apparently, I'm not alone, for David Barboza, writing "Shanghai Schools' Approach Pushes Students to Top of Tests" in the New York Times (December 29, 2010), cites some skeptics:

The Shanghai students performed well, experts say, for the same reason students from other parts of Asia -- including South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong -- do: Their education systems are steeped in discipline, rote learning and obsessive test preparation.

Public school students in Shanghai often remain at school until 4 p.m., watch very little television and are restricted by Chinese law from working before the age of 16.

"Very rarely do children in other countries receive academic training as intensive as our children do," said Sun Baohong, an authority on education at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. "So if the test is on math and science, there's no doubt Chinese students will win the competition."

But many educators say China's strength in education is also a weakness. The nation's education system is too test-oriented, schools here stifle creativity and parental pressures often deprive children of the joys of childhood, they say.

"These are two sides of the same coin: Chinese schools are very good at preparing their students for standardized tests," Jiang Xueqin, a deputy principal at Peking University High School in Beijing, wrote in an opinion article published in The Wall Street Journal shortly after the test results were announced. "For that reason, they fail to prepare them for higher education and the knowledge economy."

In an interview, Mr. Jiang said Chinese schools emphasized testing too much, and produced students who lacked curiosity and the ability to think critically or independently.

"It creates very narrow-minded students," he said. "But what China needs now is entrepreneurs and innovators."

This is a common complaint in China. Educators say an emphasis on standardized tests is partly to blame for the shortage of innovative start-ups in China. And executives at global companies operating here say they have difficulty finding middle managers who can think creatively and solve problems.

Being himself Chinese, Mr. Jiang is surely knowledgeable in his criticisms, but I also recall that in the previous article by Sam Dillon in "Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators" (NYT, December 7, 2010), the PISA evaluators noted something unexpected:

Large fractions of these students demonstrate their ability to extrapolate from what they know and apply their knowledge very creatively in novel situations.

I therefore wonder if Chinese education is really so rigid if the Shanghai students topped out on the PISA in creative skills. But if it truly is so rigid as the critics maintain, perhaps that sort of education doesn't stifle creativity quite as much as is often thought. I'm going against the grain of my own views on this knotty point, but perhaps rote memorization does provide something of substance that the creative mind can work with among those students who already tend toward creativity.

But even if rote memorization doesn't stifle all creativity, I suspect that it does stifle curiosity by encouraging passivity, and without curiosity, students won't pose questions and pursue them far enough for their creativity to come into fruitful play.

Standardized tests probably have no way of gauging whether or not a student's mind is actively curious. I've noticed that my Korean students, who are usually passive in class, tend to get revved up for tests, so they all appear rather active then, but outside of those artificial circumstances, they generally shut down and fail to express much curiosity.

But maybe that's a problem with students worldwide . . .

Chinese Students Shanghaied into PISA Stunner?

Shanghai Studies

Sherwin/European Pressphoto Agency

(Image from New York Times)

China seems determined to dominate in everything these day, from sports to economics to politics, and now -- as reported by Sam Dillon in "Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators" (NYT, December 7, 2010) -- China's triumph on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA):

With China's debut in international standardized testing, students in Shanghai have surprised experts by outscoring their counterparts in dozens of other countries, in reading as well as in math and science, according to the results of a respected exam.

How well did the Chinese do? This well:

PISA scores are on a scale, with 500 as the average. Two-thirds of students in participating countries score between 400 and 600. On the math test last year, students in Shanghai scored 600, in Singapore 562, in Germany 513, and in the United States 487.

In reading, Shanghai students scored 556, ahead of second-place Korea with 539. The United States scored 500 and came in 17th, putting it on par with students in the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and several other countries.

In science, Shanghai students scored 575. In second place was Finland, where the average score was 554. The United States scored 502 -- in 23rd place -- with a performance indistinguishable from Poland, Ireland, Norway, France and several other countries.

This is rather stunning, especially for first-time performers. But I wonder . . . were perhaps the best and the brightest Chinese students shanghaied into this? The claim is that the "5,100 15-year-olds in Shanghai were chosen as a representative cross-section of students in that city," but I have to wonder, given China's record, if there's not a hidden story behind this triumph. Recall the cute little girl Lin Miaoke who sang so well at the Beijing Olympics, only to turn out to have been lip-synching to the voice of Yang Peiyi? The real singer was deemed not cute enough for China's image. Am I overly suspicious, then, in wondering about the representative validity of these test scores? At least one expert raised a similar question:

Shanghai is a huge migration hub within China. Students are supposed to return to their home provinces to attend high school, but the Shanghai authorities could increase scores by allowing stellar students to stay in the city.

Not that I'm impugning the mental abilities of the Chinese, who are both smart and disciplined, and the expert puts his point of suspicion forward only as a speculation, offering no evidence as support. Moreover, the real news, for my money, was that the Shanghai students showed themselves to be doing more than mere rote memory work:

Large fractions of these students demonstrate their ability to extrapolate from what they know and apply their knowledge very creatively in novel situations.

That's something to admire, even if the representative validity of the Shanghai student sample might be questioned.

An Iranian 'Shin Jeong-ah'?

Ali Kordan

Need to hire "two lawyers and three detectives"?

(Image from The Telegraph)

In a piece of news that also could easily have come from Korea in the past year, Nazila Fathi reports for the International Herald Tribune that a high-ranking "Iranian official admits [that his] Oxford doctorate is [a] fake" (October 1, 2008):

Iran's interior minister[, Ali Kordan,] admitted that a doctorate he said he had earned from Oxford was a fake, and said he was pressing charges against an intermediary who had forged it without his knowledge . . . . Kordan said he had been victimized by a man who introduced himself eight years ago as a representative of Oxford and gave him the fake degree in return for a thesis he had written previously.

"My degree was issued, based on my management and executive experience and in return for a thesis, by a man who had opened an English language school in Tehran," Kordan wrote.

I sympathize with Mr. Kordan. Every day, I receive countless emails promising to award me a doctorate for my "life experience," for which I -- like Mr. Kordan -- surely deserve honored recognition from some preeminent institution of higher education. So far, however, I've been put off by the price and haven't taken up any of the offers. Why should I shell out hard cash for recognition that I so legitimately deserve? I've already paid my dues in the school of hard knocks, so why the extra tuition? The money thing is enough to make one skeptical, but some of us have to learn the hard way:

Kordan said that he reacted with "utter disbelief" when he discovered that his doctorate was a fake. He said he had filed a complaint against the man, but had not been able to trace him. He did not give the man's name.

Mr. Kordan is to be commended on his new-found incredulity. He has learned a valuable lesson from his experience and would likely now truly qualify for a doctorate in Pyrrhonian skepticism -- undoubtedly a Pyrrhic victory for him (though as a Pyrrhonian, he would be entititled to continue doubting).

In my initial remark that this news about Mr. Kordan "could easily have come from Korea in the past year," I was thinking of the Shin Jeong-ah case. The talented Ms. Shin -- formerly a Dongguk University assistant professor and also originally slated as a director for the 2008 Gwangju Biennale -- claimed to have a doctorate from Yale University, but like Mr. Kordan, she was 'deceived':

According to the JoongAng Ilbo, she recently told a reporter that she had not faked the diplomas and was actually the one being deceived, saying she had hired two lawyers and three detectives to search for a tutor who had helped her write her Ph.D. thesis. (Kim Rahn, "Shin Jeong-ah's Life Full of Mystery," Korea Times, September 12, 2007)

Ms. Shin's "two lawyers and three detectives" were apparently unsuccessful, but all is for the best because Ms. Shin is currently enrolled in an institution of learning where she will certainly earn the highest of degrees in hard knocks.

Perhaps Mr. Kordan can look forward to the same opportunity.

Another fan-death disbeliever!

Fan Death in Korea

The pain is horrific to bear!

(Image from OhmyNews)

Despite my best efforts, I seem to be fighting a losing battle against those who doubt fan death. Why do I say this? Because another fan-death skeptic has visited my blog, and this one is a Korean!

The infidel's name is "Julia," but we cannot blame her loving parents, for the accursed disbeliever tells us that her own dear mother:

...used to wake up EVERY night at 3 am to open my brother's bedroom door because he slept with the ceiling fan on. Because Richard would never heed her advice about leaving the bedroom door open if he was going to have his fan on, she was horrified that the fan (in a closed room) would SUCK the air our of the room and leave her with an empty shell of a human being as a son...

Such loving care -- careful love that only a Korean mother could bestow -- was wasted on this ingrate, who laughed at a sad song titled "Fan Death Suicide Pact Cult" that she heard in some bar and then returned home to Google the internet so that she could laugh at the sad stories of others who have posted warnings about fan death.

She even happened across my blog entry of warning about fan death and reported back on her own blog:

[H]ere's what one crazy ex-pat professor of English Literature says about fan death (it's just too insane to NOT share):

How can people doubt fan death!? Fans kill thousands of people each year, but most of the deaths go unreported because the fans were in a different room. It's a little-known fact that the whirling blades cause disturbance in the ether that pervades the universe, and the ripple effect impairs organisms up to 500 feet distant.

This summer, fans killed several of my son's pets. First a stag beetle died when our cat, driven mad by ripples in the ether, overturned the beetle's plastic terrarium and fought the poor beetle to its death. Miraculously, the cat survived. Our eel was not so lucky as the cat. Driven insane by the whirling blades' insidious disturbance of the ether, it managed to flip itself out of its aquarium -- through a tiny hole in the top!! -- and die. We found it on the floor ... shriveled and dry. That could happen to you, too. Since then, two other stag beetles have died. Snails as well. And a goldfish has turned deathly white! Scary.

Miraculously, our cats and children have survived, but we're taking no more chances, especially now that our two fans have begun to alter weather patterns in our apartment. In the past two days [this September 2006], they've actually been blowing cool air at night -- even though there's no air-conditioning unit attached! We think that the fans are now trying to freeze us to death, so we've put them away in a closet, completely covered in a bag zipped carefully shut to prevent them from doing even more damage.

Fans are killers. Why do you think that they're called fans? The word "fan" is short for "fanatic." You can't trust fanatics. Don't trust fans, either.

If you want to see the original post, check out his lunatic rants here.

As if her own scoffing at the truth weren't bad enough, Julia is in league with others opposed to fan-death theory. A certain Jennifer comments:

Wow, I'd be speechless, except I suspect the English professor is being satirical. If he isn't... well, then I really am speechless.

I think "fan death" will make it into a blog post, oh yes indeed! :)

Jennifer's skepticism even extended to doubts about my very sincerity, but Julia at least believes that I'm sincere (an important Korean virtue):

I would have thought that as well, seeing as how ridiculous his claims are, but if you read the rest of his blog entry... I don't know. I think that he believes in fan death...

At this point -- seeing that I needed to certify my sincerity -- I posted the following comment:

Yes, [Jennifer,] do blog on fan death:

"I think 'fan death' will make it into a blog post, oh yes indeed!"

Call attention to its dire threat!

Not only does it cause death, but even in small doses, it will make one ill.

Why, it's already driven me insane ... as duly noted in this blog entry [by Julia]. (Thanks for noticing.)

Indeed, I am so mentally disturbed by the etherial effects of those whirling blades that I even believe this nonsense about fan death.

I realize that this belief is crazy, but ... well, so am I.

That's the sad part, of course: I'm truly insane. Those whirling fans have driven me mad, forcing me to scribble all sorts of egregious nonsense. Yet, even my "nonsense" has more sense than non. I count five letters to three, which implies that sense wins out.

Need I remind you, therefore, that fans drove the brilliant Hwang Woo-suk to utterly destroy his illustrious career in cloning? Recall how Hwang's fans made the poor doctor look even more ridiculous?

Or note how fans are also responsible for the disgraced Shin Jeong-ah, the disgraced Lee Ji-young, and the disgraced Lee Hyun-se. How, you might ask, are fans responsible for their false academic claims? A moment's sober reflection will answer that question.

Koreans are such fanatics about obtaining higher degrees from elite universities that each year, high school graduates even kill themselves for failing to score high enough on qualifying exams for admission to Korea's top three universities. Although Shin Jeong-ah, Lee Ji-young, and Lee Hyun-se escaped almost certain death by academic disappointment, they did glimpse the abyss gaping at their feet. They faced a stark choice: either die or lie. Thank God they made the right decision, and we should respect them for choosing life.

Besides, it's not their fault that they lied. Academic fanaticism drove these three to deceive everyone! Read the authoritative words of Thomas R. Ellinger and Garry M. Beckham ("South Korea: Placing Education on Top of the Family Agenda," Phi Delta Kappan, April, v. 78. no. 8, p. 624) for what they tell us about this sort of fanaticism:

South Koreans view education as they view the rest of life: a process of winning and losing. They have no concept of a game played well for its own sake. The family emphasis on educational achievement is so strong that it has been dubbed "education mania." (quoted in Paul Robertson, "The Pervading Influence of Neo-Confucianism on the Korean Education System," Asian EFL Journal, June 2002, Volume 4, Issue 2, Article 1, paragraph 8)

And what is "education mania" but insane fanaticism? Indeed, such fanaticism made academic fanatics of Shin Jeong-ah, Lee Ji-young, and Lee Hyun-se. In short, they were themselves, literally, turned into academic fans!

But it's a fate that they share with all Koreans, for each and every Korean is secretly an academic fan for whom education -- like life itself -- is a process of winning or losing! Most, of course, lose out and grow self-destructive. I think that Korea's current, unsustainably low birth rate can only be explained as the collective suicide of all those failed educational fans. In other words, fans are killing the entire Korean nation.

Fans are truly insidious...