mission

I am, for once, done with school stuff for the weekend: I stayed at the office until 2AM drafting a rather involved, 6-section final exam for my pronunciation class (we'll be testing pronunciation, rhythm, intonation, syllable stress, and minimal pairs in what promises to be a very difficult test); I also made up grading rubrics for each of my six classes so that, on every final-exam day this coming week, grading will be that much easier and smoother. This is the last burst of energy before we reach the finish line. The following week will feel positively post-coital—the sigh that comes after the furious activity: that's the week we handle student begging and complaints about grades, finalize those grades, and take care of whatever other little admin-related obligations remain before we all go our separate ways for vacation. (I, of course, am too poor to go anywhere, so I'll be hanging in Hayang, suffering the Daegu heat, during July and most of August).

Upshot: I'm free today. I've been in bed most of the morning with a painful neck, but now that it's midafternoon, I've decided I'd better move my ass and fight through the neck-ache. We've got another apartment-wide shindig coming up in our building; I'm trying to get everyone together for a rooftop gathering, potluck-style: our building has plenty of talented cooks (I smell their efforts in the stairwell all the time), so I thought it might be nice for us to show off our collective culinary prowess. To that end, I'm off to Costco to buy supplies and equipment, as well as to hunt down a small cell-phone mount/tripod that I can use next week to video my students while they're talking during their finals (I prefer to review the audio/video files at my leisure instead of trying to grade the students on the spot: grading on the spot can lead to errors, especially when teams are involved).

So—off I go to Costco and the Daegu version of Seoul's electronics district. The hunt begins.


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