Street Sense Poetry

Street Sense is DC's newspaper written and sold by the district's homeless population, "Where the poor and homeless earn and give their two cents." That's written on the cover. They don't actually earn 2 cents - there is a suggested donation of at least $1 for the paper, 25 cents of which goes back into paper production, and they keep the rest. Vendors wear official vests and seem very proud to be a part of the organization, and they stand outside of metro stations, mostly, with a stack of papers. Some of them just stand there and look at you as you walk by, others get really into it and yell "Street Sense hot off the presses" or something funny to get your attention. I don't buy them often, because I rarely have any cash with me, though when I tell the vendors that I don't have any money they often try to give me a paper for free. They're very generous, friendly people.

The writing is quite humorous, though unfortunately the humor is usually unintended. It's just quite bad. Here's a selection of poems from this week's edition. I kind of like the second one actually.

What

What's up world?
Where's my girl?
I don't know.
She didn't show.
I am homeless.
She is not.
It hurts so much when
we can't be together.
She sticks with me,
through all types of weath-
er.
She sells this paper,
so do I.
Hopefully,
this
is not
the highest we can fly!

-Shawn Herring
(Dedicated to my wife and friend,
Ms. Margaret J. Jenkins,
my fellow Street Sense vendor.)

Who Do It (Man)

It was a cold night in the hood.
My homes and I was going down to the
Local bar to hang out a little while
when we saw two people in the alley.
One was a light skinned dude from the
fourth ward on Washington Street,
He had lost his cup of soda, or
maybe someone took it.
"Who do it, man, who do it?"
That dude began to yell, "Police,
Police!" but they only asked, "Who do it,
man, who do it?"
It was D-Sweet man he
was running down the street, cup in hand.
Maybe, maybe we will never know
Who do it, man, who do it.

-James Fetherson

Korean Language Resources

Work in Progress:

Hangul (Korean Alphabet) - Indiana University

Korean Class 101 - podcasts with daily lessons (free), plus paid content

Forum thread with web links

Korea Tips

Here's a great, informative post from the Supa Dupa Fly Seoul Sista, covering just about everything on living and working in Korea.

Tips for those on the job hunt

And useful websites (shopping, international calling, traveling, etc.)

Korea Teaching Resources

I haven't used many of these resources yet - as I do I will post reviews of them, or remove them if they're useless. I'll also update this post as I find better material. Let me know if you have any good resources for teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) - or teaching in general - and I'll post them here as well.

Websites

UsingEnglish.com - 141 free lesson plans & handouts (separated into beginner, intermediate, advanced), quizzes, a teacher forum, and a poll section where teachers can vote on the correct usage of debated terms. I imagine I'll be using this site when I'm short on time or don't feel like developing a lesson plan myself. Hopefully that's not SO often.

Dave's ESL Cafe - Ideas - Teacher-submitted ideas on everything, including disciplining your students, educational games to play, ice breakers, how to teach grammar, etc. Many of the ideas are geared toward kids, but there are hundreds here. If you can't use them exactly they'll definitely spark your imagination.

Crossword Puzzle Games - Simple template to create your own crossword puzzle, or browse their selection of puzzles already created.

▪ Phonics web site
http://www.starfall.com/

▪ Worksheets, songs, and flash cards
http://bogglesworldesl.com/

▪ English puzzle maker
http://puzzlemaker.discoveryeducation.com/

▪ Korean lesson plans translated into English
http://gepik.ken.go.kr/r/bbs/board.php?bbs_code=k_e_teaching_05_0

▪ English worksheets, songs, phonics and games
http://www.genkienglish.net/

▪ 3D virtual Chat
http://www.lively.com/popular

▪ Chant
http://www.englishfork.com/play/song1-1.php

▪ Songs with lyrics
http://www.manythings.org/songs/

▪ Activity TV
http://www.activitytv.com

▪ English Listening Lounge
http://www.englishlistening.com/

▪ CNN News Pod casting services
http://edition.cnn.com/services/podcasting/

▪ I’m Reading
http://www.starfall.com/n/level-c/index/load.htm?f

▪ It’s fund to read
http://www.starfall.com/n/level-b/index/load.htm?f

▪ Learning English for kids
http://www.britishcouncil.org/kids-stories-short.htm

▪ PBS Kids: Between the lions
http://pbskids.org/lions/

▪ CNN Interactive Story
http://www.literacynet.org/cnnsf/archives.html

Inauguration Bar Hours

Capital Spice has posted a map of all DC bars & restaurants with extended hours during Inauguration week. There are 213 of them so far, but others who are operating under community Voluntary Agreements have until January 15th to apply.

Approved venues can serve alcohol til 4am and remain open 24 hours from midnight on Saturday, January 17th to midnight on Wednesday, January 21st.

Happy Drinking!

HR-57

I've been meaning to visit HR-57 since I moved up here almost a year ago. It wasn't until this past Saturday night that I finally made it. The place was described to me as a BYOB jazz venue, and I pictured it as a dimly lit museum hall where a jazz group performs on a distant stage and snobby Smithsonian staff grudgingly oblige patrons to sip their wine at corner tables. It is, after all, named for House Resolution 57, which designated jazz music as a "rare and valuable national American treasure," and the website has no mention of alcohol being allowed. Their website describes the venue as a place "where aspiring musicians gather to learn the history and cultures of the genres of jazz and blues. It's a venue for the exchange of ideas and information between aspiring and professional musicians, students, aficionados and the general public."

It's not in the most easily accessible location - situated 7-8 blocks from the nearest metro station (Dupont, U-Street, Shaw-Howard) - but that only adds to its charm and keeps the place from overcrowding or getting rowdy. It's not Adams Morgan (that's a good thing). And the walk from Dupont was a pleasant one, down cracked sidewalks and past old row houses on tree-shaded streets.

The venue itself turned out to be little like I imagined. It's a quite intimate club, with a small black stage and about 10 small tables covering a small (20'x30') floor. Classic B&W jazz videos were playing on a drop-down projection screen to the right of the stage when we walked in. The exposed brick walls on either side are lined with cushioned benches and dim area lights above them. We sat at a coffee table in the rear of this front room, on chairs and a 4-seater leather armless couch. The room continued up a step behind us with about 10 more tables and a small glass bar where food (fried chicken, red beans & rice, and collard greens, which were pretty tasty) and a few drinks were on order.

The bar was apparently relatively new - we brought our own wine and, in addition to the $12 cover, we paid a $3 corking fee per person. We each had a bottle but could have easily brought more. The staff are very chill and friendly - all smiles. They supplied us with small plastic cups.

The jazz was good - the Michael Price quartet (piano, drums, bass, and trumpet/french horn) were on stage all night, from 9p-1a, and never lost their energy. The pianist, Michael Price, was fantastic. I remember thinking that his fingers looked like the legs of a spider crawling frantically across the keys. After their first piece he stood up to introduce the members, and then lightly scolded the audience for talking while they played. "It's not polite to hold a conversation while artists are performing at a jazz place. And this is a jazz place." His scolding was warranted (the din of voices was clearly audible above the music), but I thought he held us a bit too much in contempt, namedropping a jazz composer and joking that he used to be a member of Coldplay. "That seems to be what you people would know." Maybe he was right. We weren't an audience of jazz critics. But we're not going to get anywhere if people like him merely scorn us for our ignorance. I'd rather he let his own excitement for and love of the music draw us in. Shut us up with his piano. But maybe I was being too idealistic.

After that, people shut up and drank and jammed.

We left shortly after midnight, all satisfied, though we missed their final set. We all said we'd like to come back another night, maybe for some Cuban jazz next time. Though Lisa and I only have a month left, and there are a lot of places we still haven't been.

Meat pile recipe!

My sister involved me in a recipe exchange chain letter yesterday for a recipe exchange. Since I love making and eating food, I felt obliged to participate. I sent a recipe for roasted red pepper hummus to the email address listed, and forwarded the invitation to 20 people. They were supposed to send a recipe back to my sister, who is vegan (although I did not make a comment about her dietary preference in the email). My coworker Sandra, who I included in the invitation list, responded with the following recipe:

"Whenever I get hungry and don't have much time to run to the store, I grab a steak, chicken, bacon, sausage, veal, and cream out of my fridge (which everyone has on hand! if you happen to not have one of the ingredients, it's okay, just substitute more bacon!)

I wrap bacon completely around the steak, so you can't see it. In a frying pan, I fry an extra 8 strips of bacon, take them out, and snack on those while I make the rest. I fry the bacon covered steak in bacon juice. In a separate pan, sautee onions and garlic in more bacon fat, add sausage and ground chicken.

When the chicken and sausage are cooked through, pile them on a plate. Top that with the bacon covered steak, barely cooked, to about a rare temperature.

Cook veal in the leftover bacon grease from the steak, add red wine and about 2 cups of heavy cream, reduce, and pour sauce over the pile of meat.

Enjoy!"

I laughed so hard I literally cried onto my keyboard.

poverty is a killer

a couple of weeks ago the NYT Magazine published an article on poverty in mexico, in which the author quoted my boss, margy, without citing her. margy asked me to do a write-up on it for the website, so i spent the better half of a morning working on the response i thought she wanted. later i found out that she only wanted a couple of sentences to indicate that the NYT journalist had, in fact, cited her in the article. i don't know that what i wrote would have worked for her anyway - it was a bit too feisty for the organization. so i'm posting it here instead. it should give you a good idea of the framing message that we promote (or that we work against).

Poverty Kills
12/23/08

Poverty is a killer - but not in the way that you probably think. Since the poverty debate was born in the 1960's alongside President Johnson's "War on Poverty", it has cut down numerous policy solutions before they had legs to stand on. Today, every public policy option set on the table under the poverty banner is doomed to fall victim to the same fate – a slow, painful death. This is not, however, because the policies are necessarily or inherently bad. It is primarily due to the fact that supporters of poverty policy (let's call them "liberals") don't own the term 'poverty' anymore, so they're paying for it every time they use it. Although they were its original benefactors, 'poverty' has since been hijacked – in plain daylight and under their noses – by the very people who argued against them from the beginning (let's call them "conservatives").

In "A Payoff Out of Poverty", a December 19th article in the New York Times, Tina Rosenberg highlights this concept in a concise literary history of the idea of the culture of poverty, from its probable inception in Oscar Lewis's 1959 book, "Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty," to Edward Banfield's 1970 publication "The Unheavenly City," in which he "attacked the key assumption of the War on Poverty – the idea that government can help."

Lewis had used the phrase to describe habits acquired in response to structural factors — the standard left-wing argument that people are poor because of low wages, discrimination and bad schools. But the phrase has essentially become shorthand for the right-wing argument that poverty stems from the limitations of the poor and is largely impervious to outside intervention.

Rosenberg goes on to talk about a "gentle evolution" in the thinking of poverty, in a Mexico-based program called Oportunidades, or 'Opportunities', a conditional cash transfer initiative aimed at improving – what else? – opportunities for the next generation of Mexican youth. It is an interesting idea, and apparently one that some in the US, including New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 'Opportunity NYC', have begun to try out. But whether or not Oportunidades makes for good policy is beside the point, because it is still – at least according to Rosenberg – all about poverty.

I think everyone can agree that poverty is a bad thing. But the fact that no one can agree on its cause means that talking about poverty – or anti-poverty policies – won't work. Even individuals are ideologically divided between their belief in poverty's systemic causes and the role of personal responsibility in overcoming deprivation. It makes it hard to build public will for anti-poverty policies when people can't even agree with themselves on the issue. Taking that debate public doesn't help. Because even if a particular anti-poverty policy is wildly successful in fighting poverty, however you measure it, the debate won't be over anytime soon.

"If Opportunity NYC goes large scale," Mac Donald [a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute] told me in an interview, "it will further break down the moral obligation to care for one's child and adopt the repertoire of parenting behaviors the middle class takes for granted. It will replace that with the expectation that I'm only going to do it if you pay me." She cites Banfield that living in the present is the central cause of poverty and echoes his skepticism that government can help. "What government cannot do is create personal responsibility and drive in individuals," Mac Donald has written.

Putting initiatives like Opportunity NYC under the poverty banner is not just asking for a fierce debate – it is being untrue to the spirit of the policy. Opportunity NYC intends to do exactly what it says: improve opportunities. This is a policy that ultimately intends to engage people today as an investment in a future, stronger economy and more inclusive society. When a community resident begins to fall too far behind the rest, the whole community is the worse for it.

When considered outside of the influence of poverty language, policy is transformed into something positive to work toward, rather than something negative to escape from. We can start discussing how to move forward – and improving opportunities for future economic success would be a great start.

Perhaps Oportunidades or its sister initiative, Opportunity NYC, really are great programs. But we likely won't ever get to see the ultimate results, at least in the US. If they can't change, poverty will kill them.

the waiting game

lisa and i submitted our 2nd round documents (background check, letter of recommendation, diploma copy, transcripts, and full application, along with the appropriate apostilles) to the EPIK recruiter two weeks ago, and he forwarded them onto korea. now we're waiting, and it's killing me. i can't stand depending blindly on someone else. if i can talk to them, face-to-face, or at least on the phone, then i can get a play-by-play and i know where i stand. if i know where i stand, then i know whether i can do anything about it or not. if i can do something about it, then i'll do it immediately. if not, f*$# it. i'll move on. but since i already bought our plane tickets for february 16th, moving on isn't an option i'm willing to consider quite yet.

once we hear back from them with our employment contract, we can apply at the embassy for the E-2 visa needed to teach in korea. but we can't do anything until we hear from them. i gotta admit, i was kinda stressing out yesterday and badgering the recruiter about it. but after finding out that it only takes 2-3 days to process the visa application, my anxiety has subsided. i'm gearing up to go.