Wednesday, November 12, 2008

at Ye Olde "Nearly a Bizness Skool"

That spooky thing over there is one of the corridors of power at the "Nearly a Bizness Skool" here at BPU.

Where I may work next year.

We had the meeting with admin and it sounds like we might get a chance to semi-change status and also create the English program here.

Right now we have students coming in from about 14 countries, and about .25 are not sufficiently Englished-up to go directly into business classes. So some of them need to take a year of English (100 and 300) and even some of those who are in the BBa and MBa programs need to take classes.

So this is 20 hours a week at the 100 level, 16 hours a week at the 300 level, and three hours of (now) optional lab at the higher levels.

But because the problem is larger than NBS expected, and they need instructors with Master's degrees, and because this program was thrown together ad hoc style (a bunch of shit flung at a wall to see what would stick), they know the need something done.

Add to this the fact that teaching at NBS is far more time-intensive than at BPU (where we essentially work out of workbooks, and the syllabi and content is provided us) and you had some stirrings around here.

So it looks like, maybe, if all goes right, we will be given "projects" instead of classes, during the intersession, and this project will be building an entire English program from the ground up - decide on the curriculum and standards, pick the materials, create the syllabi, etc. This has several important aspects, the first of which is the experience, since not many people get this kind of foundation-up exerience; the second of which is the resume filler; the third of which is that I will get about as much pay as anywhere else, and; finally, I will get to keep my killer apartment on the top floor.

With all that said, today I sent out job applications for places in Seoul, and I'll be interviewing at Buddhist College on Monday... ;-)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Man! LLNL needs to take some decoratin' tips from Koreans! They (the Livermorons) get style points for having the insta-fog windows on their Room of a Million Servers, but that's nothing compared to the eerie glow of tech you captured in that shot. Nice.

And a nice game of chess you must have played in that meeting as well. I take it you backed off on the shout-them-down approach? I offer you my congrats -- though it looks a bit early for that with the opportunity on the horizon to play off the head-shaving thing as your new religion. ;-)

-yaf