Here we are, Autumn 2005, The Long Family on a rare outing, celebrating the 100th day of our new family member.  The more the merrier.  Hallelujah and Amen. 

          Greetings to all:

This website had its genesis in a felt need to find a way to ensure that I would maintain contact with all of my students.  My mother, a high school French and English teacher, once told me that she received two distinct forms of reward from her job:  1) pecuniary compensation, after the consuetude, and 2) glad heartening of her spirits when old students, many years removed from school return to visit her at her school and home. 

Having taught more than a decade in South Korea and knowing that we would move to The United States by 2010, I began to sense a clear paucity in the second form of compensation where students would find it most difficult to come and find me in my humble abode in the U.S., particularly as we do not even yet know the address where we will reside. 

Hence, the need to establish a permanent online presence had me embarking upon the at once arduous but enrichening process of overcoming my entrenched aversion to computer-related activities while commencing to absorb the not inconsiderable delight which inheres in learning how to maximize one's influence on the "ominipresent, everlasting" web.

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During my first six or seven years here in South Korea, I invested substantial time and thought writing and sending e-mails to my students, as it turns out they do not read e-mails much, and as time went on and they developed an affinity for hand phones, e-mail became ever more a thing of the past for them, in their social circles.  So be it. 

But then I came to find that neither are web sites the holy grail of South Korean youth. 

My students remain predominantly affixed to Korean language portals, unable to navigate through English commands and tool bars.  Still, I felt a compelling need to go with English, and Yahoo seemed destined to stay, not dissolve in a puff of cyber smoke amid bankruptcy proceedings.   

My wife is sensitive to the 15 dollar monthly maintence fee for this site, but I point out that unlike other husbands who support some vice, such as going out drinking with their mates, I have no such proclivity or penchant. 

So, she concedes that this is my "hobby."  I think she will better understand after she has been teaching a few years and built up a passel of great old students who begin to visit her from time to time.   

I love working between cultures, learning languages, and frankly, I do not want to stop, having been very satisfied here for the past decade in my work, missionary and subsistence altogether, no exceptions. 

I would love nothing more than to enact a seamless transition in my family's exodus From the Land of the Morning Calm(한국) to the Land of the Beautiful Landscapes(미국).  This seamless transition would entail a means for me to continue purveying my work, with ever greater emphasis on channels of writing and commentary:  articles, advice on English style and grammar, homestay for Korean students in our humble abode, padook development related activites, and an ESL camp in Virginia or North Carolina -- the Good Lord Willing and the creeks don't rise. 

Hence the personal need to create some interface work between cultures that I could carry on in the U.S., and keep at it until I subside and rise up to be with the Lord, my Maker, beyond all we know of time.  Ultimately, I aim to come back to South Korea some day, after my children no longer need me, and start a church and do mission work in North Korea, and continue to make use of my Korean language abilities, and familiarity with the culture here.  

Sincerely, Nathaniel Long

What's New?

Work in Progress:

• The Best Questions Dialectics Text series is pretty much complete now, up through seven volumes, buy my wife does not want me publishing it.  I will wait, like a hermit in the backwoods of Maine, believing I have made a better mousetrap, and continue improving it, using the chapters in my classes, and my more avid high level students as guinea pigs cum test pilots.  That suits me fine, and grants me immeasurable liberty.  
• The series is an upper level text for South Korean English language students, aimed towards international government and business representatives, and those Korean students who intend to study at the tertiary level in the U.S.
• Board Game coming soon, to practice Diplomacy Skills in groups of four to ten. 
• I have finished preparing a room for teaching Padook (바둑) in English, over the past two and a half years, during which time I studied the game.    

Book Two has the following chapters planned as discussion topics:

     * Christianity

     * Childcare

     * China

     * Confucianism

     * Consumerism

     * Cosmopolitanism

     * Courtship 

     * Cultural Differences

     * Deadbeat Dads

     * Death

     * Democracy

     * Desire

     * Diamonds and Dust

     * Drinking

     * Drugs

     * Eating

     * English

     * Family

     * Fashion

     * Feminized Classroom

     * Fighting

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