It's raining today. Sometimes rain makes me happy but today it's really, really depressing.

BC and Steph both sent me articles noting the death of my college senior essay advisor, Robin Winks. All of senior year I was terrified of meeting with Winkie, whom I called Winkie to defray some of the terror. (But not to his face or anything.) He was really very kind, though, when I decided halfway through the year that I couldn't actually write a paper on the Silk Road if I didn't know Chinese, Russian or any of the language spoken in the -Stans. I still remember him telling me that another student of his had once done the same, and switched her topic midyear to Barbies, her lifelong collection hobby. And of course I remember going to see him when I got an A- on the essay and being greeted by: "You didn't like the minus, did you?!" (Followed by an explanation that he'd been on the fence about the minus as well, but left it up to the grader, who was the wrong person to be grading my essay anyway but as we'd never discussed who the grader should be, I couldn't very well complain... lord, if I could do college at this wizened age, I think I'd actually know what I was doing.)

Winkie visited every single national park in the States; he told me once that he'd meant to become a park ranger but got sidetracked by history. He also was interested in and wrote about espionage, detective fiction, British history and all the countries formerly in the British Empire. I didn't know he'd done a Fulbright in New Zealand until I read the obit.

I don't know from Joe Doe about Winkie's personal life, but it does seem that he had a full, satisfying life, in which he explored many different interests in depth. It's inspiring.
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In other education-related news: I just read an article for work stating that the UN's Committee on the Rights of the Child recently found that the undue stress that Korean students are subjected to as a result of rigorous early education and excessive competition for university admission constitutes a violation of their rights. In all other cases where children's rights were found to be violated, the violations consisted of poverty, inadequate healthcare, and abuse. Korea was the only country on the list where excessive education was the cause of abuse!

One of my colleagues here told me that when she really began to prepare for the university admissions test (usually a year before), she would be up at 6, go to school all day, eat dinner there, study, go to a private study building after that, study some more, and go home to sleep around 12. This, all year. 16-year-olds! Yikes. She expressed her doubts about the system too: "I don't want my kids to have to go through what I did."