Defining "Achievement" in Schools

In my Learning and Cognition course, I've been assigned to read Engaging Schools by the Committee on Increasing High School Students' Engagement and Motivation to Learn and the National Research Council.

The following consists of my preliminary reaction to the first two or three chapters and executive summary of the book.

As I've been going through the readings, I'm struck by a number of social problems with the book that most people probably haven't noticed.  They have nothing to do with class or race.  Instead, they have to do with what we consider standards and how we define achievement.

The fact is that there aren't enough jobs for the number of people graduating college.  Entire fields are overburdened with hopefuls in the unemployment line, bearing their degrees that their teachers promised would make them wealthy and give them a better life.  Indeed, I have to ask, is the implementation of these reforms contained in Engaging Schools producing false hopes in students that academic achievement and college are tickets to a meaningful life?

Indeed, it goes beyond standards and strikes to the core of why we teach.  What is our mission?  To see the students succeed, one would assume, especially while reading Engaging Schools.  However, there is a subtle subtext running throughout the book that seems to interpret academic achievement as providing a way to be successful in life.  The constant need to motivate students is countered by the bevy of assessments with which teachers inundate their students.

I'm reminded of Shamus Young's online "Autoblography" where he writes: 

“Just make sure to do all the work, and you will pass my class.”

"My heart sinks. I hate when teachers say this. It means the bulk of our grade will come from doing things, not from knowing things. It’s the first day of tenth grade, I’m sixteen years old, and I’m hearing this a lot today. Some teachers even go so far as to grade the notes we take in class. This is infuriating to me. In the past I saw school as this perfectly arbitrary trial of mysterious activities. Now I see it as a house of incompetents. Our goal is ostensibly to learn things, but the system of rewards and incentives is often completely divorced from this idea, and sometimes even runs counter to it. 

"If we think of grades as “pay”, then we aren’t being paid to learn. We’re being paid to turn out volumes of worthless forgettable busy work."

Indeed, I fear that the attempts to engage students actually fail because our consistent reliance upon assessment and its equation to achievement and success.

We've already set up a generation of people who have been lied to by their teachers about good grades and success.  The more I speak with many of my fellow Gen X'ers in fields outside of academia, the more I am inundated with statements like, "I didn't learn anything in school," "School was worthless and a waste of time," "School was bullshit," or "Yeah, I learned how to be a student, that's all."  Those who went to college felt as though that was the first time they were able to actually learn something and the point was driven home by the fact that during a single semester, they had two or three assessments and nothing more.  They either passed or failed.  It was actually liberating for some of them.

So what do we have?  A book written by a committee.  The product of bureaucracy and reads as such.  I have little faith in it thus far--Marc Bloch was wrong when he said the bureaucratic mind was the highest form of intelligence.  This committee begins its book with a report on findings and a list of recommendations.  To what end?  What is achievement to produce?  The committee's language in the "Executive Summary" is vague and full of Orwellian doublespeak.

In my interpretation, we are to compete with the Asian schools that are producing competitive workers, scientists, engineers, businesspeople.  It is no secret that schools are pushing math and science to the detriment of the humanities.  History and English teachers aren't nearly as sought-after as math or science teachers.  Meanwhile, we forget that those students are also taught to read and write effectively in their schools.  We are not.

And so we pump out graduates who go to college as if it is the entire goal of education.  This is the teachers' greatest failure.  Education is not, never was, and should never be, simply a vehicle for success.  The fruits of our labor have resulted in apathy among those who know they aren't college material and the unemployment line coupled with staggering debt for those who are.  Why should our students thank us?

A recent article in the Atlantic Monthly describes how a single principal overhauled one of the worst schools in Staten Island and made it a success story by teaching analytical writing to students.  Math and science scores improved substantially--a rising tide floats all boats and our disinterest in the humanities have led to student engagement and achievement at a low ebb.

The ability to write effectively means these kids can think effectively.  Engagement in New Dorp High School increased because the students realized that they were capable of achievement, comprehended material better, and therefore had a greater stake in what they were learning.  It started to matter.

The ability to write effectively also means that adults can think effectively.  And this should be the goal of education--a populace that is aware, knowledgeable, and able to think analytically, critically, and creatively.  Sadly, rubrics don't leave room for kids who can think outside the box--rubrics are, themselves, a box.  Furthermore, the goal of education should not be to enrich students' wallets but their lives.  A student who gets straight Cs can still grow up to be a happy, healthy, productive member of society be he a manager at a store, a car mechanic, or owns his own plumbing business.  Somewhere along the line, we gave our kids this idea that hard work and an honest living were inferior to a college degree and

I don't want to engage my students because I think it will help them score high on tests and get them into college.  Indeed, I honestly couldn't care less about any tests, assessments, or colleges.  I care that they learn because I believe what I have to teach them will enrich their minds, help make them better decision-makers, informed voters, and give them a stake in their society and community.  I believe that a car mechanic can be just as important a pillar of his community as a CEO.

Work, work, work...

I am getting slammed by work right now and don't have time to update, really.  Which is a shame because I really, really want to talk about the Epic 6.  It is a modified version of D&D in which the maximum level is 6.  Period.

This makes the game a lot more gritty.  Your characters are mortal.  Very mortal.  This means that almost no one in the game world can cast spells above 3rd level.  Well, no mortal, anyway.  And not without powerful rituals, sacrifices, ley line nexuses and other house-ruled stuff.

The benefits are that it is rules light and makes for a much more realistic game.  Many times I've complained that a 25-year-old knight who has years of combat experience, when faced with a T-Rex, will probably die, horribly, in real life.  Yet somehow, paladins are constantly slaying dragons, which are much worse than a T-Rex.  Wits, preparation, a solid plan... these things can overcome a dragon (if you are lucky) in Epic 6.  Straight up combat won't.

There's a lot I want to talk about with regards to Epic 6.  Frankly, I think it is awesome.  If you're interested, there are some forum discussions on Epic 6 here and here.

Religion in D&D: Faith in the Forgotten Realm's Shadowdale

It's late and I'm musing on some of the things I did to deepen religion and illustrate faith-in-practice in the Dales.  I was heavily influenced by Walter Burkert's Religion in Ancient Greece and Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane.

Let me zero in on one specific area of the Dalelands--Shadowdale.  It has three temples, one to Tymora (goddess of luck), one to Lathander (the god of mornings and light), and one to Chauntea (the earth goddess).  Each one is a cultic center and each has its own rites, rituals, and means of currying favor with the gods.  In addition, there's a shrine to Mystra (goddess of magic) and Tyr (god of justice) in the village environs.

Let's start with Chauntea, the earth goddess.  This temple is vitally important to the village, as it's surrounded by farms and therefore very rural and agriculturally oriented.  The priests of Chauntea are keepers of agricultural lore and as such, they are called upon by the people to perform ritual cleansing ceremonies and blessings of the soil before it is tilled.  The details are simple in my head, but if the characters investigate, I can make them more complex.  Perhaps a procession around the boundaries of the field is conducted and holy water is sprinkled along the border to ward off evil or blight.  Songs and chants are sung during this procession and incense is burned.  Then, maybe, an offering of last year's harvest is given to Chauntea and burned at the center of the field.  The officiating priest plows the first furrow and sows the ashes into the ground.

Simple.  And yet it creates a deep and powerful meaning for the players.  The gods are real, their favor is curried.  They are called upon to aid the works of their devotees.  Although each NPC and player may have a patron deity, the inhabitants of the world will seek the benevolence of the gods.  Rituals in which sacred time is experienced and sacred events are reenacted may be crucial to the cults of each temple, bringing the celebrants and the god in closer communion.  For example, at the dawning of the sun during the winter solstice, the first rays shine upon a golden disc in the Temple of Lathander.  Before that, the priests may intone drearily that all is primordial darkness and chaos rules.  Once the sun breaches the horizon, the priests will praise Lathander with song, crying out that light is born and order is generated--the sacred reenactment of the first dawn in which the sun is reborn and begins its journey from the southern to the northern skies brings the priests and the people of Shadowdale into closer communion with Lathander.

Each town may have their own traditions and rituals.  In Shadowdale, during the midsummer festival, the children will make small paper or wooden boats, each with a wafer, berry, copper coin, or other minor offering, and set it into the River Ashaba as an offering to the water wizard who died there and gave the river its name centuries ago.  In Mistledale, they throw flowers into the river in the wizard's memory during the festival and ask the wizard to protect the village.  These offerings may, indeed, bear fruit for if Zhentil Keep sends forces to conquer the settlements, the river may remember these deeds and rise up against the Zhentarim and protect those who made the offerings.

Thus, the wizard Ashaba is a saint to the people of both Shadowdale and Mistledale.  Sylune, the Witch of Shadowdale, who fell defending the settlement from a dragon, may also be worshiped and honored as a saint, with offerings of flowers, coins, incense, food, or candles at her grave and shrine beneath the village citadel.  The remains of her hut where she died may be the site of an annual gathering of all the women in the village, who perform a ceremony that reenacts her brave death and commemorates her sacrifice.

When my players enter my worlds, I do endeavor to make those worlds real and breathing, even if I didn't create those worlds myself.  I still want the players to feel that these worlds are alive.  I want them to know that clerics and paladins aren't just character classes with duties demanded by role-playing mechanics.   They are a part of a religious continuum and have social and religious roles to play in the party and the world at large.

Random "I'm Alive" Update

The past month-and-a-half have been completely consumed by lecture notes for HIST 315 and HIST 316 (writing, organizing, preparing slides, etc.) and my papers/presentations for Education in a Global Context.  Between all these things, a lot of what I have to say about literature, current goings-on, gaming, reading, etc. just seems trivial.  But I like doing so anyway.  So, I'm going to make a point of finding time to getting back to blogging about that stuff.

Religion in D&D

So I'm taking a break from working on lecture notes and my syllabus for HIST316 to talk about a feature of role-playing that I feel is woefully misunderstood by gamers, specifically D&D gamers--the role of religion in an RP setting.

These days, skepticism and postmodern deconstruction have played a powerful role in misinforming people about religion in society.  For example, read any book on Augustus' political maneuverings that involved religion and you'll run across a deeply postmodern viewpoint that the first emperor purposely manipulated religion to bolster his reign.  This gives the reader the sense that Augustus didn't really believe in the religion, but saw it as a method to dupe people into surrendering political authority to him.  Granted, there is no doubt that Augustus was cynical and well-versed in realpolitik.  However, to suggest that he simply saw Roman religion as a means to power-acquisition imposes a skepticism onto his character that is thoroughly modern and somewhat anachronistic.  It is possible he was agnostic enough to see religion as something that could be manipulated, but to think that he actively disbelieved in the gods, did not fear their power over reality, or seek to gain their support is absolutely erroneous and unhistorical.

After reading Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane, as well as numerous works on ancient religion by Walter Burkert, I can't help but shake my head at the woeful understanding of religion's role in pre-Enlightenment societies that gamers have.  Gods exist as plot coupons, granting spells and standing for good or evil but not really playing a viable role in the societies of their settings.  The traditions, the demarcation of the sacred, the rituals and rites, the concept of purity and hallowedness, don't exist.  Holiness or unholiness are simply the side-effects of alignment or alignment-based spells (such as hallow).  There is no real understanding of the relationship between magic and the divine (or metadivine).  Clerics' roles in the gaming world are limited to being healers or buffing stats for player characters.  They don't play a real meaningful role in determining what a society values, how it organizes itself, or how it determines what is virtuous, moral, bad, or evil.

I'm reminded again of the role of Ronald Lacey's character in Flesh + Blood.  There's a phenomenal scene where he sanctifies Martin (Rutger Hauer) as leader through interpreting an omen.  He is instrumental in determining what is good for the group and what must be opposed, all filtered through a powerful religious lens.  In this pre-modern, medieval world that the characters inhabit, heaven and hell are very, very real places, God is omnipresent and always judging, and the priest is His mouthpiece.  Nevermind our modern notions of power and politics; these people really believed because belief was all that they had with which to determine the nature of reality, good and evil, and meaning itself.




Ronald Lacey's militant priest should be one of the models for a D&D cleric.  He commands respect and perhaps even fear.  He has the ear of God and the power to interpret signs and wonders, omens and visions.  He is a link between the invisible realm of Good and Evil and the mundane, drab world of physical reality.  He has power.  Not just spellcasting power.  Power and understanding.  He knows.  And he has the power to purify and sanctify, the power to declare who is good or evil and whom shall be damned.  In effect, he has a finger on the pulse of the afterlife and that scares the shit out of people and demands their respect.  Only another priest can really counter him.


These powers are largely ignored in the D&D worlds.  Clerics form largely a support role.  They are evidence that the gods are real because they cast spells.  Hell, half the time in D&D, the gods manifest themselves in visible and undeniable ways.  Yet D&D religion is largely myth-as-fact and little else.  For example, the D&D 2nd edition The Complete Priest's Handbook advises a DM create a mythic history for the setting.

One of the first things the DM can do to add color and detail to his campaign world is to work up that world's mythic history. Such a history will help establish, in his mind and those of his players, the relationships between the gods, and between gods and men. It will help set the tone of the campaign and the attitude of the player-characters' culture. It will give the players some idea of what their characters expect from their gods and their future. And once it's done, the DM can then elaborate on it and decide how each individual god relates to other gods and to the sentient races of the world.

After that, it gives instructions on how to create gods, their ethical dimensions, alliances and oppositions... and that's it.  It doesn't discuss rites or rituals, traditions, holidays, or deeper philosophical and ethical ideas beyond a cursory sentence or two.  This is profoundly manifest in the Dragonlance setting, in which the gods exist, are divided by alignment, but don't really have any set of traditions.  Their priests don't exist to demarcate the sacred in opposition to the profane or mundane in any sense that Eliade or Burkert describe.  There is no sense that ritual and ceremony re-enact mythical events or bring the celebrants into a sort of communion with their gods.  In a sense, each god's dogma is that of henotheism or monolatry.  There's not a lot of depth there.  There are next-to-no sacred texts (the Disks of Mishakal being the only text mentioned in the Dragonlance Chronicles), no factional splits based on dogma or interpretation, no local rituals or traditions.  The gods are simply there to fight out the whole Good vs. Evil battle.

This deficit makes gaming in the setting easier, but not necessarily more rewarding.  The setting suffers from lack of depth.  Similarly, role-playing also suffers.  A good DM should at least give Eliade's Sacred and Profane a cursory reading, and perhaps to some research into real-world religions, especially Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Shinto if their religions are polytheistic, henotheistic, or monolatric.

Twin Post: D-Day and Ray Bradbury

Two things have really converged today that make being a blogger a bit interesting.  The first is that on June 5, Ray Bradbury passed away.  The other thing is that today, June 6, is the anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandy during the Second World War.  Both topics are likely being blogged about all over the internet, but I thought it would be remiss of me to not say at least something.  I've avoided doing this before because everybody is doing it, but this time I figured I'd hop on the bandwagon.

Ray Bradbury
The passing of this giant of science-fiction is honestly quite sad, especially since he was prescient enough to foresee the cultural decline of American society into kitsch and the waning of literary awareness.  I read Fahrenheit 451 back in high school and it struck me how much Bradbury predicted how cultural and moral relativism would generate a malaise of meaninglessness and censorship of literary works (much of which comes out in the "Coda" of the book).  I was reminded of this when I discovered that new editions of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn were being published with heavy editing in order to make the work less "offensive."

I've read only a few of his short stories, but I especially remember "All Summer in a Day," dealing with school bullying on a colonized Venus (before we knew about the pressure-cooker atmosphere) because she's the only student to have ever seen the sunlight (since Venus is shrouded in clouds and constant rain).  This makes her "different" and the other children reveal the base, cruel, evil selfishness of human nature--only to discover deep shame and guilt for their actions at the end.  Sadly, what's done is done and they can never undo their behavior.  It's a great story about human nature and was quite moving for me to read as a child who suffered from bullying and ostracism.  Although I was far more angry and missed the real point of the story--that you cannot undo evil--and focused more on the poor girl who ends up being tortured by her peers.

Bradbury is one of those writers who has proven that science-fiction can, indeed, be literature.  He was most prolific during the height of science-fiction writing, during the middle of the 20th century.  That was when the likes of Bradbury, Clarke, and Asimov rubbed shoulders with Heinlein, Sturgeon, Hubbard, and Ellison and others.  They wrote in a world before Star Wars radically altered our perceptions of science-fiction (for good or for ill).

D-Day
On June 5, 1944, as we all should know from school, the Allied invasion of Europe began with paratroop drops and an amphibious landing in Normandy, France.  This was the turning-point in the war against Nazi Germany.  Although Hitler had been steadily losing ground in North Africa and Italy, it wasn't until the French front was opened that the Nazi war machine really began to fall apart.

We've all seen the opening shots of Saving Private Ryan.  Hopefully, we also watched the chronicle of Easy Company in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers.  Some of us fancy ourselves to have survived the horrors of the war through playing Call of Duty 2 or Medal of Honor: Frontline.  The experience of war can be horrific and harrowing.  Many of our grandparents and great-grandparents (has it been so long?) are still haunted by the memories of those days, when they stormed the beaches, killed and died.

The Normandy landings would see at least 12,000 Allied soldiers dead.  By the conclusion of Operation Overlord, the Allies would have suffered over 225,000 dead and wounded, while the German casualties approach 450,000 by some estimates.  The immense human suffering and destruction of lives brought about by World War II should not be easily forgotten--nor should the lives and deaths of the men who fought against Nazi Germany.

Since I had the pleasure of reading Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad, I have wanted to read some of his other books.  Considering how excellent Stalingrad was, I figured I'd plug his D-Day book, especially since I intend to get around to it within the next year or so.


Interesting note:  I find it interesting that nearly 160,000 men stormed the beaches at Normandy in June of 1944, while (considering my last post) almost the same number of men marched ashore at Busan in May of 1592 to begin the samurai invasion of Korea.

History Book: THE IMJIN WAR by Samuel Hawley

In 1592, the Year of the Water Dragon (임진), a force of nearly 160,000 men landed in Busan harbor, swiftly overran the citadel, and proceeded to march north through the Korean peninsula intending to carve a bloody path of carnage to Beijing.  They had been dispatched by the 太閤 (Taiko), 豊臣 秀吉 (Toyotomi Hideyoshi), who had united Japan under his personal charisma and generalship, to conquer 明朝 (Ming China) and if 조선국 (Choson Korea) stood in their way, then they would be destroyed.  The next seven years would see Ming China nearly bankrupted, Choson Korea ravaged with war and its attendant plagues and droughts, and Japan bleeding manpower and capital into the Taiko's impossible vanity project.  The result would be a legacy of ruined relations between China and Korea on the one hand and Japan on the other.  Japan would benefit from importing advanced pottery and other industrial techniques from Korea, but the human cost was incredibly high.  Choson Korea would come to understand the incredible power of firearms in warfare, but the cost for them was even higher--for decades their economy, which was mostly based on agriculture, would be a shambles and the Choson dynasty would never again reach the cultural heights that their ancestors had enjoyed.

The Koreans had no idea what they were in for.  The Japanese had just ended a century-and-a-half of internal struggle between rival 大名 (daimyo) as the 足利幕府 (Ashikaga Shogunate) proved to be impotent after the 応仁の乱 (Onin War, 1467-77).  When firearms were introduced halfway through this Period of Warring States, 戦国時代 (Sengoku Jidai), they revolutionized how the Japanese fought wars.  Massed units of peasant-conscripts armed with muskets could devastate a samurai cavalry charge.  The Japanese became very experienced in military affairs, logistics, siege engineering, and the use of hand-held firearms.  When they landed in Korea, the disorganized, poorly-trained (and often poorly led) Korean forces were completely massacred.

The Japanese, however, proved to have over-extended themselves.  When military mastermind--and possibly the greatest admiral in human history, greater even than Britain's famed Nelson--이순신 (Yi Sun-shin) led a series of campaigns against the Japanese navy, he successfully cut the supply-lines from Japan.  Food became scarce in a war-torn Korea, and starvation became a real problem.  When the Ming forces intervened against the Japanese, it became apparent that conquest of Korea, let alone Ming China, was well beyond Toyotomi Hideyoshi's reach.  In retaliation, the aging tyrant ordered his forces in Japan conduct a devastating sequence of punitive expeditions throughout southern Korea before retreating home.

Samuel Hawley's narrative of the conflict, entitled The Imjin War: Japan's Sixteenth Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China, is a tale of tragedy and human suffering brought about by one aloof and tyrannical man of great hubris.  He endeavors to examine the seven years of warfare in Korea between the Choson dynasty, Ming Chinese, and Japanese samurai from a variety of standpoints.  In doing so, he delves into Chinese, Japanese, and Korean accounts of the war, as well as personal correspondence and political documents in an attempt to engage the events on the personal level.  What unravels is a multifaceted chronicle of human experience.  The conduct of the war and the accounts of battles are coupled with excerpts from edicts, letters, and descriptions of the backroom politics, intrigue, and byzantine treachery that plagued both international negotiations and the bureaucratic maze of the Choson royal administration.

It's important to compare Hawley's work with Stephen Turnbull's publications on the war, the 2002 Samurai Invasion: Japan's Korean War 1592-1598, by Cassell Military histories and 2008's The Samurai Invasions of Korea, 1592-1598, by Osprey.  Turnbull is far more focused on the military maneuvers and less with the politics or the human dimensions of the conflict.  These elements are not given the same attention to detail as Hawley's massive narrative.  Turnbull's research is mostly drawn from Japanese sources, occasionally from Korean sources, and rarely (if ever) from Chinese.  In comparison, Hawley's work is far more scholarly, with extensive endnotes and a large bibliography.  Where Turnbull shines is in the detailed maps and illustrations throughout his books.  Hawley's work sports a number of black-and-white plates that are extremely well-chosen, but lack the luster of the full-color illustrations in Turnbull's publications.  I found myself constantly thumbing through Turnbull's many Osprey publications to help visualize the Choson, Ming, and Japanese forces.  Imagining the Korean landscape was easy--I spent three years teaching English in Korea--however, since many of the fortifications have been destroyed by time, war, and urban development Turnbull's maps of sieges and his Japanese Castles in Korea: 1592-1598 for Osprey Publishing were invaluable companions to Hawley's scholarship.

Hawley supplies his own interpretation of the various political and military developments that emerge through the course of the Imjin War.  He discusses the importance of Yi Sun-Shin's excellent admiralship against the Japanese navy, it's impact on the war and how it strained the Japanese supply-lines through into and throughout the peninsula.  He also notes the influence of guerrilla and warrior-monk units against the Japanese and the complex politics and personal agendas of Chinese generals and bureaucrats.  Surveys of Japan, China, and Korea before and after the war are provided to give context and background to the events.  Most impressively, Hawley frankly discusses the difficulties involved in discussing East Asian history, where historical fact can (and often is) manipulated and subverted by politics and yellow journalism.

Unfortunately, his book is very light on deep historical analysis and insight and is, according to Kenneth Swope, riddled with errors both major and minor.  I don't know enough about these events in detail to be able to judge the depth and breadth of the errors in his narrative.  Hawley's bibliography, while more comprehensive than Turnbull's, relies a bit too much on translations and doesn't delve deeply enough into original and untranslated sources.  Translations are often problematic and Hawley's book is susceptible to error creep from over-reliance on these.  Hawley appears to have a thorough grasp of Korean language sources and research, but lacks in the Japanese and Chinese languages.  He doesn't approach the immense depth of, say, Anthony Beevor's explorations of major Second World War battles.  However, Hawley's book is much more approachable for the lay-person and a very thorough introduction to this fascinating conflict than some of the more scholarly and obscure analyses that might surface in an academic library.

Overall, Samuel Hawley's account of the Imjin War will probably remain the definitive volume for a long time.  It's a deep shame that more Western historians do not research and publish more narratives and examinations of East Asian history with such attention to detail and thoroughness of scholarship.  It is also a deep shame that Hawley's Imjin War received such a limited publication run.  I was fortunate enough to purchase it for ₩45,000 (approximately $38) at Youngkwang Books in Busan.  Amazon has it used for around $150 in the States.  My copy, a second edition, was printed and bound by Samwha Publishing in South Korea.  It's not readily available overseas, unfortunately.  Nevertheless, it is absolutely indispensable for the student of Korean history, feudal Japanese studies, or those researching the decline of the Ming Dynasty.

NOTE:  I'm very keenly interested in reading a copy of Kenneth Swope's A Dragon's Head and a Serpent's Tail: Ming China and the First Great East Asian War, 1592-1598, just to be able to compare it's scholarship with Hawley and Turnbull.  Swope reviewed Hawley's book a bit unfavorably on Amazon's website.  I don't know if his review is justified, seeing as there is precious little in the way of actual scholarship in the West regarding the Imjin War.  Since Swope's book could be considered competition, his review must be viewed with a jaundiced eye.