Last Thursday was another odd day. All classes were cancelled*. Instead, all students and teachers went to a small stadium some distance from the school for a sports meet/pageant in front of the parents. We had been informed about this some days ago, and had been asked whether we could come. Being the great guys that we all are, we said yes. I ( Read more... )

Ugh, today was terrible.  Infuriating is a better word.  Enraging.  Baffling, too.

Let me set the scene.  Today was a pageant celebrating the 20th anniversary of the school.  Each class put on a small show.  These took the form of skits, songs, dances, and acrobatics.  None of us foreigners had any involvement.  We weren’t asked, and we didn’t ( Read more... )

Bill Bergen is a name that none but the oldest or nerdiest of baseball fans will recognize. He was a turn-of-the-century ballplayer, playing catcher from 1901-1911 for Cincinnati and Brooklyn. In fact, he might have been forgotten altogether, if not for one simple fact: he was the worst hitter in baseball history. Now, of course, the worst ( Read more... )

 Today I finished The Gathering Storm, the just-released 12th book in the Wheel of Time series.  Mom very kindly mailed it to me, and it arrived last Friday.  And it was fantastic.

I like to judge books on what I call the School Night Sleep Deprivation Scale (SNSDS for short).  Imagine that it is midnight on a school night.  You are lying ( Read more... )

A funny thing happened when I taught class today.  I had almost no guidance on what I supposed to teach.  My email from Leslie said simply that I was to cover “chapter one.”  So I planned an hour and twenty minute class on chapter one.  Everything was going fine…until class started.  After we did some introductions, I told the kids

“Take out ( Read more... )

Well, that ends a surreal week of teaching.  By the end, there were but 7 or 8 gaunt, hollow-eyed plague survivors in each of my classes.  As for the rest, well, the dysentery took most of ‘em.  The wombats ate the remainder.

Seriously though, it got to be ridiculous.  I literally did nothing productive this week, on account of the epidemic ( ( Read more... )

Today I received a double-barred shotgun blast of old memories to the face, and had to go to the hospital with severe, third-degree nostalgia.  First I was walking along Yihai Street.  There is a hairdressing place that is always playing odd western music (lots of ABBA, in fact).  Well, today they were blasting "Tide Is High" by Blondie (no, not a ( Read more... )

I had a very satisfying day of teaching today.  I decided to teach the kids the concept of a rhyme.  I knew this would be difficult, but I wanted to push them.  First I told them a few rhymes, really emphasizing the sounds at the end of the words.  I could see some faint glimmers of comprehension.  It was rather like raising a sail to the wind. ( Read more... )

Ugh.  I’m not a disciplinarian.  I’m really not.  But today I had to drop the hammer on the kids.  There was one class of mine that was being extremely loud and rude.  Not rude to me.  Hell, they can cuss me out to my face in front of my mother for all I care.  But when these kids are talking all the time, it’s rude and disrespectful to everyone ( Read more... )