Author Archives: DELively

Moment After Moment

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Our oldest, being finished with exams (sort of, maybe, long story), went to an event honoring the release of one of her favorite singer’s new singles. While she was there she managed to anger She Who Must Be Obeyed. I, of course, didn’t make things better, but it did get me thinking.

First, our oldest changed clothes and went to the concert but left the parts of her school uniform scattered around the living room. In fact, it was so messy that it’s fair to say that even Project Blue Book would have sent agents to investigate her alien abduction.

While she was away, she texted to inform us that she had lost her Kanji textbook, which meant she couldn’t study for an exam she has tomorrow. She didn’t know where she’d lost it but had a couple possible locations.

(Note: If I’d known she had an exam tomorrow she wouldn’t have gone. That said, I do not understand why both she and She Who Must Be Obeyed refer to the exam as a “mini-exam” that seems both important and not important.)

The revelation of the lost book led to much anger/ranting from SWMBO, whose anger is a lot like a string of firecrackers: once it starts it doesn’t stop until it’s finished and trying to stop it frequently leads to injury.  I contributed by commenting that there was little we could do about it at that moment as we were in a different state and that we should save our anger until our oldest arrived home/I finished what I was working on. (Note: this, as near as I can tell, did not endear me to SWMBO.)

I met our oldest at the station to escort her home as she arrived well after dark (and there’s a creepy guy along the way who’s spoken to her in the past…another long story), she explained that her book had been buried in her backpack the entire time.

This made me mad as it proved she hadn’t actually studied, which is why the book was buried where she couldn’t find it. But then it got me thinking.

Our oldest had clearly had a Teenage Moment. This is like a Senior Moment, but happens to teenagers.

I shudder to think how many Teenage Moments I had when I was a teenager. Then again, it’s fair to say that everything that happened to me from age 12 to age 33 counted as a teenage moment.

 

Accidental Time Swapping Traditions

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It has become a tradition in my daily log that I get a couple days backward.

In both this year’s log and last year’s log, I’ve started to fill out a page only to realize, much too late, that it’s the wrong page. This means that the next day also has to go into the log in the wrong place resulting in a couple pages of swapped time.

This made more sense in last year’s log as it was a blank book and I had to write the dates every morning.

However, my current log has dates already printed. Despite this, for yesterday’s entry, I strarted writing the notes for the 12th on the 13th. Today I had to write the 13th on the 12th.

Tomorrow I hope the 14th is on the 14th, but I can’t guarantee that.

Finishing and Crashing

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I had six test pass-back classes today but only about one class worth of things to do. I used the extra time to finish exams.

At the school where I work, for reasons I don’t understand, we are expected to keep students a full 50 minutes on the days we give them back their exams. The trouble is, the best we can hope for is 20-25 minutes of test-related activity and the rest is, more or less, babysitting.

Some teachers show movies, others give assignments, but I’m more prone to allow free time with the admonitions “No fighting. No kissing. No sports.” If the class is in the homeroom and/or the students remember my instructions to always bring something to do in case they finish an assignment early,

When I did this in my early classes, I was able to finish marking the long writing sections on my second year high school (11th grade) exams and tally the marks.

In my third year junior high school classes (9th grade) I was kept busy marking long writing sections. (Note: on some exams, I don’t mark mistakes. Instead I read, give a score, and then mark the section if a student questions his final mark.)

Luckily all that happened after I finished marking my exams. If it hadn’t, I’d probably still be marking exams rather than writing this.

 

 

That Long Last Stretch is Oh So Long

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Been busy today, which means I got nothing but work to talk about. In fact, today involved three different jobs in various forms.

I was able to close out two of the jobs by sending edited paragraphs and posting final marks. I was also able to complete the class marks for my junior high school classes.

All that seems like an accomplishment, and in many ways it is, but that was the easy stuff and it leaves me with the final section of my final class’ worth of exams and over three days to finish them. The problem is, the way my brain works, those few thousand words (in theory 120 words X 28 exams) somehow manage to stretch out for the entire allotted time.

I like to think that something like that won’t happen this time, but I’m already thinking of ways to waste time. None of them productive, just ways to waste time.

Matters of Geez and Gosh and Justice

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Warning: This post contains a great deal of profane language.

Watching Fixer Upper, where everyone’s reaction to their newly renovated home is “Oh my gosh” has me thinking about Boy Scout camp and matters of justice.

When I was at a Boy Scout camp about a thousand years ago–I think it was the now defunct O. A. Greager Scout Ranch in Western Colorado–there were a lot of rules involving earning feathers that would help your patrol, and eventually your troop, earn rewards, albeit usually in the form of more feathers.

One of the rules I had a hard time accepting was that “gosh” was acceptable as an expression of surprise/disgust, but “geez” was not. Uttering “gosh” would elicit no reaction, but uttering “geez” was treated as if the speaker had said “shit” or “fuck”.

The logic, as I understood it, was that “gosh” was far enough away from “God” that it did not count as a swear word. (Saying “God” in reaction to something earned demerits.) “Geez”, however, was considered too close to “Jesus” and therefore counted as taking the Lord’s name in vain and earned demerits.

My reaction to this logic was “That’s bullshit.”

Even if they assumed “Geez” was spelled “Jeez” it was still farther away from “Jesus” than “Gosh” was to “God” as the latter required fewer letter substitutions. However, the Scout Master at the time insisted that it was different because “Gosh” didn’t lead to “God” whereas “Geez” could easity lead to “Geezus H. Christ”.

My argument was that “Geez” was not “Jesus”. Only “Geezus” was “Jesus”. (These are the kinds of things that seem important to you right after you’ve earned demerits for saying “Geez”.)

Eventually we all got used to the arbitrary rules. I mean, geez, they were still bullshit, but we got used to the fuckers and no more demerits were earned, at least not by me, and at least not for swearing.

Taking a Break by Working

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It says a lot that the way I took a break from marking exams was by marking paragraphs.

As an experiment, I’ve agreed to do some online marking that allows me to work from home. The problem is, the online marking works a much different schedule than my day job.

The other problem is, that if I put off doing either the exams or the online marking, I end up sitting at my desk marking questionable writing.

Today, I had a good burst of energy, which means I carefully balanced my carbs-to-coffee ratio, and managed to finish exams I picked up just yesterday. Luckily, I have two lower level classes, which means I have reduced class sizes and that made finishing a little bit easier.

However, after I finished the fronts (our tests have short answer on the front and essay/long writing on the back) I decided to mark some paragraphs as part of my part-time job.

For this job, students submit paragraphs via an oddly counter-intuitive email system and I spend a couple hours marking their mistakes before sending the file back to them for revision.

The main advantage is that the online work is typed, not handwritten, which makes it physically easier to read. Sometimes students use hard lead that is hard to read on cheap copy paper.;

I have more paragraphs to finish tomorrow. I’ll probably save them until I need a break.

 

Heart Attack Number Two

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For a few minutes I was calm, then I panicked and stayed that way a while. You can blame a sound technician.

Because I’m still paranoid about the listening test, I approached the sound booth whilst simultaneously retracing my mental steps to see if I’d actually tested both CDs before submitting them. I decided I had. Probably.

Then the sound technician arrived and started doing his pre-checks. The sound was a bit uneven with one speaker sounding low and the other sounding louder. I made a couple jokes about that and then he started to play the listening to double check his settings.

What I heard went something like “Number Two. It is my favorite superpower because scritchscritchscritchskipgoogoogooskipscritch Number Three.”

Panic set in and I thought about where I could buy a suit for the ensuing apologies until I realized he was just fast-forwarding the CD. However, after that I couldn’t calm down until the entire listening had finished.

Luckily, after that, everything went well. There was only one question and I got a chance to relax. Once my heart started beating regularly anyway.

Nothing Comes From Nothing

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If I’m able to write anything coherent, it will not be because I was inspired by my students.

Today was dedicated to marking final exams and almost to a student, the long writing sections were terrible. They either didn’t match the actual topic or they were too short or they were less than coherent. Students where were supposed to write conversations wrote essays instead, or they didn’t include any notation to indicate that speakers had been changed.

In fact, this test may have set a record for worst long writings in the history of long writings.

I spent most of the time counting words and/or writing word counts, “off-topic”, and “WTF? Really?” It has left me feeling surprisingly drained.

Tomorrow I get to enter forms and wrestle with my marks spread sheet. After that, I get to go so school and pick up two more batches of exams.

By this time next week, I may no longer be a native English speaker. Or, I won’t be able to write very well.

Better Than You

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I’m having an argument with a student who rarely speaks.

Last week I expressed my displeasure at his having copied large sections of Wikipedia and presenting them as his daily personal journals. This has him pouting. He complained last week during the required “research what happens if you plagiarize” assignment, and he complained this week too.

This week involved him declaring he liked the other teachers at the school better (I would, too) and saying how he didn’t understand how I could possibly think that what he did was plagiarism. My profound response, written in the margins of his journal: “Because it was plagiarism.”

I also gave him some encouragement as my angry response has him questioning his plans to study in the USA. I told him to stick with it but that I can’t help him if he insists on presenting work that isn’t actually his work. The purpose of the journal isn’t to fill the pages, but to practice writing.

Sometimes, I try to be the good cop. Or at least I will, once I figure out what the good cop does other than offer a cigarette and a glass of water.

The Longer and The Shorter

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One of the listening tests today was so short that those of us in the teachers’ room were afraid something was wrong. I had an immediate flashback to horrors from my own past. The other was so long I’m pretty sure students fell asleep before it was finished.

The test on my listening test will be somewhere in between, although this year I did add a lot of nonsense to it to confuse and befuddle the students. (More on that in a future post.)

I bring this up because a couple years ago a few members of the staff complained that students finished our tests too soon and that created some sort of problem for the test proctors. I personally ignored this as I can’t control how fast the students finish, especially if they’ve lived in an English speaking country or simply given up quickly.

People who are more diplomatic (and, oddly, more well liked by the staff) made an attempt to lengthen their listening tests by adding pauses or extra listening sections.

Each exam includes a listening portion and we write, perform, record, and edit the listening sections ourselves. This leaves it up to our own preferences and/or energy levels.

The results today were a listening test that was less than three minutes long and a second that was 18 minutes long. It also means the second year junior high listening will probably be more difficult than the second year high school listening. But, I consider that part of the fun.