Category Archives: Work

Close But Not Closed

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Today was a mishmash of regular work and side projects and some sifting but not much was actually accomplished.

I was at home all day because I was babysitting and although I managed to finish my “work” for the day, it took a while as I attempted to organize and sort pens and ink.

I have customer with a large order and a hefty stack of ink to put up for sale. I also have a bunch of pens that are in the “no, really, use it one more time” phase of sales.

Somewhere in there I cooked lunch for our youngest.

Tomorrow (today actually) we will go to a candy street where I will pretend that I’m not going to buy the cinnamon candy and ginger candy, but in the end I will walk about with both. I will also be “working” by taking pictures of the area to use for “work” next week.

It is all as silly as it sounds, and it left me feeling annoyed and off-kilter enough that I didn’t actually finish much.

My follow-through was shot and except as a topic, I didn’t care much. Just one of those days.

Farewell Parties

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They were generous with the booze, but not with the food, which is not usually how I like school parties.

Tonight was a farewell party for two English teachers at the school where I work. One is moving to Tibet (long story) and the other has found a full time job and will, within a few months, wish he was in Tibet.

The event started with booze, which was unusual because they usually start with random appetizers of questionable content and origin. After a while we got salad, tuna, tofu, and raw vegetables. After that was more booze.

After enough booze I found myself looking around for a menu. Food hadn’t arrived in a long time and I thought we were expected to order it. During a school party, food is usually a form of self-defense. It provides something to do other than drink and it helps slow down the impact of the booze.

It turned out I was wrong, though. We didn’t have to order because after a while more food arrived.

The trouble is, by the end of the evening, a lot more booze than food had arrived, which magnified the power of the booze. (In defense of the restaurant, they served bourbon neat, even though it wasn’t on the menu and were generous with the amount.)

On the other hand, they were generous with the amount, which means I’ll soon have regrets. Especially as there wasn’t much food.

 

Here Goes That Again

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Tomorrow I’ll go back to work without ever leaving the house and that has me kind of cranky today.

I’ve written before about the period of “house arrest” the company I work for subjects me to, but this year there have been some changes that might make it more interesting.

For reasons I don’t fully understand, the powers what are want to develop a database of information about the different areas we live, because, well, because they can and they need something for us to do to justify paying us when we have nothing to do just to show us they can make us do things.

That means that taking the girls sightseeing will count as “research” toward the project (How to Enjoy My Town with the Family, etc). Granted, I’ll have to eventually produce some kind of writing, but since I’ve already written something like that for the company the first time they tried something like this, I’ll just revise what I’ve written (after doing “further research” of course).

Some where in there I’ll actually have to do some actual work related to the school where I work and there will be a “training session” of some sort that will count as a “work” day.

That will end with the actual job starting. (There are other complicating factors, but more on those in a future post.)

The First Day of the Many

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As has become my tradition, the first day after the end of classes is spent planning the rest of the days before classes begin again.

For the first few days I am still, technically working at the school where I work, but starting next week the company I work for expects me to show work even though there is no work for me to do.

Because of this, I’ve already been planning what I plan to do for those days.

The twist in the plot, though, is that the company I work for wants us to write about what there is to do where we live so that, um, because, um, well, I don’t really understand why. Some new guy has a vision of how to help new people get information about towns because, I guess, in his head he lives in a pre-internet world where such information is not readily available. (Or, he’s the new guy and he needs to “build something” to show his worth, and he has an entire army of people forced to do work when there is no work to do at his disposal.)

The only good thing about all this, and perhaps this is the actual method behind the madness, I can take my youngest shopping downtown and call it “research” (Visiting town X with children; Things to do in Town X with children, etc.)

It also means I can go shopping and count it as work, as long as I write something eventually.

Word Searches and Silence

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It was a copy of several copies, it wasn’t something we’d studied and I didn’t have the answers. It kept the students mesmerized, though, so it did its job.

This week and part of next week we have pass back classes for our first and second year junior high school classes. Because the actual pass back part takes only a few minutes, we are left with at least a half-hour’s worth of time to fill.

This year some of us decided to pass out word searches that involved matching capitols and countries and then finding the capitols in the word search. It had nothing to do with anything we’d studied, but it was something to do.

I made it optional, as the students already have homework for the next grade even though they haven’t, technically, finished the current one, but almost every student grabbed a copy and each class became eerily silent as the students tried to finish the word search.

My job was to translate the over-copied words into letters the students could understand.

This means, of course, that complicated word searches will always be a part of pass back classes.

Getting Ready for the Normal

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I’ll be normal again soon, but I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.

I finished marking exams today and even managed to figure out all the final marks. This means I have a chance to fall back into normal rhythms for a while, at least until I have more free time and that’s when things fall apart. Granted, part of that “free time” will be served under a de facto house arrest where the company I work for forces me to work at home because there’s no work for me to do.

The trouble is, that for a few days after I finish marking, I enter an anxious period where I feel as if I should be doing something and that keeps me from relaxing. Oddly, during those periods, I can manage to waste time in a way that’s not even fun. I’d actually feel better about it if I just wasted the time playing games. Instead, the time is just wasted.

Eventually, I settle down and start taking advantage of all the extra time. The trick this time around is to keep the extra time from being filled with planning how to fill the extra time.

That’s not always the case, though.

The State of Zooming Out

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The end is near, but like the vertigo effect, the closer I get, the farther away things seem to be.

Because I don’t always think things through/have aspirations that outshine my abilities and focus, I decided to mark the exams that are due last first and the exams that are due first last. This will, of course, give me a weekend off.

The problem is, that it is also slowly driving me insane–or maybe that’s the Bond movies (more on that in a different post)–by blocking off my chance to do any outside activities.

That said, if all goes according to plan, and we all know what happens to the best laid schemes of mice and men, I’ll finish relatively early tomorrow.

Actually, because of my odd plan, I have to finish tomorrow. If I don’t, Friday will be interesting in the “may you live in interesting times” curse kind of way.

 

One More Begin Again and End

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Today was a mix of finishes and starts.

I saw a few dozen for the last time today as I won’t be teaching third year high schools next year. At the same time I picked up two more sets of exams from students I’ll have to see again very soon.

This situation makes this an especially odd time of year as I don’t get to enjoy the satisfaction that pass back classes usually bring as they are just harbingers of more work yet to come.

Granted, the good news was that apparently no one has failed which means I won’t have to write and mark a make up exam, but I do have only a few days to mark the exams I just got–or maybe I have all weekend to mark some of them. It’s all confusing, although the confusion is offset by the shocked looks on many of my high school students when they saw their low scores and realized they should have 1) paid attention in class 2) followed instructions and 3) memorized their speech contest speeches which would have helped them a lot on the exam.

I did get some marking done, but I’m actually doing it all backward: I’m starting with the class I might have the most time for. This will force me to finish all the exams by Friday, and that will give me the weekend off.

That’s the plan, anyway. Who knows what will actually happen.

 

Gradually, Then Suddenly

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Sometimes you don’t get the extra work you want when you want it. You get a little with lots of time to do it and the you get all of the rest with less time to do it.

I had 10 days to finish marking my first five batches of exams. Starting tomorrow I’ll have four days to finish six batches. (Note: for complicated reasons, that’s about the same number of exams.) Because of that I found myself wishing that the junior high first and second year exams had been a couple days earlier. I would have even been happy to come in on Saturday.

Instead the exams are late in the exam period and the first set of pass backs is on the earliest possible day for pass backs.

This wouldn’t be so terrible except that we’ve also got pass back classes eating up time that could be spent marking.

At the same time, there’s been a sudden interest in ink and because I’m in the “yeah, sure, I can totally do that” phase of the business, I’m spending a lot of time fielding emails and texts and taking pictures of ink samples whilst working my phone charger overtime. (Note: I’ve discovered that I’m a surprisingly good up-seller/enabler thanks to the Detective Colombo “Oh, just one more thing” style of sales.) I’ll be dealing with all that on Monday and Tuesday. That leaves me only a couple free days to buckle down and do the marking that is my actual job.

As work tend to expand and contract to fill the time, I’ll get it all done, and hopefully won’t have to pull an old-school all-nighter. Then again, knowing me, I’ll probably do that anyway, I just won’t get much work done. Then I’ll have to do it all suddenly.

One Brief Moment

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Every now and then I see that a student has learned something, even though he doesn’t realize it.

As a rule, I don’t use any Japanese in class, even with low level students. Any use of Japanese by me creates a temporary ruckus that distracts from whatever point I was attempting to make. This happens as students laugh, mock, act shocked that I used Japanese. My students do all that despite the fact that they constantly say “Japanese please”. Even if they don’t do all the laughing, mocking and acting shocked, if I use Japanese they will learn to ignore any English coming out of my mouth until I stop spouting nonsense and start speaking Japanese.

Today, in a class that was competing to be my worst class, a student tried to get me translate a phrase. I’ve mentioned many times that I’m not a dictionary but that they are welcome to bring one to class.

A student was trying to get the phrase “get to school” but wasn’t sure about the “get to” part. He was ignoring the student next to him who just kept repeating “get, get, get, get” which only annoyed the student and made him say “get, get, get, get” louder.

The student with the question asked me in Japanese, but then stood up and demonstrated, in English and with gestures, what he was trying to say. I said “get to school.” and he finished his writing.

He didn’t realize that this is exactly what I’m trying to get them to do: talk around words they don’t know and, whenever possible, use gestures.

I felt smugly satisfied, which is not something I usually do with that class.