RL: the No Good, Horrible, Very Bad Day, and BSG: The Awesome, Wonderful, Very Good Vid.

[beccatoria]

So, I have been having a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. No day when you wake up to discover you have no water because your pipes have frozen is going to be a good day. It is usually only made worse when you get yelled at aggressively by a random person on the street (near as I can tell for...not being Korean or something), made to teach an extra class forty minutes after my finishing time, having to handle children who think it's hilarious to draw in PERMANENT MARKER on the white board, discovering that 60% of the teaching staff of your school are leaving AT THE SAME TIME IN SEVEN WEEKS meaning that the school who are already serially late paying me (and worse about paying the Korean teachers) because rumour has it the bad economy is tanking it, will have to pay out about three times as much as usual in severance pay AND I'll probably get an insane workload all through March if I get paid at ALL, coming home to discover the pipes have frozen AGAIN because if the workman told us to leave a tap running, we didn't understand him and no one at the school thought to relay this piece of common wisdom to us until ten minutes before we left, having the workman show up to fix it AGAIN only to have him stand up in my husband's face, yelling his head off (presumably for being stupid and not leaving the tap on) even when it was obvious that a) Kev had no idea what he was saying, and b) he was scared. As people are wont to be when other people walk into their homes and yell at them in a language they don't understand. Oh, also, all the stress and then craziness at work meant I accidentally went for almost twenty-four hours with having anything to eat or drink. NO WONDER I HAVE A HEADACHE.

On the more positive side, I came home to this:

We Didn't Start the Fire by chaila43

It's an AWESOME vid. Go watch it. (Warning: it has historical spoilers! But only up to 1990.)

It's an epic cycle-of-time, everything-that's-happened-in-the-show vid. To Billy Joel. It's wonderful. I can't really parse why it works so well, but I'll try. The vidder categorises it as "crack (sort of)" which I think is along the lines of what I call "deadly serious crack".

Sometimes ideas are crazy but work if you commit to them. I think the reason this vid works despite a song choice many would assume could only work for comedy (although there are some hilarious moments. Srsly. Laura Roslin is Elvis. WHO KNEW), is that it underscores the absurdity of, well, everything.

And absurdity is just as good for poignancy as humour.

And yes, I do believe that BSG is absurd. In the philosophical sense that they all live in a world where things just happen and therefore things are meaningless. Which might sound entirely contradictory considering my deep affection for the cycle of time, both in the show and this vid, but I don't think it's contradictory at all. What's more meaningless, arbitrary and absurd than being trapped in a giant cycle of events? Just because it's happened before doesn't empower it with a special gravity of meaning. It doesn't mean it'll count for something extra special later.

Oh. Yay! I think I just found my zen if they decide to do anything truly insane or disappointing in the last half of S4! Also. Again, this will help me handle any and everything to do with Bill Adama.

And now I am finished.

Comments

[bluerosefairy.livejournal.com]

Avenue Q does NOT lie. The song is my ringtone, too - at least, it was on my phone from home. My ringtone now is this awesome jazz song.

*cheerleads* Halfway done! You have survived for five and a half months! Go you guys!

Augh, I hear you on the economy and tuition-related stuff. My school has thankfully been open for a year and a half (even before I got there) and we're circumventing funding issues by opening more kindergarden classes, so we offer a regular school program and a kindergarden program. This month has been the first of the K classes, which are eaaaaarly in the morning and kicking my butt to teach.

I can see why you might need to tailor your teaching methods to this problem kid, but frankly, we have the same thing in the main kindergarden class. James runs around, kicks, screams, and wrestles the entire time, and really, the best thing we've found is to have Brett, Park or Minh (two of the security guys/drivers) pick him up in a football carry until he's calm, and continue teaching. If I had more of a height advantage, I'd carry him myself. He just seems to react the best to being unequivocally convinced that he's not going to get away with misbehaving.

Ohhh, hangman. God bless hangman - it has already saved a few class periods, and I've just started. I will definitely have to try out the tic-tac-toe variant you mentioned - my gang likes the original version, but it gets old fast.

The dry-erase markers are more prevalent than paper, I swear to god. It's insane. Except half the markers have been used up, so you go to write down vocab and you have to run out and find a new one and hope they don't go bonkers in the room before you get back.

"Simon Says" I usually reserve for my low-level comp kids. I can think of enough things to keep them occupied, and it helps them learn left from right, the names of body parts, etc. "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" (complete with actions, or it's useless) is another favorite of my younger kids. And OMG, "Red Light, Green Light" is so much fun! You can't use it in a class with a ton of kids, because they'll start shoving matches, but basically, whoever is "captain" stands at the front of the room with their back turned. The kids line up, and when the captain says "green light", they're allowed to take one step forward. If the captain says "red light", they can't move. If the captain turns around and catches someone moving on a red light, that person has to go back to the starting line. My first-graders adore it.

Unfortunately, I can't time-waste with spelling tests - we have scheduled ones, and they'll throw a fit if you test them on a day when they aren't supposed to have a test. I usually end up doing pronounciation and vocab, or having them do informal writing practice. "Write me five words that begin with the letter P", or something.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

My school has been open for like a gabillion years (at least six), and it's part of one of the biggest english language school franchises in south korea apparently (though you wouldn't know it from the unprofessional way it's run: I think franchise is the operative word here) so it should have been pretty stable. :/ Which is why I'm kind of worried that they're in trouble.

We already have a fulltime kindergarden program, I teach two classes a day. And yes, we have a kid who wrestles, kicks, screams and broke my glasses so I'm now wearing a spare pair.

The problem I have with these two problem kids (the second kid is actually not still in kindergarten, it's first grade), is that no one backs me up in dealing with them. We don't have burly security guards to carry them, and while I physically DO pick them up and remove them when things get too difficult, all the teachers are in other classes, and if I put him outside, he continually flings himself at the door. If I leave him with the desk teacher, she eventually brings him back in for some reason, and just... Like they say things like, "If he's bad just give him to the desk teacher," but the reality is, it doesn't work and I get looked at like, "Why can't you control him?" even though no one can. Like it takes two of us to manhandle him when he's being really difficult, and it totally disrupts the class, and apparently, "Do not let him be in my class," is not an option.

It's because this place is a business not a school. They hate having to phone the parents and tell them there's an issue with their kid because they're scared the parent will just take the kid out of the school. So they'd rather keep throwing him at me and refusing to help me with him because I'm less likely to walk away and take their money.

The other kid - in the class I can't draw with now - I actually can handle him much better, which is why I'm frustrated. All the times when he's misbehaved REALLY badly, like hitting someone, have been in the breaks between classes when frankly, my chain of custody is over with. I have somewhere else I need to be going to. I agree we need to deal with him somehow, but removing ALL FUN WAYS OF LEARNING for EVERYONE IN THE CLASS because he's a little git is...not helpful. But endemic of the way things get handled here. :/

I think that's my major issue. I'm slowly realising that if I say, "I have a problem with X," what everyone hears is, "I have failed at something because I am stupid, please help me."

Possibly I'm just having a really, really bad few weeks (and I think that really is a lot of it) as is everyone else at the school, but...I also think there's some truth to that.

I DO ACTUALLY KNOW THAT GAME NOW! Only we used to play "light house," and the "captain" stood at the light switch and the students could move when the light was out, but when it was on, they had to freeze. The problem with these games or running games, etc., is that our classrooms are tiny. There's an oval table for the kids and maybe a foot and a half of clear space either side of it before you hit either the wall or bookshelves. It's awful. And the table is so big I can't move it out of the way either.

My kids flipped out a little at first with the spelling tests, but I managed to explain it was "just for practice," and now they're a lot calmer about it. I mean, they don't like it, but they accept it and seem to try. So, I consider that a success. Writing practice, as I said, is difficult without lined paper, but "write me X words," is more workable, I think. I may have to try that.