Saturday, July 16, 2005
an intristing day at work
keeping with my theme of spontaneous amalgamation, i will relate the following day at school:
i woke up at 6:30 in the morning, not unexpectedly, to the sound of megaphonic military chants and the metered pounding of little footies. i swear they do it just to annoy me. when i came to the school, the dorm guard (now i know his name to be larry) had a handful of keys in envelopes and asked me to pick a room, any room. he must have thought that noone in their right mind would pick the card right on top. i was tired, jetlagged to be exact, and not up to the task of guessing my fate. i picked the top one and ended up with the first floor room, right on the corner facing the basketball courts; right where the morning exercises take place. oh bitter fate, thou knowest me well.
no use in going back to sleep, so i get up and futz. shower dress contacts and i'm ready to go. the air outside has a burnt-rubber stench and drops the visibility to a hundred yards. i look upward in despair, searching for any speck of blue in the sky above, but all to be found is cloud upon cloud of depression. not exactly the most optimistic city to wake up in, but i push on.
i spurt out from the front gate with a spring in my step, only to have it halted by an onslaught of noise glare drizzle. not only is today stinging my eyes, but now it is wetting my pate. i hurry past the prematurely honking machines and the prematurely spitting folks on to my blessed alley, full of its earthly delights. i almost don't even have to walk in the alley anymore, she's ready with my three baozi in a flimsy plastic bag. xiexie, buxie.
today the muck is digging into the fragile tissues in my throat, so i decide to fight fire with fire, smog with sludge, and buy a coke at the local kedi. it doesn't so much cleanse one's thirst as it does kill all bacteria in one's mouth, throat, stomach, intestines, sphincter. coke, the raw choice.
the rain is getting heavier, so i put a move on, jumping from tree to tree like a clumsy squirrel. i neglected to buy an umbrella since the first two i bought broke as soon as i left the store. when i get jaded about a certain object, it'll take me a good long time to forgive and forget and pay the 20 yuan to buy a new one. today makes me rethink that aspect of my personality.
i make it to the primary school, walk moodily past the trash bins made to hold wet umbrellas, slip a little on the tile, and head up the stairs. of course, it's a tuesday. had to be a tuesday. certainly, for the purposes of this story, yeah, it's a tuesday alright. i get to the third floor and walk into my office to prepare for first period. it's 8 am. half an hour till the pain begins. already i have a headache just thinking about it.
noone is there, thank goodness, but that doesn't stop the phone from ringing as soon as i get in the door. and it's an especially annoying ring. i heard that ms bao (director of the primary school, bigwig of our office) had her daughter's voice chanting "mommy, i love you, mommy, i love you, mommy..." ad infinitum last year, but this year it's not like that. it might even be worse. imagine the old mcdonald tune in a high register blaring tone, played over and over at high speed. and then multiply that by one year. yeah, it was a good think i wasn't packing most mornings.
i ignore it, it's not for me.
oh fudge (that's not the expletive i used, but this is a public blog) i have some copying i neglected to do. not to mention i have no idea what i'm teaching first period. or second period. or fourth. lord it's going to be a bad day. and this really has nothing to do with god or fate or poltergeists. this problem i'd gotten myself into was the product of a slow, irreversible ennui accumulated over the past couple months causing me to only do this kind of meaningless work under duress. if i can possibly be doing ANYthing else, i'll do it in lieu of actually preparing for class. i'm pretty sure i learned this from teacher's in my past, but i'm not sure if i could ever prove it.
i think while copying. wait, strike that, i think while waiting to copy. it seems that other people are having the same problem this morning. on top of all that, only one copier in the primary school is working. (man, the suspense is really building up in this story. it's too bad that this happened so often to me during the year that it stopped being exciting and tense and just got plain taxing.) yeah yeah yeah, long story short, i show up to class ten seconds late with a sheaf of papers, two books, and a class full of screech owls. i quickly throw them some dead mice to quiet them for a bit while i compose myself. dead mice = graded quizzes (i'm not sure when i had the energy to grade them, but magically, there they were)
side note: i think i'm jumping around from past to present tense at an amazing frequency during this story. apologies. when pushing the contents of eight days into one, little disruptions in the spacetime continuum are bound to happen.
it is while i am teaching for the first hour that an amazing thing happens. a camera crew enters the back of my room and starts to take pictures of me teaching. this is quite unsettling for me as a teacher, but the students are really losing it. they can't concentrate a bit. as a teacher, i'm furious, but as a performer (the real job of every teacher) i'm at carnegie hall. i start waving my hands and holding up student's classwork to explain my points. i hold up pieces of paper far longer than i ever would have to in a real class and cut poses that make me look like i know exACTly what i'm talking about. the students must be thinking a demon has taken control of my body, because they've never seen me teach like this the whole year. but really, i'm just trying to give them their shots and get them the bleep outta there. it works. and i'm spent. i get the kids to read and i take a seat, mentally preparing for the next class while still "teaching" this one.
thank goodness it's history. my worst subject, the one i'm the least qualified for, and so the one that i don't care about a bit. not that i'm not teaching, it's just that the kids in my class barely speak english and so i can just read straight from the book and elaborate heavily on every point and teach just as well as i would in a native class if i knew my sh..tuff. whoops, forgot to make a quiz. so in the ten minutes between class, i make a paltry test of knowledge along with twenty copies and hit the door as the bell's ringing. argh, i had also promised them they could change seats, so, as they are quizzling, i write a new seating chart on the board, playing chess with the kids current seating arrangement. sandra takes charles's pawn. berlin takes andy. evelyn to dennis2.
the class, after collecting quizzes and moving bodies, goes rather smoothly, except that i don't have a board eraser in the room. i fill up the board with elaborate drawings of medieval warfare and then can't erase to write the homework on the board. i use some scrap paper, but feel beaten.
third period is mine. mine alone. my precious. i desperately want to nap in my chair, but drama is afoot. during the second-third period break, the twenty minute one, the crazy break, something happened. my office mate, emily bond, a real light-weight, was injured. i naturally assumed that it was one of her normal injuries like being bodychecked by a kid flying out of an open doorway, or being squashed by big seventh graders in the hallway. but no, it's even more ridiculous. she was walking down the stairs to the first floor and a sizable child fell from the sky and whacked her on the back. after initial cries that the sky was falling, she figured out that a child two floors above was sliding down the railing of this switchback stairwell and overbalanced due to the heavy load on his back. after caroming off two two rails he landed on emily and then plummeted the rest of the way down, hitting the ground pretty much on his head. a dumb kid deserves dumb luck at least once. he survived and was back the next day. emily had back problems for a month. the school installed metal bars between the gaps in the stairwell to prevent further plummets - but encourage totally awesome railslides! the drama totally ruined my gnarly nappage time. i still had a wicked noggin and a bodaciously heinous pile of work to do. most un-righteous.
i did some more quick copying for fourth and hit the middle school. still raining, so i show up soaked. slip on some tiles and head up the stairs to class. this time i did Not magically grade the quizzes from the friday before. just plain forgot. i rush straight into testing vocabulary knowledge. and then on to some grammar. my kinda class, but it is not to be. the kids are restless, electric, and the material is soggy. i try to make it intristing, but my energy for the day has already been sapped. lunch is the next period and the kids sense that i am looking forward to it as much as they. i pretty much let the class devolve into whispers and other activities and give them some homework to start on for the last fifteen minutes. none of them start on it and i sit at the front looking frazzled, dreaming of cafeteria tofu.
more rain, uninspired conversation at the lunch table, an ice cream snack, and an hour break. that's how i wish it went. but instead: i eat quickly to avoid conversation and rush back to my on campus apartment to snatch a nap. i wake up with the phone ringing. that is not a pleasant sound after a small afternoon nap. it can only mean one thing. i rise and answer and run for the gate. i am late for my ride over to shangbao, the local middle school i teach once a week. that nap got outta hand! for real! if i was frazzled before, i am clearly buggin now.
and the thing about shangbao is, you don't have to necessarily prepare for class, but you have to be on your game. and i didn't bring my computer so i can't just show a movie. i spend the car ride and the time before class coming up with clever ways to use class time - which amount to nothing. my brain isn't working and all i can think about is returning to my nap to continue the dream i was drooling onto my pillow about. i walk into the class, chum for the sharks.
i stumble out eighty minutes later after hearing the tentative tapping at the door. my fellow teachers are ready to hop a cab back. i am missing large shreds of clothing and my hair is sticking up in odd places. one shoe is missing and the other is hanging on by a lace. my face must look utterly terrified, for aggalia gives me a look of concern. "you okay?" i jump headlong into the cab.
day finished. i'm sure i could add more crazy things that happened after that, but it gets unrealistic after a while. actually, though, that was a pretty good approximation of the random things and unnecessary stress that a tuesday often brought to my life. i'll stand by that. the missing shoe was a hyperbole, they only got my pants.
e
i woke up at 6:30 in the morning, not unexpectedly, to the sound of megaphonic military chants and the metered pounding of little footies. i swear they do it just to annoy me. when i came to the school, the dorm guard (now i know his name to be larry) had a handful of keys in envelopes and asked me to pick a room, any room. he must have thought that noone in their right mind would pick the card right on top. i was tired, jetlagged to be exact, and not up to the task of guessing my fate. i picked the top one and ended up with the first floor room, right on the corner facing the basketball courts; right where the morning exercises take place. oh bitter fate, thou knowest me well.
no use in going back to sleep, so i get up and futz. shower dress contacts and i'm ready to go. the air outside has a burnt-rubber stench and drops the visibility to a hundred yards. i look upward in despair, searching for any speck of blue in the sky above, but all to be found is cloud upon cloud of depression. not exactly the most optimistic city to wake up in, but i push on.
i spurt out from the front gate with a spring in my step, only to have it halted by an onslaught of noise glare drizzle. not only is today stinging my eyes, but now it is wetting my pate. i hurry past the prematurely honking machines and the prematurely spitting folks on to my blessed alley, full of its earthly delights. i almost don't even have to walk in the alley anymore, she's ready with my three baozi in a flimsy plastic bag. xiexie, buxie.
today the muck is digging into the fragile tissues in my throat, so i decide to fight fire with fire, smog with sludge, and buy a coke at the local kedi. it doesn't so much cleanse one's thirst as it does kill all bacteria in one's mouth, throat, stomach, intestines, sphincter. coke, the raw choice.
the rain is getting heavier, so i put a move on, jumping from tree to tree like a clumsy squirrel. i neglected to buy an umbrella since the first two i bought broke as soon as i left the store. when i get jaded about a certain object, it'll take me a good long time to forgive and forget and pay the 20 yuan to buy a new one. today makes me rethink that aspect of my personality.
i make it to the primary school, walk moodily past the trash bins made to hold wet umbrellas, slip a little on the tile, and head up the stairs. of course, it's a tuesday. had to be a tuesday. certainly, for the purposes of this story, yeah, it's a tuesday alright. i get to the third floor and walk into my office to prepare for first period. it's 8 am. half an hour till the pain begins. already i have a headache just thinking about it.
noone is there, thank goodness, but that doesn't stop the phone from ringing as soon as i get in the door. and it's an especially annoying ring. i heard that ms bao (director of the primary school, bigwig of our office) had her daughter's voice chanting "mommy, i love you, mommy, i love you, mommy..." ad infinitum last year, but this year it's not like that. it might even be worse. imagine the old mcdonald tune in a high register blaring tone, played over and over at high speed. and then multiply that by one year. yeah, it was a good think i wasn't packing most mornings.
i ignore it, it's not for me.
oh fudge (that's not the expletive i used, but this is a public blog) i have some copying i neglected to do. not to mention i have no idea what i'm teaching first period. or second period. or fourth. lord it's going to be a bad day. and this really has nothing to do with god or fate or poltergeists. this problem i'd gotten myself into was the product of a slow, irreversible ennui accumulated over the past couple months causing me to only do this kind of meaningless work under duress. if i can possibly be doing ANYthing else, i'll do it in lieu of actually preparing for class. i'm pretty sure i learned this from teacher's in my past, but i'm not sure if i could ever prove it.
i think while copying. wait, strike that, i think while waiting to copy. it seems that other people are having the same problem this morning. on top of all that, only one copier in the primary school is working. (man, the suspense is really building up in this story. it's too bad that this happened so often to me during the year that it stopped being exciting and tense and just got plain taxing.) yeah yeah yeah, long story short, i show up to class ten seconds late with a sheaf of papers, two books, and a class full of screech owls. i quickly throw them some dead mice to quiet them for a bit while i compose myself. dead mice = graded quizzes (i'm not sure when i had the energy to grade them, but magically, there they were)
side note: i think i'm jumping around from past to present tense at an amazing frequency during this story. apologies. when pushing the contents of eight days into one, little disruptions in the spacetime continuum are bound to happen.
it is while i am teaching for the first hour that an amazing thing happens. a camera crew enters the back of my room and starts to take pictures of me teaching. this is quite unsettling for me as a teacher, but the students are really losing it. they can't concentrate a bit. as a teacher, i'm furious, but as a performer (the real job of every teacher) i'm at carnegie hall. i start waving my hands and holding up student's classwork to explain my points. i hold up pieces of paper far longer than i ever would have to in a real class and cut poses that make me look like i know exACTly what i'm talking about. the students must be thinking a demon has taken control of my body, because they've never seen me teach like this the whole year. but really, i'm just trying to give them their shots and get them the bleep outta there. it works. and i'm spent. i get the kids to read and i take a seat, mentally preparing for the next class while still "teaching" this one.
thank goodness it's history. my worst subject, the one i'm the least qualified for, and so the one that i don't care about a bit. not that i'm not teaching, it's just that the kids in my class barely speak english and so i can just read straight from the book and elaborate heavily on every point and teach just as well as i would in a native class if i knew my sh..tuff. whoops, forgot to make a quiz. so in the ten minutes between class, i make a paltry test of knowledge along with twenty copies and hit the door as the bell's ringing. argh, i had also promised them they could change seats, so, as they are quizzling, i write a new seating chart on the board, playing chess with the kids current seating arrangement. sandra takes charles's pawn. berlin takes andy. evelyn to dennis2.
the class, after collecting quizzes and moving bodies, goes rather smoothly, except that i don't have a board eraser in the room. i fill up the board with elaborate drawings of medieval warfare and then can't erase to write the homework on the board. i use some scrap paper, but feel beaten.
third period is mine. mine alone. my precious. i desperately want to nap in my chair, but drama is afoot. during the second-third period break, the twenty minute one, the crazy break, something happened. my office mate, emily bond, a real light-weight, was injured. i naturally assumed that it was one of her normal injuries like being bodychecked by a kid flying out of an open doorway, or being squashed by big seventh graders in the hallway. but no, it's even more ridiculous. she was walking down the stairs to the first floor and a sizable child fell from the sky and whacked her on the back. after initial cries that the sky was falling, she figured out that a child two floors above was sliding down the railing of this switchback stairwell and overbalanced due to the heavy load on his back. after caroming off two two rails he landed on emily and then plummeted the rest of the way down, hitting the ground pretty much on his head. a dumb kid deserves dumb luck at least once. he survived and was back the next day. emily had back problems for a month. the school installed metal bars between the gaps in the stairwell to prevent further plummets - but encourage totally awesome railslides! the drama totally ruined my gnarly nappage time. i still had a wicked noggin and a bodaciously heinous pile of work to do. most un-righteous.
i did some more quick copying for fourth and hit the middle school. still raining, so i show up soaked. slip on some tiles and head up the stairs to class. this time i did Not magically grade the quizzes from the friday before. just plain forgot. i rush straight into testing vocabulary knowledge. and then on to some grammar. my kinda class, but it is not to be. the kids are restless, electric, and the material is soggy. i try to make it intristing, but my energy for the day has already been sapped. lunch is the next period and the kids sense that i am looking forward to it as much as they. i pretty much let the class devolve into whispers and other activities and give them some homework to start on for the last fifteen minutes. none of them start on it and i sit at the front looking frazzled, dreaming of cafeteria tofu.
more rain, uninspired conversation at the lunch table, an ice cream snack, and an hour break. that's how i wish it went. but instead: i eat quickly to avoid conversation and rush back to my on campus apartment to snatch a nap. i wake up with the phone ringing. that is not a pleasant sound after a small afternoon nap. it can only mean one thing. i rise and answer and run for the gate. i am late for my ride over to shangbao, the local middle school i teach once a week. that nap got outta hand! for real! if i was frazzled before, i am clearly buggin now.
and the thing about shangbao is, you don't have to necessarily prepare for class, but you have to be on your game. and i didn't bring my computer so i can't just show a movie. i spend the car ride and the time before class coming up with clever ways to use class time - which amount to nothing. my brain isn't working and all i can think about is returning to my nap to continue the dream i was drooling onto my pillow about. i walk into the class, chum for the sharks.
i stumble out eighty minutes later after hearing the tentative tapping at the door. my fellow teachers are ready to hop a cab back. i am missing large shreds of clothing and my hair is sticking up in odd places. one shoe is missing and the other is hanging on by a lace. my face must look utterly terrified, for aggalia gives me a look of concern. "you okay?" i jump headlong into the cab.
day finished. i'm sure i could add more crazy things that happened after that, but it gets unrealistic after a while. actually, though, that was a pretty good approximation of the random things and unnecessary stress that a tuesday often brought to my life. i'll stand by that. the missing shoe was a hyperbole, they only got my pants.
e
