the riot act

It was hard to smile today, knowing I had 1-G coming--you'll recall that last week didn't go well--but 1-J and 1-H deserve to have me treating them for who they are, and not what I have to deal with from their colleagues. 1-G's homeroom teacher told me he gave them an earful and they should behave better in the future, but I decided to continue on with my own plans. We only had 5 of the 6 targets today, but I made them stand up and said "We're going to do an exercise in communication."

So, you guys. Since the beginning, since I got here in April, I've been warning you about your behavior. It seems to me like I've treated you with respect [heads nod], and in return, you've taken my stuff, and last week you shut down the class, denying your classmates the chance to learn. So, no more warnings. Now, for you, this [motion to warning system on whiteboard] no longer exists. If you're causing problems, you're going to the Inspector. I've given you chances on chances. No more.

I almost tossed Bruno and Exequiel a minute later, but they (a) looked genuinely frightened, and (b) managed to convince me they were whispering briefly about what I'd said.

And the class got their first star of the semester! They were as good as they can be, which is still way less focused than my other classes. We'll see if it sticks. If they can keep it up--an open question, since Bruno in particular looked physically pained from the stress of controlling his behavior--I will happily throw them a party for being the most improved group.

discipline

Okay, finally somebody described discipline the way I wanted to:

Discipline is doing what we decided to do and not what we feel like doing.

Thanks, coderoom!

Spanish and directionality

Alvaro just tapped my shoe and said, "Cuanto calzas?", a mysterious utterance since I know cuanto as "how much?" and I don't know the verb calzar at all. After some negotiating, I realized he was asking my shoe size--calzado is "shoe" in Chile, and the verb calzar apparently means something like "to shoe." He is surprised that it sounds strange to me, and all I could say was that in English, we don't have a verb just to say what size shoe you wear.

I've been thinking about Spanish's different sense of direction. I've written before about the ubiquitous reflexive form ("is used," "is eaten"), which we would translate as the passive voice, but which in Spanish doesn't have the passive voice's, um, passivity. Another good example is the verb faltar, which means (among many things) "to lack," but it's often more like "to be that which is lacked." At the beginning of class, if there I people missing my inclination is to say "Faltamos alguien?": "Are we missing anybody?". However, if we're missing three people, the students say "Faltan tres": "Three are missing." If you can imagine a quality of "missingness," in Spanish it's laid on the thing that's missing.

Similarly, there's a convenience/liquor store in Vina called El Pollo Nuevo [The New Chicken] Premiado. Premiar is "to award," so premiado, the past participle, is "awarded-to." We do happen to have the English "prizewinning" to cover this, but the past participle is more natural in Spanish, and that's how we get my favorite Spanish coinage. Terremoteado: "earthquaked".

teaching videos

As promised, here are the videos Anna took of me teaching. The batteries died midway through class, so you don't get to see the spectacular body-check during the vocabulary game. Also, they were exceptionally well-behaved because Anna was there (and note how they're always getting up and moving around anyway), and I'm particularly bouncy because it's Friday and Anna's visiting.





Or play them directly at YouTube.

when I look up, I just trip over things

New Zealand had an earthquake. Here's some pics.

I've been getting my geek on by learning about discrete-event simulation. That's a fancy technical term for "making a computer model things like banks and fast-food restaurants," with independent events (customer arrivals) that take time and require limited resources (like cashiers). There's actually a large and important branch of mathematics for this, called queueing theory, but beyond me having a hard time and no interest in learning math on my own, the kinds of systems I'm interested in actually get too complicated for formal analysis. We saw all kinds of nutty stuff in Danger's backend system, for example, which (so far as I know) has too many moving parts to divulge its secrets in formal analysis. So you simulate it and see what happens, and it's faster and cheaper because you don't need 3 weeks and $8 million worth of computers.

We desperately wanted a simulation at the time, and one guy started writing one, but writing your own discrete-event simulator isn't a small project. Like so many things in software, it's not that it's hard, exactly...not simple, but mostly tedious, and a pain to get it right. Fortunately, other people have already done this, many times, and I'm playing with a thing called SimPy. It's pretty cool, and I'm not sure if it wasn't up to snuff in 2005-2006, or what. I want to use it to model something like the Danger system and see if I can produce the screwy behavior we saw, so I can think about what caused it and how to do things differently in my future projects.

Programming is unfortunately more fun than teaching, and way more fun than lesson planning. I'm trying to work on the planning anyway, though, since then I can enjoy my Sunday.

We had a lovely aikido class this afternoon. Jorge says he may add 2 more classes, in the evenings at a different location, which would be pretty awesome. It's a fun group for me to train with, because they're all really nice and Jorge studies aspects of aikido that interest me. It's also fascinating, though, because I'm far and away the most experienced student there, and it turns out that my training has been really good. Although we don't talk about it much, the standards at Aikido West are really high compared to many other places: partly because of the impossibly high level of accumulated experience in the students there, but also on purpose, so that when we go out into the world, we can acquit ourselves well and represent our teacher and our association. We've all had the experience of training with someone and thinking, "Wow, you're a second-degree black belt? Really? Because you're not very good." Aikido West intends that one of our students should never be that person.

From what people say and how they respond, it seems like they're pretty happy to have another experienced person around, someone who's maybe a bit more willing to show details of techniques than Jorge is. It seems like they're interested in how a more experienced person trains with Jorge.--he's bigger than me (about 6'1", 200lbs), and while he doesn't use any strength in throwing you, it's quite another thing for you or me, at our level, to throw him. Many of the students are smaller women, so it may be helpful to see that scrawny little me can throw him, without breaking a blood vessel with the effort. And I think Jorge likes having someone he can fling around a bit more fearlessly.

Odd side effect: despite the lack of training, I think my aikido has improved, and will continue to. Manuel (the teacher in Santiago) and Jorge both teach styles where relaxation is important, and I just don't have the physical strength and endurance I'm used to having, so I'm finding out to do things the relaxed way.

Short version of everything: I'm excited to be home, which makes it hard to focus on being present here and focusing on what's needed in each moment. Just like normal, only more so.

(The title is from Ani diFranco's excellent song "As Is": "When I look down, I miss all the good stuff / When I look up, I just trip over things.")

notes from today

I did have class with 1-A today, but only 4 kids came to school from 1-J: somehow, along with 1-G, they thought the teacher protest was today instead of next Thursday (which is also what I thought, until two days ago), so only a handful of kids came in from those classes. The poor kids who did show up had to stay the entire day, with no classes. I stayed in the room with them as a favor to Marcela, because, hey, why not, she has at least 40 classroom hours per week, and I had no plans for the afternoon, and I just started reading Siddhartha for the first time.

We did have a nice moment in 1-A. Adding to our dialogue questions, we practiced

1. What do you do for fun?

2. I like _____.

and they fill in the blank with a short list of hobbies we learned: things like tennis, soccer, video games. After some practice, I had them get up in pairs and do it from memory.

Kevin: What do you do for fun?

Ignacio: I like you.

Which was pretty awesome, not just because of their insinuations that someone else is gay--I don't know if Ignacio was being sincere, or allowing himself to be part of mocking someone else, as I often do--but because it highlighted a growing flexibility in the students' use of language. For example, I also had them do the entire 4-question dialogue:

1. What's your name?

2. My name is ______.
1. Where are you from?
2. I am from ______.
1. How old are you?
2. I am _____ years old.
1. What do you do for fun?
2. I like _____.

That's how I intended them to do it. Here's what they did:

1. Where are you from?

2. I am from _____. And you?

Somewhere in their past, they learned to respond to "How are you?" with "I am fine. And you?". And now they have suddenly generalized "And you?" to other sentences! It feels like they're actually speaking English, putting things together in a way beyond what I've taught them.

time spent with people.

Last night I finally met up again with my Chilean pal Karen (she's been sick). I met her at her workplace, but then she had to recover her house keys from a friend and we ended up back at her apartment, where there were her housemates and boyfriends/girlfriends, all university students, including Jaclyn, an exchange student from Michigan.

It was awesome. Chilean university students tend to be 4-8 years older than American college students, so they were mostly closer to my age; and they were far easier to understand than the teachers at school (I think they were speaking more clearly for Jaclyn's benefit). There was a lot of good talk about Chile and cultural differences and the manifold problems here--one girl, Cristina, is studying to be a math teacher, and the entire group has a pretty keen sense and interest in social justice.

(Interesting side note: Claudio was saying that the 90s were all about students' rights, and his generation came out of that, but the current generation has grown up immersed in its rights, but without a clear sense of its responsibilities. That certainly fits the WorldTeachers' experience of our students, but we don't have the history and cultural context to make that generalization.)

Karen and I did get some solo time to chat while retrieving french fries from the snack shop up the street, which were fantastic and exactly what the doctor ordered. I left the group at 11:30pm when they headed out to the nightclub.

Today I wound up having lunch with Joan, the math teacher who's also in charge of 1-G, whose Monday section is far and away my worst class. He's pretty cool, and also listens much better than the group of women teachers who adopted me. (They've gotten better, but still don't change their speech much to make communication easier.)

All of this makes me think I should drink cheap rum and Coke with my own age group a bit more often.