I dreamed

I don’t often remember by dreams, but when I do usually they’re odd. My sister once commented that of course, I even dream science fiction stories. This isn’t one I would actually write into a story, so I’ll blog it.

I dreamed of my body strapped into a seat. The seat wasn’t connected to anything I could see, but knew I was in a craft, which was moving so quickly that it felt like I was perfectly still in it. My suit was comfortable, the room warm but not too much so. There was no music, only the whine of hidden machineries straining against nature to move the vessel to very quickly. My gear was on the other side of the room, and I was reading a book that was in my head, on a computer inside my brain, because there was no extra energy for the ship to waste carrying paper books.

I knew I was going somewhere very far, but that there would be a way to live where I was going, and that it was very peaceful and beautiful. The jump across space was coming, though, and when it came, the world fell apart. I could see and hear things from a million years ago, from the present, from the future… humans minds from all across history were like stars suddenly burning intense with feelings and thoughts and instincts, all bright as daylight in my head. It was difficult to find my own voice among the millions that had suddenly appeared. My brain ached terribly, my head felt as if it was being pushed through a hole the size of a microbolt; but then after a few moments, the jump was finished, and I was crossing space, quickly but slowing, toward a planet teeming with life…

… and I woke up.

Shocking!!!

Shocks are always sudden, and while we often learn to expect a shock or two in life, we never see them coming. That’s why they are shocking.

Some shocks are a passing thing:

I know a young woman (a student of mine here in Jeonju) who was just dumped by her boyfriend. One day he told her he loved her, and the next he said, “Forget I said that,” and dumped her. I can’t guess why he did this, but I know that the girl’s shock is a passing thing, for she is very young and very nice and is quite certain to meet other, nicer boys in her lifetime. But she was shocked by what he said and did, and I was shocked by my perspective on the situation. I am actually old enough now to see such youthful shocks as a passing thing.

Some shocks are really bad, and disturbing:

I found out something very shocking a few days ago about someone I used to know. He gave his computer to someone and when that person used the computer, they found something very shocking (in a very very bad way, like, illegal bad, and mentally-ill bad). I think this person’s life as he knows it is going to pretty much collapse and there’s nothing he can do about it, and while some part of me is sympathetic to this happening to anyone, another part of me is very harsh toward him and thinks that he shouldn’t be living in the life he is living in, considering the sickness of what was found. Supposedly. This is all hearsay of course.

Some shocks we need:

The pool at school is not very warm. Whenever I go swimming, the first minute is a shock. I try everything, from splashing a little water onto myself, to jumping right in and bracing myself against the chilliness. But every time, it’s a shock, one I just need to face if I am going to swim every day. And I am… which would shock my family who used to think (and actually told me when I left for Korea) that I would never exercise. Maybe I’ll join some of the guys who go to the campus gym, too. Yeah! I’m going to lose ten kilos by the end of the year. And I’ll be shocked in the very best way when I succeed!

Musical Weekend

Well… this weekend was busy.

Friday I mostly slept, aside from some phone calls and SMS messages. I didn’t get enough sleep, but I did sleep.

Saturday I wrote an email, which I won’t get into here but it was important for me to write it.

Saturday afternoon, I planned on reading and writing and working on my blog a little, but I got a call from Myoung Jae telling me that the band needed to meet that afternoon, if possible. He was sick and medicated on Contact, so I didn’t feel my own slightly sore throat, by then mostly better, was a good excuse to whine and ask if we couldn’t meet Sunday.

So we met, and ended up finalizing plans about our practice room and a drum kit, some gigs next week, and plans for our CD-recording project. The gist is that we’ll be practicing a lot over the next two months, trying to prepare some songs for our next CD.

So Saturday night we went to the new practice space, set up, and practiced some of our newer songs as well as developing two new songs. The new songs are still a little incomplete in our minds, bits disconnected or mistakes we still make about what comes next after this or that section, but the new tunes are looking good. One is very groovy, but with strange grooves stretched over odd numbers of beats, and three-and-a-half measure patterns, things like that. (And a very cool polyphonic section where I sing this talky thing over Myoung’s singing, and, eventually, Seong Hwan will also sing… I really hope we can get him to do it.) The other song is the Jeonju Jew, my own song, though it’s nothing like what I originally envisioned.

(It was hard for me to accept the process of letting a song become something rather different from what I’d planned. I spent a lot of time developing the lyrics, form, and melodies of the original, but because I couldn’t figure out the harmony, and for other various reasons, it turned out we’re playing a very different song. This shouldn’t bother me, and if I’d developed the song in the right way… loosely, with the band trying it out first before it became a fixed structure in my head, like a composition… then the whole change might have been less of a shock to me.

(But now, I’m feeling better about it. This is how bands come up with songs… even though my taste and Seong Hwan’s really clash sometimes, like when he suggested a certain pop-song sounding chord progression and the dark modal tune I suggested to use in its place didn’t do much for him. But I know my taste clashes with everyone else’s sometimes, too.)

After that, we (all except for Seong Hwan) ended up at the Deepin, and while Myoung and Thai and Kathleen were wise enough to leave early, I got into a long talk with someone I originally didn’t know very well, Myoung Hee… we talked a long time. It was interesting to get to know someone who everyone else seems to know, and who seems to have been around the world of the anglophones in Jeonju for a long time, and the fact she was happily buying drinks for me, and then that Min was happily giving them away, kept me at the bar much later than I should have stayed.

I woke Sunday feeling a little icky but not too bad, however. But I always wake too early because the sun comes into my room very early in the morning. OR maybe it’s the army of children chanting their cathecism? I don’t know. Anyway, I went out for lunch and then took a taxi over to the practice space. The taxi driver who took me there was kind of crazy. He had gone to Vietnam and kept telling me that, while mimicking the action of shooting a machine gun at people walking on the sidewalk. When he compared his service in Vietname to the Korean soldiers sent to Iraq this year, I asked him whether he thought it was good or bad for Korea to get involved there. He said it wss good and then mimicked the machine gun thing again. I tried not to bring it up because I wanted him to pay more attention to the road than to our conversation.

Anyway, I spent Sunday from about 2:30 until 7:00 practicing with the band, working up those new tunes and reviewing our more recent (post-CD) songs. Then Myoung gave me a ride on his scooter, and I got some groceries and broke down and bought a pizza on Myoung Jae’s earlier recommendation. It was from a pizza truck, and I had to ask the woman to not give me corn or ketchup on my pizza, but it was, as Myoung said, pretty good.

And now I am going to sleep. Good night, so long, to you and you and youuuu… ugh, I am quoting The Sound of the Music. This is a sign of something, but I don’t know what. I am scared, though. The HILLLLLLLLSSSSSSSSSSS…. ARE A-LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE…… WITH THE SOUND OF MUUUUUUUUUUUU-SIC!

ungh. sleep well, all.

In-Class Persona stuff

When I started teaching, as a teachin assistant in Montreal (which at my University meant I was the professor for a freshman class), I didn’t understand that I wasn’t quite supposed to be the same Gord in the classroom as, say, at home. I thought, look, my job is to show people how to do a job. I was teaching writing, something I was good at, and I was teaching students who were basically my own age, or only a few years younger at any rate. I felt that there was no way I could actually pull rank on them, not feasibly, as they were my age, my size… my fellow students, really.

And so I just acted like my normal self in the classroom. This was a disaster, and it lasted for a few weeks. I had students not doing their work, not handing in assignments or studying the materials they were supposed to study for class.

So finally, I gave up on being myself. I acted like a tough demanding boss. I checked that students did their homework, and if they didn’t I deducted marks directly from their final grade. When they missed class too often, and then showed up asking questions about the material missed without a good reason, I told them catching up was their responsibility and they should check with a classmate about what they missed. When they had a good reason for missing class, I told them pertinent page numbers and sent them off to find a classmate as well, but with an offer to help with any questions during my office hours.

Finally, I marked their assignments (almost all writing assignments) very carefully, with clear reasoning and explanations. Students knew exactly why their mark was a B+, a C-, or an A-/B+.

This cultivated respect and cooperation from my students. In fact, all I did was alter my behaviour to appear more like a “real professor” and in my students minds, this worked!

These days, I teach college students. It’s an interesting contrast to my previous work, in Iksan, where I taught mostly kids and older adults as well as some college-age students who were mostly eager to improve their English. My students now are taking a required class.

So I am a little tougher with them. I tell them my high expectations and, while I don’t crush them in terms of grades when they don’t meet my expectations, they also don’t mess around on me as much. When a student who by all rights should have a textbook, shows up in the third week of class without one, I send him home. When a student claims that a given language-task he’s supposed to be practicing is easy, and then he cannot actually perform the exercise at all, I laugh at him a little mockingly, as if to say, “Come on, man, if it’s easy why can’t you do it?” And then I simply tell him to practice more, and he does. Whereas with students who do their work, I am pleasant but businesslike most of the time. No mockery, for they make an honest effort and they fail to get their assigned work done they usually don’t come whining to me with the same pathetic excuse as the week previous.

Jill Carroll has written article about this, titled Constructing Your In-Class Persona, and here’s a snippet from it:

Whether you like it or not, whether you’re conscious of it or not, whether it’s intentional or not, you have an in-class persona that determines a lot of what goes on between you and your students. You might as well put some thought into yours and construct it in a way that will serve both you and your students. If you don’t construct one, what I call your “default” classroom persona will take over for you. If it works for you, consider yourself lucky. But if it doesn’t, the results can be messy.

Read the whole article here.

PS I have decided to be slightly less mocking of the guy who never tries in one of my classes, whose fists, I noticed the other day, are full of sutures and stitches. Scary sight.