Here are some things from today:

School Things

• My board usage isn’t that good. I mean that I often don’t organize how things will appear on the board very well, on the spot, and I don’t tend to plan it out much. This isn’t usually a problem, since I tend only to put vital information up and tend to erase a lot as we go along. I usually don’t have to put more than a couple of sentence structures and a list of words to use with them up at one time, if that.

  But when outlining an exam for students, it’s really important to lay stuff out so it’s clear and simple. If the board looks messy by the end of the review session, they’re going to have a much more panicky feeling about things and probably do less well on the test, even.

  I would much prefer simply telling people:

  Look, we’re going to be talking about the following topics: Your Schedule; What You Did Last Weekend/Week/Night; Foods You Need to Make Certain Dishes; Your Current Favorite XYZ; Your Childhood Favorite XYZ; and Comparisons of Korean Pop Stars. We’ve practiced it all, covered it all in class, and now all you need to do is know what we covered.

  But vast numbers of my students—unquestionably a majority—aren’t paying enough attention to retain simple sentence structures even a few days after having practiced them in class, so expecting them to have practiced and maintained that knowledge for the final exam—let alone the next semester, when they proceed to a more difficult level in the program—is expecting far too much.

  Anyway, uh, yeah; board layout. I gotta work on my board layout so that when I am spoonfeeding students their preparations for exams, they don’t get all nervous and worried and fill up with unaskable (for them) questions.

• Students who don’t still put their names on their assignments after over 13 years in the school system… well, they just don’t belong in the school system.
• No, the foreigners in general can’t read the information in the all-Korean package you dropped on our desks one morning. They don’t know magically that there’s a free trip for all profs to Qingdao to get their visa paperwork done—and if you’re not even sure they don’t know whether they qualify to go on this trip, and wait to tell us about it until after even the most lacksidaisical of us has booked his flights for the summer, then you cannot expect them to change their holiday flight bookings in order to fit it in. No, our “upgrade” to professor (which involved a pay cut for many of us) doesn’t really mean that you ought to help us less with our governmental paperwork. And I hardly believe all the profs on campus buy their own ink for the laser printers you claim you’ve never supplied to anyone. I hardly believe that they don’t have assistants for things like grading and marking assignments and such.

  Oh, it would’ve been nice to explain the pension situation earlier. I mean, someone must have told the other profs in the University. Why aren’t we at all in the information loop? Oh yeah: nobody in the office speaks English. Which is a problem, when you’ve got a staff of over a dozen foreigners.

• Hmmm. I knew that girl would be trouble from almost the start. She started complaining about having to actually go to work only a week after she started. But who can blame her? Scholarship points will not earn decent work from most people.

Household Care

• When washing something that might be sharp, it is wiser to assume it will be sharp, than to think that, as it ought not to be that sharp, it won’t be.

  Because it just might be sharp enough to cut you bad.

  Ow, my thumb.