Category: Work

Buffalo x 8

First of all, Wikipedia has done more for me over the years than anti-fungal ointment, and depending on if you smelled my shoes when I had athlete’s foot (actually, if you were in any enclosed space with my shoes, you most likely did smell them), that’s saying an awful lot.
Secondly, it took me a good fifteen minutes to truly understand this (grammatically correct) sentence: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
I’m totally using that for a class, because in the Thai language, calling someone a buffalo is a hugely insulting and funny thing, and “buffalo” is one English word every Thai person knows. Just mentioning it in class will produce immediate and long-lasting laughter, for students of any age. So I’m afraid it might take a whole class to parse this sentence properly.
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UPDATE:
Buffalobuffalobuffalo.png

Writing exercises

While researching for an extended writing class, I stumbled upon this list of exercises at McSweeney’s: THIRTEEN WRITING PROMPTS
Sample:

“A wasp called the tarantula hawk reproduces by paralyzing tarantulas and laying its eggs into their bodies. When the larvae hatch, they devour the still living spider from the inside out. Isn’t that fucked up? Write a short story about how fucked up that is.”

That’s so fucked up.
The end.

Get a Job

HOLY CRAP!

“Want a job you can really relish? Do you have an appetite for adventure, a friendly personality and boundless enthusiasm? Do you want to become a goodwill ambassador for Oscar Mayer, helping to organize promotions and even pitch TV, radio and print media? If the answer is “Yes”, you could qualify to be an official Oscar Mayer Hotdogger. Read on for all the juicy details.
…..As an Oscar Mayer Hotdogger, you’ll gain lots of experience that may come in handy for your future career. You’ll be trained to work with professionals in the fields of consumer promotion, marketing and sales; help organize and execute events; and even help pitch TV, radio and print media. And last, but not least, you’ll learn how to operate and maintain the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile”.

HOLY CRAP!
(thx Uri)

What makes a good teacher?

This question has been bothering me since I started teaching a couple years ago. In my head I have a pretty good idea what makes a good teacher, and I can sit in on a class and immediately tell whether a teacher is effective or not, but it’s still difficult to form an answer with which I’m completely satisfied.
It was interesting to see Malcolm Gladwell’s take on this in the New Yorker: Most Likely to Succeed

Volunteering in Kalasin

20081022kalasin-volunteer0038.jpg
Last week a few of us teachers were asked to visit some classes being taught on a volunteer basis by our Business English major students out in Kalasin. We went out without much info and assumed these were classes being taught at a school. As it turned out, one of our student’s family had created an ad hoc classroom outside their house and was hosting free lessons for two weeks since schools are mostly on holiday during October. Children from their village as well as neighboring villages attended, with younger kids coming in the morning and older ones in the afternoon, perhaps 30 kids per session.
The classes were being taught by a few of our students who stayed at the house for the duration of the project.
We went and basically had a lot of fun thinking up activities on the spot… I sweat a lot as it was a really hot day, so I can honestly say that I contributed a lot of salt to my polo shirt.
Our student’s house/farm has a shrimp pond out back, so our reward for lunch was huge platters of steamed prawns, raw prawns with garlic, and epic tom yum goong with shrimp the size of mini-lobsters in it.
We also helped out with the afternoon class and took a quick trip to a popular “beach” up the road just a couple kilos, at the Lampao Dam reservoir.
All in all it was a great day, and the dedication of our students really impressed us. When asked why they were doing it, they said they didn’t want to just waste their holidays away. Well done!

Thai immigration in Mukdahan

Our university sent us foreign teachers to Mukdahan yesterday for our annual visa renewals. Until now, we had been using th immigration office in Nong Khai, but the last time we visited for 90-day notice, they told us that the Mukdahan office was becoming the top office for the Isan region and that we should go there from now on. So the seven or eight of us rode out on a bus accompanied by 26 Chinese exchange students who are studying Thai in China at various universities and are on a program here for a year. 30+ visa applicants are enough to crowd any immigration office, and it was shocking to see how understaffed the Muk office was. Everything took a long, long time. It’s unreasonable to blame the people (the underlings at least) working there because they’re as trapped by the system as we are… It was hard watching other applicants* come and wonder where to queue up because the waiting room side of the counter looked like the escape scene from The Killing Fields.
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What saved the day was my colleague finding a well-run expat cafe (expat customer, not proprietor) a couple doors down from immigration -the name of the place was Good Mook. Good coffee, pate on crispy French bread, and bottles of Beer Lao… It was a great place to relax and wait for all the students to get processed, until the tiny little immigration office closed at 4:30.
We got back to our university at around 9:00 PM. By the time I had a bowl of noodles with another colleague and went home, both wife and baby were sound asleep.
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* Some of the other applicants included one of Nam’s Japanese teachers, and my next door neighbor (who also works at Nam’s school, MSU – Mahasarakham University.)

Adventures in English Teaching

So you might have noticed that I don’t talk about my job here much, and there are several reasons for that. It’s mostly because I’ve read a lot of people blog about teaching and I personally found it less than enthralling, and that was before I was teaching. My not blogging about teaching definitely is not an indication that I don’t enjoy it… (After writing the previous passage, I realize that the only thing less enthralling than reading about English teaching on a blog is reading about why an English teacher who blogs doesn’t blog about work.)
Anyhow, today I had the hardest time figuring out what a student was trying to write about for an in-class assignment on what he had done for summer vacation. The words that caught my eyes on the page were “I went home and bred my niece.” Haha, I thought, and pointed out the mistake. He immediately corrected the sentence to “I went home and breed my niece.”
I told him to look up the word in the dictionary, which he did, and then turned quite red with embarrassment. Great, I thought, now I’ll finally figure out what he was trying to say. He corrected the sentence for the second time, and this time it said, “I went home and breeds my niece.” By this time I was feeling really quite sorry for his niece and decided to drop it altogether; I corrected his sentence to “I went home and took care of my niece.”
I’m still a bit unclear about what he was trying to say, though.
There – I’ve gone and blogged about English teaching, and the world might even be a bit better for it. Watch your nieces, though.

Lasts

Today marks the start of a series of “lasts.”
Last e-mails on the work account.
Last time staring at the patterns in the acoustic ceiling tiles.
For Christ’s sake, last goddamn morning exercises!
I am walking around the office in a haze. I watch myself shaking hands, saying goodbyes, tying up loose ends from a third person point of view. Six and one-half years is an awful long time to do the same job in a foreign country.
Over the next few weeks, time will accelerate and I will be in a rush to see old friends, catch a few new sights, and feel the rush of old, familiar feelings one last time before I go (oh, and also to move to Thailand). But it all starts here, on the last day of work. My cynical side equates this to escaping from the Yamato – fight bravely, suckers! – and it is undeniably sad to watch friends and colleagues sail off as I find a different way, but it is also the right thing to do, and it is my way.
Today, I graduate from being Salaryman.
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