The perils of being overly friendly to your students

If you think back to your school days one will likely recall teachers you couldn't stand as well as teachers who were on the friendlier side. I've tried playing the hard ass role, have enjoyed it, and was even thanked for it. But I also enjoy the friendly role. I don't think either of them are correct in any sense, it is just a style choice.

But there are some pretty strong disadvantages to being a friendly teacher. Case in point; the other day I was doing a writing class. No one likes, or wants to do, a writing class so I labeled it 'storytelling' to see who would turn up.

Pretty much nobody.

But two students did turn up (somewhat to my dismay), and we sat down to a pleasant hour of storytelling. 

I wish. See, you aren't exactly a teacher when your too friendly with the students. You are firstly, a friend, and this changes the dynamic slightly. You don't obey friends, even when the friends know what is good for you. You want to have fun with your friends and this is where the friend/teacher compromise becomes challenging. As a teacher, you want to be fun, but you also want to be obeyed[1].

 Good luck walking the tight rope.

You give the students a simple warmer ("talk about a story you remember from Childhood") and immediately the bartering begins "Can I talk about something that happened to me instead." This is the choice laid clear; do you want to be the nice teacher or the mean teacher?

"Sure" you say, thinking it makes no difference. But you are wrong; it makes a difference, for now you have set the precedence of being the kind of teacher who bends to bargaining. Neither of the two students tell a particularly good story because no one is interested in the time when you were five and you made your grandmother buy a peach you didn't really want. But what is worse is that from the teacher's point of view the warmer failed miserably, as the students didn't really focus on verbs as you hoped they would, but instead struggled for the word 'oar' and 'raft' (see my earlier post on context).

You give the student's the next assignment (where they have to write stories as a team, each writing one line at a time) and you insist that they do it as quickly as possible.

Maybe they would have listened if you were the nice teacher; but you aren't so suddnly the students morph into Gertrude fucking Stein, and every word of their story needs to be a masterpiece. What was slotted to be a 5 min assignment runs into 25 min. Frankly, I was pretty grateful that the class ended when it did. 

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[1] In fairness to all students everywhere, I am convinced that the particular problem I am here recounting was compacted by the low attendance of the class. If I had a class with even five students I was friendly with, I don’t think this problem would have occurred.

Leifang Pagoda [Photo Dump]

The Liefang Pagoda at a distance.

At some point or the other a buddy came to visit me and we ended up at the Leifang Pagoda, by West Lake. I had no idea what I would find their, but these would carved bas-reliefs are incredible, and worth the price on entry alone.

The escalator to the Pagoda... Because China
that's why.

Another shot of the pagoda

The outside of the pagoda is nicer than the
inside.

The Pagoda is rather dull inside. Except for these wood carvings. They are utterly magnificent. They are supposed to tell the myth of the white snake, a traditional Chinese story that has been told to me several times, but the telling of which was never good enough to remember.

Some flying cranes

Some people and more cranes

More cranes

Yet more cranes

A woman

If I had to take a guess, I would say a woman and her servant.

The same two, encountering a man

And suddenly someone was wounded

It gets kinda martial artsy after a while

To battle!

I secretly think the sculptor was to lazy to give them proper
legs

Monkeys were also somehow involved

The adventures of Fish Helmet and Lobster Helmet

This lady means business

The king is fleeing. Can't say I blame him

Now there is a Lobster Helmeted squad

I can't figure this one out at all

Figured out or not, I really like this shot.

An old man

But there is something Papal about him. And
he kinda reminds me of the good old
Warhammer days of my youth

Passing the baby

I don't either.

Things are better now.

The view from the top of the Pagoda was kinda nice to.

See how it all looks kinda funny in the background?
That's pollution. You're gonna hear me say that a lot

Skyline and the coast of the lake

Skyline beyond the woods

Skyline with the green of the park/lake

This is my inept attempt at an artsy shot;
"Bells against a lonely sky"

The city and... actually, I have no idea what the red building
on the hill is

The escalator as seen from the top of the
Pagoda

A temple as seen through pollution

A polluted sunset

Sun over the polluted valley

The lake and the edge of the pagoda

Lake

Lake

The complex and the skyline

Valley

Boats. I like boats

Pagoda as seen through the woods

Descriptivists failings.

I decided to take a grammar class through my job. Actually, I had no damn interest in taking a grammar class, but the class on phonology that I actually wanted to take was booked and this was a good close second. Among the first assignments for this class was a debate online where some of the students had to defend the position of descriptivism and others had to defend prescriptivism. I could have defended the merits of either position, but was assigned the descriptivist camp. Now, it is my actual opinion that the debate is as worthy as asking how many linguists can dance on the head of a pin; the question is patently absurd because all of us are going to teach the compromise position, whether we like it or not. But I happily fought for the descriptivist position, and I fought fucking well. That's a lie. I slaughtered the competition. They didn't have a prayer. And there was a reason for this, most of them had no idea what they were talking about and basing their arguments on last minute research. For me, this shit had been all I was interested for a number of lonely years (IE my twenties) when I had no friends and was repulsive to the opposite sex.
This was, proverbially, the moment I had always been waiting for.
I wiped the floor with the fuckers. I mean, they didn't stand a chance! I responded to every post, rebutted every rebuttal, and went on for days after any and everyone else stopped giving a shit. But that isn't the important thing. The important thing is that I FUCKING WON, and in doing so I made myself look erudite, and I got to cite intelligent people like John McWhorter and Willard Quine. I became a standard bearer for descriptivism at large. Fuck with that.
Well, the universe did exactly that. Fuck with my victory. See, I can't actually win anything.
Time past and I found myself teaching just some random class. Now, we of course teach classes contracted forms, and that particular day I was meant to go over 'going to' which contracts to 'gonna' or /gʌnə/ (this is phonetic transcription. Can't read it? Tough shit.) Well, I say 'I was meant to go over', but the truth of the matter was that it was an easy class that I had taught a thousand times before and frankly I was at that point on auto-pilot. I wasn't thinking about teaching, I was merely speaking a script that happened to coincide with what was being taught. And because of this, I didn't feed the students /gʌnə/, I fed them 'goina' /gɔɪnə/ , where the first sylable rhymes with 'boy'.
Suddenly, the dead that were once my students awoke, and began assaulting me with actual questions! /gɔɪnə/? I've not heard of such a thing? When do you say /gɔɪnə/? How does it differ from /gʌnə/ ?
I found myself in the odd situation of actually having to think about things! Specifically, I had to think about /gʌnə/ and /gɔɪnə/. When do I use one? When do I use the other. Well, here was the challenge to my descriptivism? I had taught students to say /gʌnə/ thousands of times, and I never bothered to ask myself whether I actually used it, or used something else in its stead. Did I say /gɔɪnə/? If so, under what circumstances? Is it an american thing? A DCMA thing? Shit I picked up somewhere off the beaten path? WHERE THE FUCK DID THIS COME FROM?
The reception from the classroom was not particularly good, either. /gɔɪnə/simply confused them. And that brings us back to good ol' descriptivism. Actual spoken forms are all well and good, but at some point one may not want to veer to far from the script, even if you really do speak in a certain way.
And just as a final kick in the pants, I was asked about the class later on in the day. "***** (my name here)" Kelly, the only colleague at work I actually like, asked me "do you really say /gɔɪnə/ ?"
"Surely do" I said, in my best Omar Little impression.

Things I like about China #2: Bus drivers.

Man, I sure do like to complain a lot. But I should at least try to balance it out just a hair by talking about some of the things I like about China.
I am a commuter cyclist here in China. And I like being one. But sometimes the weather just does not permit, and I have to take the bus to work. And the buses here are magical.
In some respects, I was ready for this. Back in early 2009 I was living in DC for a bit while I unfucked my life, and would occasionally go up to NYC to hang out with some folk I knew up there. The most affordable way to do this was via Chinabus - Chinatown to Chinatown for $30USD round trip. The lunch you got your self afterwards to settle your stomach was guaranteed to be more expensive then the trip itself. I remember this one time it began snowing right as I got on the bus. But not some kind of light snow; it really started to come fucking down. I was expecting the bus driver to get on and tell me (and the other passenger - it was 11pm on a weeknight) to get lost. Nope. The driver flicked a cigarette into the gutter, shut the door, and began driving.
Furiously.
I didn't think I was going to make it. The driver considered how the weather would effect risk, and came to the conclusion that there was no absolutely no risk of a traffic cop giving him a ticket in this weather. He upped his speed to whatever maximum the vehicle could stand and firmly planted a brick on the gas pedal. We swerved about so constantly that I began prepping goodbye text messages that I could easily send one I knew the moment had arrived. At one point banked so hard that I was convinced the bus was on only two wheels.
Good times.
That's pretty much how the buses are here, only they are stuck in gridlock traffic. It's a sight to behold, like th emix of a monster truck rally and Nascar.
I imagine that the first and only question asked if you want  to become a Chinese bus driver is "What do you think about human life?" and the only acceptable answer to this question is "Well, if I may be frank I've never actually stopped and considered it." The bus drivers here are paid to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible, and whether or not you are still healthy at the end of the process is certainly not their concern. They care only about maximizing speed while minimizing distance to point B.  They are going to speed up as urgently as possible and brake on a dime. Heavy traffic? They are going to be braking so often and so hard that you are going to unconditionally headbang, whether you like to or not. You'll be slamming into strangers, just because.
What does this mean for you, the commuter? Well, that depends. Should you be fortunate enough to be sitting down, stay seated, and don't even give that seat up for the crippled pregnant widowed elderly war veteran. If you are standing up, hang on. Always. Never stop hanging on. Move about the bus as you moved on your kindergarten jungle gym; always with a firm hand clinging to a metal bar as you swing from place to place. And god help you if it is raining when you are on the bus (and as I have mentioned, it almost always is when I am on the bus) because that floor is going to be a slippery pool, and as easy to walk on as an oil spill. This means that you should plan your exit, because the bus driver isn't killing time at bus stops. When those doors open, get off, because they are not staying open too long if the driver can help it. He's got places to be.

What did I tell you?

As a continuation from my post about terrible shirts in China, here you go. A friend of mine took this picture, and apparently this guy spoke English to consent to the picture being taken.

Tianmushan road [Photo dump]

 I managed to convince my boss to change my schedule. I asked for two things; that my schedule is as consistent as possible, and that is always the late schedule, so that I can do things in the morning. Surprisingly enough, he agreed, and I have been capitalizing on this time as much as possible. For one thing, I have started going to the gym regularly, something I have dearly missed. But more importantly, this new schedule allows me to occasionally stop and smell the roses about my day. My commute to work (which I do by bike) is about 9km almost all of that on a road called Tianmushan. A large part of that road runs along a national park called the xixi wetlands. I always wanted to stop and take a few pictures of the road I commute on. With my new schedule, I finally can.