Where's Waldo?

Where's Waldo?, originally uploaded by aniemerg.

Tournament Results

Most of the trips to the internet lately have been disrupted by corn mills or power outages so I don't have a clue how the NCAA tournament is going...or went...is it over...what month is it anyways?  The Term 1 Mini-Soccer tournament, however, ended with the Danger Sisters defeating the Lady Lions by a score of 10 to 5.  The most surprising, and annoying, upset was the Pineapples victory over the highly favored Lemons.  Surprising because the Lemons were pretty good and the Pinepples were a couple of Form 1 late-comers who didn't really know what they were doing, and annoying because I had to listen to the Lemons complain about wanting to play again for rest of the tournament. "But Sir, But Sir!" Term Exams start tomorrow.  While writing the exams I occasionally broke out in a sinister laugh so they might be a little difficult.  We'll see how it goes.

Internet Trouble

I was told there was some difficulty getting into the Weblog about a week ago.  I went to the internet cafe to check it out, but ran into some internet trouble of my own.  Every time the corn mill nearby starts up the power flickers and the computers reboot.  It usually isn't much of a problem, but on Saturday it happened around every 5 to 10 minutes.  Which is about how much time it takes for the computers to complete the booting process and to load any kind of Webpage.  On top of that the computer I was using wouldn't recognize my USB memory stick so I couldn't get any of the stuff off the net I wanted to use for class.  I did manage to find out that Illinois won their first round game so it wasn't a total loss.  I hope by now the problem has sorted itself out.

Revelation

It's not extremely profound, but I think I realized how the students see me as I pace back and forth in front of the class, blathering on about supplementary angles, wildly flailing my arms around.  I've kind of lost touch with...well, reality and what the people reading this blog might be familiar with so if you know what I am talking about explain it to the person sitting next to you in the language you are most comfortable with.  There was a Saturday Night Live sketch with Chris Kattan where he plays a teacher shouting wild and inarticulate nonsense at his students like "Zeedle do with a bap bop and a widdle and a dee."  He then completely expects them to understand and gets a little frustrated when, to the audience and to them, they understandably don't have a clue and just give him a blank stare of confusion.  He then combines it with unreadable squiggly lines on the chalkboard.  That's me.  Many of the students in Form 1 are not very experienced with English yet and I am still trying to speak slower, but think I just end up speaking louder as I see some of the more timid students cowering in the corner covering their ears.  I am currently developing a new teaching strategy to help them overcome the fear of answering when I ask a question.  It will involve poking a student with a long stick while repeating a question over and over until she gives me the answer I'm looking for.  A big bright spotlight might help by kicking up the intimidation factor a bit...or maybe I'll just give more group exercises.  I did incorporate a broom handle that was in the class one day, but I mainly just used it for pointing and as a walking stick going from group to group.  They thought it was pretty funny...and so did I, and I didn't even poke anyone with it.  Well, one or two but they were asking for it.