I’ve got a new article up at FasterThanTheWorld on Morrowind and the boyfriend mod.
No, not the Chaos mug.
Just something I noticed in the kitchen the other day.
2 3/4 Classroom Hours Until April Vacation
I think no matter how much you like your job, there are going to be days when you’d rather stay home and sleep off yesterday’s chardonnay and jelly beans. And remember that when I say “you”, I actually mean “me”. Today was one of those days. April vacation is next week, and I feel like this week is the last leg of a marathon. And I mean that in a slow and painful way, not an exhilarated triumph kind of way.
On my way in to work, there was an accident on the MassPike, which made me a little jittery, and also half an hour late. Being a half hour late to class is worse than being late to most other jobs. It messes up the rhythm of the class, it puts me behind in the material I planned to cover (fortunately I am so bad at timing lessons that it’s not a major setback), it makes me look really bad and it’s annoying.
When I finally got there, my students were half antsy because they thought I wouldn’t show and they could go home, and half apathetic because we only have 5 1/2 classroom hours until April vacation.
I started a round of No Yes No to try to end the monosyllabic answers. It’s usually a pretty fun game, as students start to understand the game and trick each other, but today even that was only somewhat successful. It was just an all-around boring class. Things are really bad when even the teacher’s looking at the clock and wishing it would hurry up.
I also tried to send my students on two short breaks instead of one long break, thinking that would split the class time up into smaller and more manageable sections, but that flopped because everyone wanted to visit their friends in other classes during break.
I think the worst part is that even after thinking it over (and by “thinking it over” I actually mean “dwelling on how lame my class was”), I still don’t really know what I could have done differently to make my class not so lame.
McJobs In China
According to an article translated by EastSouthWestNorth, a reporter from New Express “received a telephone call from two current university students to say that they have been working part-time at McDonald’s for more than one year and they were just making 4 RMB per hour. That is lower than the Guangzhou city requirement of 7.5 RMB per hour.” As of right now, 7.75 RMB is one dollar, so the proper minimum wage is still less than a dollar per hour.
The newspaper set up a clever undercover investigation, sending university students to apply at McDonald’s and take the below-minimum wage jobs. They used college students because the fast-food places don’t like to hire graduates, and because, as we all know, college students will do almost anything to make a little extra cash. The full description of the sting is here, but the short version is that McDonald’s is in very hot water, both for failing to pay employees Chinese minimum wage and for failing to provide contracts and laying off employees right before their ten-year tenure.
Micah Sittig points out that the newspaper is cleverly calling the McWage scandal “???”, or “Wage-gate”.
Posted in New York City
Tagged China, chinese, Chinese life, McDonalds, New York City, other blogs, telephone
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Happy Easter!
Last night, Stick and I dyed eggs (and our hands).
Look what we found!
I decided to buy an entire case of my beloved Herbal Essences conditioner… which turned out to be cheaper as discontinued merchandise than a single bottle used to be. So it’s not all bad. And by the time I finish the case, I’ll be back in China.
China
“Do you think it’s called china because it’s made in China?” Stick asked.
“Yeah, probably.” I said.
“That’s funny, because now everything is made in China.”
MySomething
I keep hearing that all the cool kids are on MySpace, so even though I think the ads/content ratio is off, here’s my profile.
Saw this today as I was leaving work
Saw this today as I was leaving work. I don’t know how I missed it before, maybe my editing skills are improving. PS I parked before I took the picture!
Going To
I went back to work yesterday, and I got to see one of Mikhail’s finest moments. Mikhail is in his seventies, he’s got a masters in engineering, and he speaks Russian and Hebrew fluently. He’s taking my English class more as a retirement hobby than anything else.
We were reviewing the future with “going to”, and my students were in pairs, asking each other a list of questions like “What are you going to do after class?” and “When are you going to have dinner?” I called on some students to share the answers they and their partners came up with it. (I was trying to make the point that only the form of “to be” changes for first person, second person, third person, so if you know the forms of be, then you’ve magically learned a new tense!)
Mikhail grinned, raised his eyebrows, and said “Tonight Mariana and I are going to go to bed at eleven o’clock.”
She blushed bright red and added “Not together!”
