Small whinge

According to the rules of the world I live in I need a little piece of paper that says I know that probably the best way to create a comfortable and encouraging learning environment is NOT to pick out students at random with as little notice as possible to answer taxing and pointless questions to which they have no answer before laughing at their answers and inviting their classmates to join me. Unfortunately said little piece of paper costs $2,400 and will consume four weeks of my life during which I will be unable to work to start earning back the ridiculous amount I just shelled out for the privlege of being let in on the prized teaching methods that characterise popular (even if slightly misguided) theories on second langauge learning in 2007. God forbid I should go out there and just start teaching people with my own methodology created from the broad reading and research I have done covering a whole range of theories and methodologies. I must be five kinds of naive to have thought that a teacher would have a say in what, and how, they teach in their own classroom. But even though it's ridiculous and even though it makes my entire (increasingly expensive) education redundant I'll probably do that stupid course and spend the $2400 because when the person who is in charge of deciding who works as an ESL teacher in their college tells you that your university education is "useless" because it teaches you to teach drawing on myriad of methodologies when she just wants someone to teach "the way we do here", what else can you do? Perhaps it is just the narrow-mindedness and exam focused tuition of private English colleges but it would appear that there is a dichotomy between what it is possible to do in the ESL teaching world and what the Applied Linguistics faculty seem to think is happening out there. Which begs the question - what am I wasting my money on?

Punnet of strawberries. $1.

$1.

It's a good day.

Plug

For some reason - probably wishful thinking - I thought it was going to be warm today. So here I am at work in my skirt and short sleeved top shivering in the air conditioning and knowing that it's only going to be colder outside. So to warm myself up I've been doing research on Cambodia. Seems like I can do my dive license over there for way cheap, the only problem being that it's quite time consuming and I'm not sure I want to spend 2 of the few days I will have there waterlogged - what if I hate it! Yeh, this post is turning into a bit of a journal entry so I'm changing the subject.

Last night I finally got around to visiting the little Thai restaurant on Goodwood Rd that my housemate recommended to me yonks ago. It was really fabulous! Small and tucked away and just comfy inside - it has a nice 'ammmmbi-ance' as my friend and I were fond of saying afterwards with ridiculously posh English accents. And it was yum. And it was cheap. $28 for two people including starters. Of course we were vego so the meals were cheaper, but even the meat dishes were cheap as. After the meal, and this was the clincher for me, they served complimentary after dinner mints! Never in my life have I seen such a thing. I have heard of after-dinner mints of course, seen them in the chocolate shelves at the supermarket, but I have never had one given to me at a restaurant and I assumed it was one of those services of the past, like pulling your chair out for you, bringing water to the table without being asked, taking your order at the table rather than making you line up like you're in a school cafeteria... Yeah, that's such bullshit, all those cafes on Rundle St where you pay through the nose and don't get any service, you have to do everything yourself, even carry your own drinks to the table!

Anyway, a big 5 star rating for the Manee Siem Thai Restaurant on Goodwood Rd. (they do takeaway!)

Hump Day

Never mind that the opposition only had four players - we won our grand final on Monday night too! Yes, I am now in possession of two inordinately green ribboned 'gold' medals. Yay. Had a couple of beers afterwards to celebrate and then headed home to catch up on some uni readings. And how lovely was the weather yesterday! Too bad I was stuck inside all day :( I did go for a walk in the evening and it was still quite lovely. Overnight there must have been quite a gale blowing though because this morning one of my tomato plants was keeled right over trying to touch the ground. Maybe he was just stretching? I'm afraid that one of the plants has carked it. For some reason he refuses to grow like the others and has a whole bunch of yellow crunchy leaves. But I guess when it's your first time growing something you gotta expect a high mortality rate - I should be glad they aren't all dead!

This morning I skipped out of my stint at the English college and did some errands instead. I found out that I can't really afford to go to Goa over Xmas. BOO. But I can afford to go to Cambodia! So that's where I'm going. I think. Nothing's final until the plane ticket's paid for. For some reason I thought that Cambodia was land-locked - it isn't and apparently has gorgeous beaches. I really enjoyed Vietnam and I think this'll be similar. Better practice my Lara Croft impersonations before I go. Actually if I can get my dive license before I go it will be heaps cheap to do some of that action over there...

These things just snowball don't they!

Solid gold

Last night on my way home from uni I spotted a chest of drawers out on the street with "give away" written on them. Yes please. I raced home and enlisted my houstemate to help me drag it back and up the stairs into my bedroom. So now I am finally no longer living out of my suitcase! It's in pretty good nick - not smelly or anything! See, that's why I didn't buy anything - because sooner or later someone on my street would have had to do a spring clean and dispose of exactly what I needed. As we were picking it up some bloke across the street called out "Hey, I wanted that!". Too slow matey. Haha!

Cue Victory Dance Music

AUTC Hot Chocolates beat Henry's Drivers 6-3 in a fast-paced high intensity grand final last night. Hehee, got a little medal on a green ribbon and everything. How cute is that! We played really well and despite letting a few through on the line we managed to keep them in check with the assistance of a ball juggling Zippy McZipster who got 4 of our 6 tries. Nice work. Considering how it felt at the start of the season when we all hated the team (well, I have't surveyed all the team members on that one, but there was definitely a lack of team enthusiasm), we did bloody well. Anyway, that's the end of the winter season and summer season starts in 4 weeks or so. Now what will I do with my evenings??

Octo-freak

It is not uncommon for the Chinese students who come to Australia to assign themselves a Western name in the interest of making it easier for all us ignorant monolingual Aussies to remember and pronounce their names. Usually they will pick something that's quite nice, and I guess it's a bit of fun for them to be able to pick a name they feel suits them as adults rather than having one arbitrarily assigned to them by their parents at birth. So in a few of my classes I have Henry, Veronica, Lucy, Gary, Jack - all Chinese. I also have an Octopus. No, I don't mean that sea creatures are now undertaking English classes in the hopes of succeeding in the capitalist Western rat race, but that some bloke from Hong Kong has decided that he wants to be known as Octopus. I could hardly control my mirth at the idea and my supervising teacher said several times, "Now, you're SURE you want me to call you Octopus?". Oh yes, quite sure. What a lunactic!

Touch update

Touch semi-final last night. We actually won. The last few weeks the women's team hasn't exactly been playing well. But this week we were on fire and won 9-0. I even scored a few times, although once I put the ball in the dead ball zone. BOO. What an idiot, but at least it was in a game where it didn't make the difference between winning and losing! Finished the game with about 3 more bruises, someone's finger marks on my leg and mud stripes up the side. We didn't have any subs and somehow I think that works out better because people work harder in some strange way. Well, the two boys who play for us (boys under 14 count as women in this comp) subbed with each other the entire game because the other team said they didn't want more than one boy on the field at a time, which is fair enough because they are pretty zippy! Too bad for them though cos they only played half as much as the rest of us. So next week is the GF for the bottom half of the ladder (that's definitely us), go Fruitcakes! Yeah, I LOVE our team name - every week the ref says to someone on our team captain, "You're a Fruitcake?" And we have to say "Yep!".

Meanwhile Thursday night mixed is going well, although it doesn't feel like it. We are in the GF too after beating the other uni team last week in an abysmal game. Games like that are just awful, where you feel like you haven't done anything and that everything is going wrong - the only reason we won was because the other team was playing just as badly. Hopefully we can step it up and knock off Henry's Drivers this week...

Drama Queens

On Friday afternoon I had a big chat with my lecturer and you know it actually helped. I've been re-writing this assignment and it's hardly making me cry with frustration at all this time! Actually, it really is a lot better going this time around so I'm feeling totally relieved. My lecturer is really helpful, clearly an incredibly busy man with fifteen things on the boil at once, but always has time for a chat but I find him a little too... effusive. On Friday I walked into his office and he's all "OH, there she is! A ray of sunshine on a long dreary afternoon, look at that!" all with his arms waving and gushing and I have to say I felt pretty uncomfortable about it all. It's not that he's creepy, or I feel 'harassed' but just that that kind of effusive, unexpected display of emotion makes me feel uncomfortable in general. You know those people for whom normal, everday expressions of surprise upon meeting randomly, or shock upon learning something unexpected are not enough, but arms and body and the whole vocal range must be employed? Too much, put it away, it makes me feel awkward. I guess because if you don't match their enthusiasm you feel like you are being a grump, or deliberately non-reactive, but if you do match their enthusiasm you are just acting a part. Anyway, in this case I chose to just nod and smile and pull up a chair and start bemoaning my lack of understanding of the topic. It's hard for anyone to be effusive about the Zone of Proximal Development. Haha!

Gee, is it really the weekend already?

As you may have guessed from the title of this blog entry, I am feeling a bit like time is just whirling by this week. On Wednesday I attended my first ever funeral. It was for my great-grandmother who died on Sunday night. She was pretty old, as you may imagine, so it wasn't sad so much as a relief I think. She was in a nursing home and in the dementia ward for the last few years. When we went to her 90th a few months ago she didn't really seem to recognise anyone, particularly not the grandkids and great-grandkids. Personally I would hate to live like that and I can't imagine she was enjoying it very much either. Sometimes I think it would be nice to just be able to forget everything, but in reality it would just mean constant confusion about everything around you. Anyway, the funeral meant that I missed work on Wednesday arvo, I had already skipped it on Monday in order to write The Dreaded Assignment, which has since been handed back and the deadline extended until this Tuesday so it can ruin yet another weekend. Thursday, yesterday, I taught an entire class at my practical placement. It was not a fabulous class. I ended up with a list about a page long of things I could have done better after the supervising teacher filled me in on how I went. My usual supervisor was away soI had a different bloke with me, and although he is lovely, he didn't have many positive things to say. Or indeed any, and I would like to believe that's not because there were none, but rather because he just didn't feel like sharing. It would have been nice to have some positive feedback too since it was my very first time taking that class and teaching adults. Hopefully when my real supervisor gets back next week she'll have some more helpful suggestions.

On Tuesday night I went to the show and did all kinds of exciting stuff. It was raining when we first got there but soon cleared up and stayed clear for the duration. Rode the Mad Mouse of course. It was CRAZY. No wonder they're shutting that thing down! I had a scream or two and left with two matching bruises just below my knees where I was slammed repeatedly at the bottom of the drops. What are they going to have at the Show next year instead of the Mad Mouse? Hopefully something with padding. Got my Freddo Frog bag which this year came with a choice of a Freddo keychain or Freddo Puzzle Mug. Go the Puzzle Mug. And get this; there were also TWO giant pencils in there with their own giant sharpener! How fantastic is that? I was pretty excited I must say and have been using the pencils to take notes at uni ever since. Might take one of them to work too. I'm nothing if not professional.

Speaking of work; I have offically reached the end of my 6 week trial. Since they are happy chappies with me and I am happy chappies with them there is only one thing to do - give me more money. OHHH yeah. I'm a bit of a fan of the amount of buckeroos rolling in at the moment because they're all going straight to the Goa Account and I am so Going to Goa at the end of the year. Just keep thinking about that and I might just make it...

Out in the cold.

Never fear! Photos of tomatoes and hairs will follow in a few days... Tonight I am going to The Show and I am Excited. Yeah. I'm going on the Ferris Wheel, I'm going on the Mad Mouse for the first and last time, I'm going to eat heaps of doughnuts, I'm going to look at fireworks (rather than be annoyed by them), I'm going to hold my nose near the animals and buy a few showbags with chocolate in them. Yeah.

Last night I had a bit of an episode. I was out the front in the road talking to a friend who was just passing by for about 10 minutes (we were distracted by the fireworks). During that time my housemate came home and left again, locking the front door behind her leaving me homeless! I had nothing on me at all and was wearing my PJs (which are luckily just trackie daks and a woolly cardie rather than anything slinky. I tried breaking into my house, and you might be pleased to hear that it's no easy feat! I gave up on that and decided to just walk to a mate's house in Unley and get some help. After ringing about 3 people to get my housemate's number I finally got on to her and she went back to ours and opened the door for me. There a few lessons to be learnt from this I think; 1. take your keys with you when you walk someone to their car, 2. leave a spare key with someone close by, and probably most importantly, 3. Commit to memory important phone numbers. The only phone number I could recall without the help of my own phone was my parents'. Not useful for this stuff. My best friend, whose number I use constantly, I had no idea what it was. Not even a faint recollection. Hmm, should probably work on that one!

But it did mean that I had a lovely 20 minute walk through the backstreets of Unley in my pjs, you don't get to do that everyday! And it also meant i got to sit in a heated room and chat about random stuff for a while when I should have been doing my assignment at home. See, procrastination is good, circumstances have conspired to allow it yet again.

Jo cuts her hair

Well how wonderful is all this weather at the moment!! Usually the start of the Show means miserable wet stuff, but it's been fantastic. My little tomato plants are flourishing so much, this weekend I had to go out and buy them some new homes. They were getting abit crowded with the four of them in one pot so I got three more pots and a bunch of soil and now they each have their own home. Apparently I am supposed to "stake" them too, so I wandered across to the parklands and found some "stakes" (aka fallen gumtree twigs) and now the tomato plants are going great guns. Probably I have committed some major gardening faux pas by using gumtree bits as stakes, probably it's going to kill my plants, but frankly I couldn't see the point of spending money on some bits of wood when I could just grab some off the ground for free. Plus, I already had to buy potting mix - which is essentially dirt, exactly what I should able able to find anywhere in even my tiny back garden - but it seems that there are plenty of different kinds of dirt and the kind that is found beneath my weed patch is not the right one. Anyway, according to the little tag that came with my toms, they will take 12 weeks to mature so now I just wait...

Friday arvo was quite pleasantly warm too and it inspired me to walk into the nearest hairdresser and spend way too much money on having someone I don't know from a bar of soap cut my hair off. It's always a gamble going to a new hairdresser, or as in my case, going to a hairdresser at all since I don't have one that is 'mine'. But I think I was lucky because she seems to have done a good job. The best part was that she didn't want to talk to me! The whole cut was done in complete silence except for when she needed to ask me something haircut related. How fantastic! I will definitely go back there. Having just decided that I was NOT going to Syders for APEC (BOOOO), I was feeling quite reckless with my pennies since anything I bought would be a saving on what I would have spent had I gone to Sydney. And just as well too - $78 later I have short hair. SEVENTY EIGHT DOLLARS. I reckon that's about twenty cents a hair because my hair is so thin. At first I was quite a fan of the new 'do, but now... I washed it and what do you know! I can't get it back the way they did it over there. And I was watching him SO carefully too - all he did was dry it a little, and rub some cream into it - why can't I do that?? Grr. Maybe I just need practice.

Meanwhile in the real world - I have assignments that need doing. This week I design a unit of work for a class. Yeah, it is as dull as it sounds. If anyone knows any good activities for teaching the present perfect continuous tense just let me know, it'd be greatly appreciated! It's seriously concerning how little I know about English grammar. To me it just seems irrelevant to language learning. I mean, we can all speak English and probably use the present perfect continuous everyday without knowing the rules of its construction - why do we suddenly need to know the names and rules for everything when we learn a second language? I guess I learnt a few grammatical rules and so on when I did Jap, but I didn't remember "OK, now this is how you make the present perfect, this is how you make the past participle", but just recognised patterns and used them myself in contexts that felt appropriate. Seemed to work. In fact, that is exactly the idea the folks who designed the English curriculum I was taught under in primary school had since that is why I grew up not knowing any grammatical rules to begin with. But whether I think I need to know this stuff or not, the fact is that the students at my prac placement, the Asian students in particular, are obsessed with knowing why??. You can't just say to them, "That's just a set phrase, there's no rule, you just have to memorise it". You can sure try though - and that's what I have to do!

Anyway - English is a stupid langauge, we all know that. Better get back to pretending to explain it to some internationals...

Friday fun in the office

Tonight I'm off to the footy! Very random I know - but a friend has organised a group of us to go and I figure it can't be too bad in a large group. Plus, what else am I going to do? Study? Haha.

Today I learnt that the photocopier can scan stuff and send it to my computer! How fun is that!

Got my placard...

Oooo, I really want to go to Sydney this weekend for the APEC-a-rama. Might get a chance to throw a rotten tomato at some world leader... Haha, or to get arrested - which could be fun? Be a shame to go my whole life without being arrested. Clearly I need to take some red paint. That's how the protesting gets done these days it seems. Of course I should just stay here and get some uni work done, but that's DULL! I just can't wait to see what goober outfit the PM dresses everyone in. Honestly, who organises this stuff?!

All cooped up

Today I spent all morning sitting in classes at the English school and all afternoon sitting in front of the computer at my real job. It sucks. How do people sit in stuffy offices all day anyway? I need a bit more fresh air than an enclosed room can provide I think. All that recycled air... I guess if I eventually end up teaching English it won't be so bad because I can (hopefully) find work someplace where I won't have to be inside all day. At least find a place with windows!

Small world

On Thursday one of my classmates told me the most amazing story. This woman is an international student from Norway and she's living in the city, Sturt St I believe. The previous Friday she had been sitting at home alone, bored, so at 10:30ish decided to go out for a walk. She walked past a pub, heard live music and went inside for a look. She had been watching the band for not 2 minutes when a bloke she didn't know approached her and started up a conversation. Hearing her accent, it wasn't long before he asked where she was from. He said, "Oh, I had a sweetheart from Norway - she was from a little town on the west coast but she went home years ago". My friend asks, "Really, what's the town called?". It's her town. It's the same tiny little village she gre up in and she KNOWS the sweetheart! How crazy! She even gave him a phone number he could catch up with her.

It doesn't end there.... they keep talking and eventually the band finishes and the singer came down to join them and the conversation turns to why my friend decided to come to Adelaide. Her dad lies in Pt Lincoln. Oh yeah, there's a few Norweigans in Pt Lincoln, what's his name then? The singer's dad has worked with her dad for years! How creepy - I know Adelaide is good at that and everyone knows everyone - but it's totally amazing that these 3 people from all over the world are connected in this tiny pub!

2 sides to everyone...

I've been photoshopping. I took a photo of myself, cut one side of my face off, flipped it to make a symmetrical Jo. The first one is the Right Jo, the second the Left Jo. It's pretty creepy I think!