Reprieve

For the past two weeks, I have had the luxury of staring at a glaring computer monitor with my butt firmly in place for hours on end. This may not seem like such a luxury to some of you whose entire lively hood is stuck behind the time-sucking machine and the tendinitis-inducing keyboard, and in fact at one point I thought of that scene as nothing worse than a horror scene from "Chucky" as a potential job. But for the time being I have changed my tune. Rather than the chain gang tunes plodding through my brain, I now wake up singing songs of glee. I am like a modern day Pollyanna. Every morning this week I have woken up thinking, THANK GOD I DON"T HAVE TO TEACH TODAY. The downtime for this exhausted teacher is a welcome reprieve. My raw throat appreciates the break from screaming for attention from 20 youngsters who would much rather be at home in front a computer game than listening to some strange, small-faced foreigner gab at them in a language they don't care to understand. My feet, calloused from hours of abuse from standing, jumping or stomping, are grateful for the chance to not have to support my body weight. And my sanity, my sanity most of all which has been dangling in the humid breeze at the tips of my frazzled hair. My sanity who might have leapt to it's harrowing death had it not been for this chance to lick it's wounds and replenish it's nutrients have cherished this time the most. I don't want to give you the impression that I don't like my job. I actually really love teaching. But the students we receive at the school are often less than enthusiastic, are behaviorally on the trouble side of the scale, and require buckets of energy just to maintain their deadpanned attention. I have had opportunities to teach students with interest, creativity and liveliness, and those experiences have really encouraged me on this path, but generally I find the students lack of human-ness draining. I spend so much time listening to crickets chirp and having to dance around like a clown, that when I was offered time to work on developing classes, I nearly broke glass with my shrill "yehaw!" After two weeks however, I think I will be ready to go back into a classroom. Computer screens can be quite draining as well, not to mention development. Development, that is what I have been doing in front of my brain machine. Development is probably one of my favorite aspects of teaching, when I am given proper time. It allows my creative juices to slosh around freely brewing all sorts of interesting (or crazy, depending on who you ask) concoctions. Currently, I am working on a sort of psychology class. I have spent at least a day on the brain storming aspect, and now I actually have to put into a workable structure. The trick is making it entertaining enough for a dull robot Korean students. As I was looking through the world wide web I came across a few things I thought you guys might be interested in seeing. Many of you are probably familiar with many of these, but for those of you who aren't- they are very interesting.

To see it at You tube click here, here and here.

Count the passes...

Who dunnit?

The Ballerina- which way does she turn?

I always see her turning clockwise, but occasionally I can get her to switch. Try pausing it and then starting it again. Sometimes it takes several minutes of long staring for it to work. Good luck.