I didn't find that I had anything important or insightful to say in the last several months besides:
Alors, the complication of having a job that necessarily requires interaction with young "vulnerable" folks means to have to get a police record check. Unfortunately, these are only valid for about 6 months after they check the records for you, and then if you're still not hired during that time it isn't so valid no more and you'll have to get yet another one.
Fortunately, my pricey 60$ Montreal PRC and 25$ Quebec City PRC back in 2006 were eventually used to procure a job in Waterloo, so those paid themselves back. The new unfortunate circumstance is that I wanted to volunteer in the local Ottawa schools to tutor mathematics under a volunteer agency (so that I can meet school principals and make connections to get into the occasional teachers list, so that I can finally get HIRED by the school board), so I needed yet another PRC from whoever.
The good news is that Ottawa police will do it for free provided you give them a letter from the volunteer agency. Done. The bad news is that I asked for it back in March, and it arrived in JUNE. Woo! Let's go tutor those kids now! >:( (In fact, it was completed in May and somehow they managed to not deliver it for yet another month.)
I feel like every single step I'm trying to take to get into the education system here is thwarted by another bureaucratic blockade that is determined to squeeze out whoever isn't favoured by nepotism and/or the virtue of being Catholic. (Did you know that to work in the catholic school board as a full time, part time, or occasional teacher, you have to be catholic? Analogous to requiring someone who cooks French food has to be French.)
Seriously messed up.
I can understand that parents and guardians want to protect their kids from hate speech, abuse, crime, disease, and other kinds of horrible things... but surely you can't protect them from information? As much as our society values knowledge and critical thinking, for some reason when it comes to just informing them on things that they will not be able to avoid when they grow up (if they grow up), there is a huge uproar over the rights of the parents to shield their children from being possibly corrupted, because they found out that blow jobs aren't a form of abstinence or that creationism isn't a science.
I can't even imagine how the hell anyone can even want to be a biology or ethics teacher like this. I always thought that teaching and education were important to everyone - yet when this kind of thing happens, even when the government backs the right for people to stay ignorant, it leaves me flabbergasted.
Also, CBC is a cesspool of idiot comments.
Before I talk about the huge party up in Quebec City after the school term ended (since I lament the fact that I came back from there probably 2 weeks too soon), I must speak of the Summer Enrichment Program(c). The school put together students mainly from Ghana in the dorms of the universities and then give them a month of workshops, trips, and other exploration activities. Tokulah put it best when I arrived back last Monday, in that it wasn't called a "summer camp," but an "enrichment program."
Thus, I was asked to give two workshops last week on "enriching" students in the wily ways of mathematics and computers. I could have done absolutely anything I wanted, but having seen the things I did with the kids during the last two years, he wanted to have them build paper polyhedra, and also to play with the computer parts that I accumulated over the last two years.
Fortunately I didn't have to do much planning, except to make sure the parts and things were all there and allow some educational lecture time. And I got paid so it was all good.
In the first workshop on Monday, I gave a short lecture on fractals (the Sierpinski triangle), and then talked about making tetrahedra. Then I had them build a Sierpinski pyramid.
I had half hoped they'd finish the whole thing by the end of the first two hours, but they seemed to have gave up steam and totally fell short by about 10 of the 64 needed. To top it off, I had made sure there were 72 photocopies (18 times 4 different colours, I'm so thoughtful) so there should have been extras of each colour, but some went missing and I had to fish out some ruined ones from the garbage can to finish the damn thing myself.
Do I have any pictures of it? Nope. It didn't hold up properly because the kids (ranging from 8 to 16 probably) didn't have any experience making paper models and so some of the tetrahedra were completely messed up. When I returned on Friday to give the computer workshop, the whole pyramid had fallen apart and I had to stick it together. It makes me sad when things are broken for a long period of time with nobody to fix them... :(
The funny thing about Monday was that I was unaware until I got there that the afternoon writing workshop had been cancelled and they wanted me to keep going with the math workshop. So I had to improvise - they spent the second two hour session making origami cubes. By that point, most of them were running on empty and they basically nodded off like the kids that you'd expect, sitting indoors in nice weather and folding paper into stupid shapes.
But the amazing thing later on Friday I discovered, that made things all the better in my perspective, was that the kids had painted some little panels during that week after the pyramid was complete - and one of them whom I had pegged as kind of ambivalent to the whole deal (which he was, actually) had painted the pyramid. Some of them had very cute paintings of their trip to Toronto, houses, flags, or whatnot, but that one kid painted the pyramid. I was touched. :)
What did they do on Friday? Massacre system units. Then I had to spend another hour after their workshop putting them back together properly.
At least it was "enriching." TO MY WALLET! :O
And thus concluded the tenure at my school. It is unfortunate that the speech was not recorded. I mean fortunate. So here I present to you the text version of my keynote speech, which according to my colleagues was pretty good. I think it could have been shorter.
My fellow teachers, the administrative team, Mr Tokulah, and the parents, siblings, relatives of, most of all, my dear students.
I am most honored by the (fairly exceptional) request by Dr. Bohez, who asked me to speak many inspiring words to you. It’s not like me, actually. I’m not a person of many words. Unless I’m teaching. Or supposed to be teaching.
But I can understand why Dr. Bohez asked me to speak to you. Who better to be up here than the teacher, who witnessed your progression as students – from the point of you being newly enrolled CIC students entering through those front doors (or hitting the doorbell to enter), up to the point you became newly admitted university students about to leave our doors? Who better to speak to you?
Yes, of course, the math teacher. The dry, unexciting, critical math teacher.
So as the dry, unexciting, critical math teacher, I’ll start all over from the basics. But this time I won’t take two hours, I promise.
When you enter school, you’re not certain of the notion that is mathematics. "It’s a scary subject to be feared because it’s hard!" You have no concept of fractions. You have no idea what to do with exponents. You don’t know what the difference is between a derivative and a determinant. All these math-y words are terrifying you as I speak, aren’t they?
You know what? It doesn’t matter. Here, it's not the point. Mathematics is not "something that is practiced until it is done perfectly right." It’s not exercises, textbooks, quizzes, tests and projects. It’s not something done. Just like English is not a subject to be done. Or sciences. Or business, history, art, music... or any subject.
You enter school because you want to experience. Not just do. Or have done to you. It’s because you haven’t come across certain experiences before, so you made the decision, for most of you from far, far, far away, to enter this school. And then you came across us: Ms. Chow, the staff at CIC, and Mr. Tokulah.
Mathematics, English, Sciences, Business, Social Sciences, and so on, are not done, they’re discovered and experienced. They are not ends in themselves - they are just means to a deep understanding, means to reach a higher level of knowledge.
You’ve now experienced Ms. Chow’s math classes.
To you, families and relatives, my dear students will tell you that my classes are hard. It’s not because I find some terrible pleasure in your disappointments, or that I do not personally like you.
It is the complete opposite. I have the utmost respect for my students. You are my lifeblood and I would do anything to guide you towards your academic success. [For some inexplicable reason my kids all applauded right here.] You make me shed in anxiety. And judging by the pile of hair around my desk, it’s a lot of anxiety.
I let you experience one thing in particular in my class, which makes it so much harder than what you had to do before; you have the potential to reason the world around you, but it has been abstracted into almost meaningless symbols like plusses, minuses, division signs, integrals, and so on. You were doing those things to bits, without any real meaning to them. Then suddenly, Ms. Chow doesn’t ask you to give her the answer to 2 + 2, she asks you to explain it. (Oh, how philosophical!)
Mathematics is not the process of doing – it is how humans reason the world. The world holds many mysteries and such beauty. It is easy to superficially appreciate the world. But it is much more rewarding to discover anew different ways to contemplate its nature.
For instance, [Here I held up a tetrahedron 5-compound figure] this is indeed quite interesting. At a quick glance, I can appreciate it visually. I’m sure you can as well. It took a long time for me to make. I hope you appreciate it.
But if I told you it is a composition of five of these [Here I held up a tetrahedron], and has a particular rotational symmetry, and each point matches up with the faces of a dodecahedron (What’s that? It’s another figure I made.) and all sorts of other things mathematical, then you have just learned to appreciate it, mathematically.
If I told you that M.C. Escher, (the man who drew all sorts of amazing mathematical pictures) made wood carvings of this shape to explore it, you just learned to appreciate it deeper artistically. If I told you that these kinds of figures were studied to no end by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, you have learned to appreciate it historically.
So now you have just experienced, in a nutshell, this figure. You’ve now experienced (again) Ms. Chow’s math class. That wasn’t scary was it? (It only gets better...!)
The world is full of these experiences. You have the choice to get by this life superficially, without considering any of the meaning behind it, or to really try to live it, experience it, and make it make sense to you.
You are about to leave our school having experienced, not having done. And you are about to enter the "real world," now having learned to experience.
It has been an honour to be speaking to you, as I will also be leaving CIC – I hate long goodbyes, but I am choosing now to announce to you that with great reluctance, I will be moving to Ottawa this summer. So I will also be taking another step forward into the unknown with you.
Regardless of where you go, you have your own way to experience the world. Here at CIC, my colleagues and I showed you some of these ways to experience. We want you to go out there and experience. And we are most hopeful that your experiences will be the most meaningful to you.
To be truthful, some experiences will be difficult, and scary, and some will be painful; but I (and everyone here gathered today) hope that the majority of these will be exciting, fulfilling, fun, beautiful, numerous and wonderful.
And that, my dears, is what I hope to have taught you – in the words of Louis Armstrong in his famous song – that it is indeed, a Wonderful World.
[Ms. Chow jams.]
I finally finished marking everything in the gigantic backlog, and it only took ... uh... more time than it should have. But it's done!!!
Jorghnassen's coming back from Ottawa tomorrow evening. He's been on the search for a condo/house, and it seems there are a few choices he's about to make his grand decision upon. :o OK, not yet, because I haven't seen any of them. Personally, I have no idea what to look for except I don't want to be pressured into overpaying for something that isn't worth it. I mean it's not like a mediocre meal at a restaurant - I can't just grin and bear it while people are sucking the money from your wallet (and weird things are happening to your intestine). Anyway we'll see. It's a bit too early to say there's any decision there yet.
I'll have more to say tomorrow after giving the KEYNOTE SPEECH at the graduation tomorrow that nobody told me I was going to be giving until last Friday. Well, you'll have to wait and see if I manage to get anyone to film it. Then we'll all point and laugh at my mediocre speaking skills. Point and laugh. Point. And. Laugh.
and I have yet another group of newbies in the school. In fact, there's been a lot of things that have changed in the school besides the newbies.
For one thing, the principal "is no longer with the school."
I don't think I have the right emoticon to express this... except maybe @_@
Needless to say, it's been a little crazy over the last two weeks at school. We've all noticed the kids getting uncharacteristically undisciplined. They're great kids, but only under the right conditions!
Jorghnassen has a really brief mention of his trip to Ottawa... and there may be more mention of this in the near future!
I hope to help promote this school next Saturday at its Open House, but it all depends what they're planning to do. At least they promised a "light lunch."
I finally submitted the final exams to the office for storage. This time around, the administration wants the exams in at least a week before the date because the other times the other teachers only had it ready and photocopied the morning of the exam, which stressed out the admin that now they mandated their request.
Actually, producing the final exam is less stressful than writing one. On the other hand, it is much, much longer than writing one. But if one were to calculate the hours for a student to study, complete exercises, and revise notes on one course, it would probably add up to more, so I won't complain about the amount of time spent over one exam.
On the other hand, the responsibilities in exam making are staggering. Not only do I have to make up all the questions (I cheated, though, and took a lot of them from the damnable textbook), make full solutions of the questions, and mark them fairly, but I consider the following:
Some of you techies out there might be wondering what the heck I am teaching in the computer science class. Well, according to the Ontario curriculum, it's supposed to be the continuation of a Java programming class... but unfortunately none of the students have ever had an introductory programming class (and the teacher doesn't remember her own introductory programming class) and some of them don't even know the difference between a programming language and a command line interface. Heck, you'd be hard pressed to ask them if they could find their computers, like today (she left it in the washroom!?).
Anyway, I thought I would make the course easier by making four units, three of which are completely non computer science-y. The first was computer hardware, which the students learned to identify and put together components of computers that I obtained around town from donations. The second unit was learning about (ugh) software types, operating systems, and ethics of computers. Unfortunately, I was not able to get a hard drive that worked well enough to install an operating system, so no Linux conversions this term. (Not that I know much about Linux anyway...)
The third unit is web page coding; I wanted to step up the difficulty of the course by requiring that they code the pages by hand using (more or less) XHTML and CSS standards. They don't like practicing anything for some reason (which is why their homework marks are terrible), so I gave them a class activity today on CSS layout. This is probably the trickiest part of CSS for me because I never, ever, ever get any CSS layout right the first time. Or the fourth time. Or ever.
They are supposed to be creating the style sheet for a given web page (for a "clueless" client - soon to be obvious). For this, I had to make a web page and some images on MSPaint. The students are meant to set up either an internal or external style sheet, edit the markup language to (almost) XHTML standards, and make a more appealing kind of layout. They are not allowed to change the content of the page.
To tell you the truth, I don't know what the crap I was thinking when I was making the page. Behold, the fast and furious times of the mysterious middle-aged playwright/actor!
Follow the navigation links to view the awesomeist pictures of the show.
Thumbnail gallery:
May 18, 2007 - The lead girl has called in sick - she says she probably has bronchitis (maybe her swimsuit is a bit too light for the show; I might have to cut back on the snow machine use). Now Little Tom will have to play dual roles, as our stand-ins are unfortunately unable to come due to their parents' anger that I have been taking them out of school. It's not my fault they were skipping middle school that day I recruited them; I thought they were just college kids "down and out of luck."
May 13, 2007 - Due to insufficient funding from a small audience this weekend, I've had to close the show for the weekday runs. I'm going to wait until the weekends to put on the show, at least until we get more reviews.
May 11, 2007 - The show has started playing at the Old Barn Theater downtown, and we've had rave reviews from the local hot dog stand!
This is the most exciting show presented here since Hair came and went back in '79! Of course, I don't know if any other shows have been on since then.
-Pete, the Weinermobile
May 8, 2007 - LOTS of tickets left! Great seats! Get them while you can!
May 1, 2007 - I've found the GReAT VeNUe! The Old Barn Theater was slated to be demolished this week, but with my savings, I managed to procure it for the show. It'll be our permanent venue, at least until we get more reviews then maybe we can start touring around the country.
April 3, 2007 - We're still looking for a new director to replace the one who decided to quit on us a week into the practice sessions. It seems the previous director wanted to change the script around, since it was "unbelievably stupid" but I wouldn't hear of it! It's perfect the way it is, and I don't care if we have to scour the whole town for another person who will direct this the way the original script intended it to be. On the other hand, we have a great cast! For a PRevIeW of them in costume, click here.
March 30, 2007 - This week was great! Someone just came up to me on the street and asked if I had a something for a person "totally down and out of luck" and I just happened to have the job position of director for my awesomeist musical! We'll be seeing each other within the week.
March 19, 2007 - After a week of searching and chatting online, I found a couple of people online who are interested in my idea. Next stop, the photocopy place!
March 12, 2007 - I have this great idea for a musical production. So last night at 3 a.m. I scribbled this whole script out and it's called "THe GReAT eSCAPe." It'll have everything, including this awesome scooter that I just bought last week. I love that scooter!
I'm a 45 year old guy who decided to change my life around after having spent 20 years in the retail industry, selling flaxseed cakes on the streetside downtown. You might have seen me next to Pete and the Weinermobile. I wrote the script and I star in the next sensational musical production, THe GReAT eSCAPe!
THe GReAT eSCAPe - the next big MUSICAL SENSATION
Flaxseed Cakes - the next big NUTRITIONAL SENSATION
This morning's algebra midterm invigilating involved a coin falling from the sky. Or I don't know where. At one point, a student seemed to have picked it up from the ground while doing his exam, and it was left on the table after the exam. I thought, "Wow, this kid doesn't even bat an eye for a CA quarter..." (This is the miser in me.) Anyway, I left it on the invigilator's table (since I am too honest a bum to swipe money from my students, who probably have more sitting in their bank accounts than my pile of leftover student loans). At least it gave the other two invigilators some topic to focus on while mindlessly watching their students this afternoon. "Oh, look, it's the New Brunswick quarter."
Then this article got me thinking: SPY COINS. Oh no, I've got new cheating techniques to brush up on!
Isosceles Triangle Property: This is a triangle that has 4 sides and all the sides are equal and 2 opposite sides are equal and the sum of all the angles is equal to 135.
The roads are littered with sad hairy flattened corpses of unrecognizable animals, now that spring pounced upon the region. It started as soon as the ice and snow started melting, some weeks ago, after some sudden snow storms and sudden sweltering sunny days. It all resulted in the now five or six new splotches per day, covering the asphalt like mini misplaced rugs. I have to drive by them twice a day; the morning, when they mysteriously appear as fresh bloody mounds, and in the afternoon, when they are no longer mounds but pancakes.
Arriving at school, I have to check the underside of the Rav4 to make sure there are no crazy stains or small animals lodged in or under fender and bumper. It only makes sense that there are so many little buggers killed per day - this is farmer country, indeed. But to have so many of them pop up in a semi-urbanized area like Waterloo is astounding; I don't even have to go out to the farmlands to note the appearance of fuzzy wuzzy's cuzzy and friends, 2D in the middle of the street. Although the appearance of the fox last year did raise our suspicion that this "city" is not all that city-like.
Speaking of roadkill... the calculus class is wrapping up tomorrow with the final exam bright and early on Saturday morning. I am fortunate that I only have a mid-sized pile of final exams to mark, input into the gigantic spreadsheet file and send the marks by email to the school before Tuesday. Dear readers must have noted that I have been particularly busy in the last three months, playing BG and BG2, oversleeping, making crafts, hiding out in ultimately sad, sad malls, eating and writing about it, and generally whining.
Actually, besides not jogging, it's not much different from when I was mulling about unemployed. So, no, I don't have an excuse for not blogging.
The result of all this is that I am finally allotted a week off, after 12 weeks nonstop of "working." :)
Though it doesn't change the fact that I still have to avoid driving over lumps of flattened fur on the road. :(
I spent all night and part of the wee hours preparing the final exam for submission to the administration this morning. Felix could attest to that, having helped me cobble together one last question that I had taken two hours to think about. Fortunately I had been working on the outline for the final exam this weekend, so I didn't need to check how to split up the marks. But it is not enough to simply make the questions before submission; one must do the entire exam and write up full solutions to them. I gave up at around 4 am and went to bed...
... only to wake up as Jorgh was frantically pulling at my covers telling me it was 8:30 a.m. (And I normally arrive at school at 8. Because classes start at 8:30.)
After sheepishly calling the school to tell the secretary that I would arrive at 9, I bumbled about looking for work attire. The only thing my sleep deprived brain did tell me was to put on my suit jacket, but I only managed to find a summer tank to put on underneath.
Someone forgot to turn on the heat in my classroom again (as usual) so I spent the remaining time freezing with a tank top and jacket. At least it helped keep me awake while I was trying to make coherent sentences. I think there was at least one instance of uttering something like "thingy," when I explicitly told them never to do that themselves. (Their language skills are much better than mine, however, though their logic processes are completely baffling.)
Not the first "???" fan pic that I have come across while teaching, but I thought I would show this to you for the hell of it. I just found it on the back of one of the quizzes I am marking, and yes I am giving it back to the student with the comment.
Some of them still don't know my name, despite it being displayed continuously on the blackboard.
I have been ultimately busy doing a number of things in the last two weeks:
I wish you all very happy holidays this season, and hope you are spending time with your loved ones and enjoying your time together, despite the less-than-white weather on the east side of the country and pretty awful dumps the west was blessed with.
To my relief, I secured a part-time job teaching math at a private high school outside of Waterloo, with Jorghnassen's help, starting in early January. The details of the job are still lacking, but the major detail in my quest for sanity has been more or less fulfilled. On the other hand, it caused a much bigger "deal" than it fixed: zero public transit and a 20 km commute.
I had thought of every single possible way I could get there on a regular basis.
Carpooling would be the most obvious one (and most feasible) if only I had asked the principal when he offered me the job; but I was only given his cell number and it apparently costs a crapton for him to use it for incoming calls... thus I am still rather reluctant on calling him through that number again. (And I know what you are going to say, so don't say it and stop saying it!)
Someone suggested getting a bike; cheap and ideal, but I loathe to find out what kind of physical shape I am in right now. Last summer, it took me 2 hours to travel 20+ km uphill, and 1 hour to roll it downhill.
Car sharing is great, but would run up quite a bill for daily commuting, compared to the final option:
Buying a car.
(The absolutely, unquestionably retarded option my mum demanded from me, despite it not being her decision, was that I take a cab every single day until I "matured" enough to know enough about cars to get one, which would take at least a year, and even then she told me I was "too stupid" to own a car. I won't even begin on ranting on the stupidity of this.)
I thought of buying a scooter or car as the absolute last option (barring the above), as I know probably less about scooters and cars than anyone I know, and I have the most overbearing, insane family of anyone I know. Fortunately, as I am the most inept of all my acquaintances, I have the option of asking advice from everyone else. And here are a few nuggets!
Rachel's brother, Pat, who had accompanied us to Bwawston, works with and studies in cars, and has a classmate who could probably locate a suitable used auto. He also offered to service it in his school. This would be in Montreal.
Ian has prevoiusly advised me to buy in Ontario, as the transfer between provinces would cost more than it was worth, but as I was uncertain whether I had time to do that before the job started, I opted for the former.
Shhh! told me that car dealerships would take care of everything in a pretty timely manner, and that it was well worth it for him.
Davy said to look into cheap enough cars within $3000 (if I could only think the costs would end at $3000 :( ).
And alas, I know naught about scooters except deep-voiced Eugene has one that he commutes with in Ottawa to the bus station. Though scooters seem quite cute. :)
An evening spent at the QPAT convention managed to mangle my healing(?) voice box some more, not to mention develop into coughing spasms that prompted one woman in a 5 person audience to essentially tell me to leave the room. So I decided to forgo the rest of the convention today by inadvertently sleeping in and figuring out what to do for the next few days in Montreal as I have little voice left and a cough threatening to invert my respiratory tract. I had planned to crawl to Waterloo this weekend but Jorgh told me to get better beforehand (as everyone knows that travel + sickness = :(^:( ).
It costed $25 to register for the convention, more or less returned by various samples and things at the exhibitors' booths and the keynote speaker, Stephen Lewis. (The Crayola table and the Sunkist/CHOCOLATESAMPLING table, although popular, don't quite make up $25 on their own.) On the other hand, I felt that the talks I attended weren't as informative as I had initially hoped, which contributed to dissuading me from going to more talks today. I also didn't want to get told off again for coughing up my lungs during another talk.
I was expecting to see a few teachers I recognized, which I did (including Erik), while I was quite surprised to come across my Teaching Mathematics (university course) teacher at the QAMT table. It was surprising not because I remembered his face (but once again, not the name), but that he remembered me. (Though I guess he also cheated and saw my nametag.)
The weirdest thing was arriving at the EMSB table and being told to call them today to tell them I was available to work. Weird because: 1) I could barely talk in the first place and they said they would get back to me if I couldn't call them, and 2) then receiving a call this morning asking me to interview for a substitution card(???) even though I could barely talk on the phone. I pretty much told them I'd have to postpone it until I got better.
The highlight of the evening was indeed, Stephen Lewis. His passioned speech about the work with children he did throughout the years in Africa and elsewhere, was enough to emotionally move all the teachers in the room to physically herd towards him at the end of his talk, bombard the tables selling his book and mob his lineup to sign the book. I had the displeasure of having imbibed too much water (from coughing so violently in the previous talk) and darting out to the washroom in the middle of this inspiring speech. It would have been less embarrassing if I hadn't chosen to sit in the fifth row up front, but infinitely more embarrassing if it had been right in the middle of the row.
Alas, I would have liked to attend more talks today and hang around the exhibitors' stalls, but I think I had enough for now. It's been 5 years since I started wanting to go to one of these conventions and now I have finally arrived, but I guess it has been overshadowed by the depressing lack of employment and being sick sick sick sick sick.
Not two days after my attempt at making caramel popcorn did my mum bring home a bag from Kernels. It seems an acquaintance at the mall who works there brought her the bag in exchange for sushi. And now I know why they call it Kernels - every other bite has a rock-hard pellet in it.
Oh, I know exactly how he feels.
And I think this cover letter is absolutely on-the-spot great. :p
