I have something on my face...

... otherwise, why would those girls be looking at me at that Zehrs?

Jorghnassen, of course, is the reason why.

We walked by an aisle going to the cash register and I looked straight at her, as she stared straight at me. She stopped talking, and the other girls continued oblivious to her silence. I was wondering if the asian (chinese probably) girls at first were long lost cousins or something because I seriously have no idea why that particular one was staring at me for much longer than a stranger would at another person. Then I realized that none of my cousins are anywhere in proximity of the Wawaloo region, and they didn't look anything like anyone else I knew.

As we loaded the things in our basket to the cash, I looked back at the girls who were still standing at the aisle, still curious at first. Now hiding behind a goddamn clipboard that she was holding, she was peeking from behind it and still chatting with her friend and staring at us. At me. Wha-?

After a few more covert confirmations that I was being stared at, I mentioned it to Jorghnassen. The ill-concealed spying from the girls was rather disturbing. By then, we were already moving away from the register, and he looked back and he thought he was actually the one being stared at. Then I got more disturbed.

Now before you think I'm becoming jealous, it was because Jorgh is teaching a course right now at the university, and the girls (or one of them anyway) are probably in his class. He says the spy-girl looks familiar, and he could probably confirm it next class.

I know I'm not always the most restrained of girlfriends in the PDA department, so I can gather that seeing your prof with a girl who *looks* like a university student (but who is probably glad she's not a university student anymore) holding his arm might look suspicious, and smacks of unethical behaviour if one thinks that student-type is in the same class as the prof is teaching. And I know that one has a right to talk to other people in public about people you happen to recognize in public.

Nonetheless, it's not polite to stare! >:(

Final Exams Loom

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:

• Balance: on a scale of 1 to 10, difficulty should be a 5 or 6, depending on the type of course. The main issue is gaging the class' abilities and the difficulty scale.


• Weighting: more time spent on a certain topic doesn't necessarily correspond to more points in that topic. Hence, the points per question will vary.


• Type of questions: either make it easy on yourself to mark (but longer to prepare) and make those choice-based questions like Multiple Choice, True/False, etc. - or make it hard on yourself to mark (but shorter to prepare) and give open questions that will require pages and pages of student chicken scratch that you will have to decipher and make some sort of logical sense with, only to give half a mark for spelling a word correctly.


• Requirements of the course (and thus, the province): if there are 50 items in the course outline that must be covered, then the exam should cover as many as possible. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to cover nearly half those points this term. :(


• Length: there's a danger that you want to cover everything in the course in the exam, in order to make all the study time worthwhile for the students. But doing so will make the exam much too long to be written in any alloted time slot. Otherwise, you'd have to ask pretty superficial questions just to get everything in. Last time, the exam was too long and I actually had to cut out two entire questions after the exam was written. :(:(


• Approval: who else but the administration will look at this exam? Actually, no one at this point. But if I had been in a larger school with more people having taught or teaching the same course, I would have to collaborate with that person to figure out what will work in the exam and what will be thrown out. Unfortunately, since I have never taught any of these courses before, it would have been better that I had someone else to consult with.

Now I can go to sleep.

P.S. School starts again on July 3rd.

Some music to soothe the beast?

... or to agonize it into suicide?!?

Don't listen to this if you really, truly intend to keep your hearing. You might think I'm kidding, but I'm serious this time.



This one is for those of you who think it is funny to deafen people around you with evil ringtones.

LOST >:(

That's it, I'm not watching it anymore. >:(

The CSS activity/project/homework assignment

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!

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Welcome to THe GReAT eSCAPe!

Follow the navigation links to view the awesomeist pictures of the show.

• The scooter!


• The Ladybug!


• The cast!


• The chainsaw strummer!

Thumbnail gallery:

News

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!

About Me

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!

Links to Great Sites

THe GReAT eSCAPe - the next big MUSICAL SENSATION

Flaxseed Cakes - the next big NUTRITIONAL SENSATION

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This has to be either the most awesome chainsaw-solo filled musical ever, or the most atrocious waste of money ever.

Long Holiday Weekend

It doesn't feel like a real long holiday weekend coming up, for some reason. In the last two weeks, our school has been tied up with AP examinations for registered students. Unfortunately, not all the schedules for every student is the same depending on what they were registered to write; so for days when there were very few students not in exams, the classes were canceled. So there has been at least one day that I did not teach any classes. Instead, I had to invigilate these 3.5 hour marathons of student BO.

Then there was that day last week when the weather warmed up to above 20 degrees, and the uncontrollable apartment heating was still ON. Jorghnassen and I were melting in the apartment, even with the windows wide open and ceiling fans tornado-ing noisily away into the night. He would check the thermostat often during those sweltering days and proclaim the temperature in approximate terms: "It's around 90 degrees." I'm no imperialist-unit type, so I will assume that means "stupid hot."

Anyway, last week I woke up at 1 pm on a day when I had class that started at 12:45 pm, completely drenched in sweat and realizing no one and nothing had bothered to wake me up. (You'd think the school would call, but by that point no one realized how messy the week's schedules were becoming.) Also, realize that this means I had to have slept through 4 alarms. I stumbled about, blindly through the heat ripples in the air looking for my cell phone that failed to wake me up through three of those alarms. I called the school to tell the secretary that I was not feeling well at all (due to the misery of the apartment heat) thus I would not be going to class, to which she kind of kept a professional phone voice and informed me that it would be taken care of (while she more or less stifled a laugh since I had told her the day before how uncomfortable the apartment was becoming).

That afternoon, we bought a fan. Canadian Tire is getting cheaper with their bonus money. >_<

It's been two weeks and I haven't seen some of these students in class for many days at a time so it doesn't feel like a holiday at all. For what else does a holiday mean to a teacher but some time to take a break from your students? (No, it never means that you don't have any work because any teacher knows that we have pooploads of corrections and preparations to do at any point in time in and out of the year. Part time work my butt.)

Canadian Quarters

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!