Teaching can be really rewarding, and really frustrating. I can't figure out if my extreme emotions are a result of the newness of living in an apartment with walking water (it doesn't run(if I didn't have any water, I would actually bathe more quickly, with buckets and ladles, rather than waiting for the trickle of water to get the shampoo out of my hair)) and the frustrations similar to my failure to find dental floss within a 50 mile radius, or if teaching as a profession is punctuated by extremes, kids who make you want to quit, and kids in which you can literally see the light bulbs coming on as they make connections between the strange language of English and the thoughts that they want to express. Even more rewarding for me than the language part of my teaching is the creativity and free thought that I am pushing. Only a couple of kids have shown any progress in this part of my teaching, but I expect it to take time to overcome a system of sameness, facts, repetition. I want my kids to think for themselves, without being afraid of mistakes. This is hard when in ever other subject, the kids are entrenched a "right answer" culture.
Last night I found yet another way to avoid lesson planning more than a few hours before my lessons. Shelling beans. This land populism really hits home when it takes an hour to shell 3 cups of beans. Imagine, instead of having to grow your own food, store it, prepare it, clean it, process it, you could spend that time in a specialty, and let other people who specialize in farming, shipping, storing and maybe even have a machine to shell beans do that stuff. The industrial revolution has many bad side effects, and often efficiency comes at the expense of equality, environment, diversity, and culture, but I think the overall quality of life can be raised by some amount of specialization. Obviously there are many things in life which need to stay outside the realm of efficiency. Art, sex, and cooking to start. Well, it's time to go to my English club. The only reason I stopped by the computer lab was to give my ipod a bit of electricity. I haven't found an Eastern European plugged ipod charger, perhaps because no one here can afford an ipod, and they don't need them because phones here for years have had music on them, for a fraction of ipod/iphone prices. Next time, remind me to write about double scheduling, inflation, and my lack of mail.
