Just as living abroad has changed my coffee habits (in case, you’re wondering: I have a legitimate way to blend the coconut oil into my coffee now, a happy development) and my writing habits, it has also changed my teaching.
Because I am teaching language and my classes are three-four times the size I’m used to, I have students use voice recording technology frequently so that I can listen to them using the target language both in and out of class. At first, I just had them record themselves talking outside of class, but when one of my units was on having academic conversations, I realized that I could not hear each group discussion during class. So, I’ve adjusted and have them record conversations in class as well (not all the time—don’t worry: after a decade of teaching, I’m finally starting to admit my limitations. One teacher can do only so much with the time she has been given. To try to do more is asking for a mental break-down.) One of my habits as a teacher is to either daily or weekly reflectively journal on my teaching: Did this lesson go as well as I planned? What should I change for the next unit? Students J, P, and X did not understand; what different approach could they need? (Admittedly, this is the same journal in which I record my student funnies and insults.) As much as I journal, it’s still hard to detach my thoughts from the experience. Imagine my surprise when I realized that now I get regular glimpses of life on the other side of my desk. As I was listening to a recording of one student painfully delivering each word of his introduction, a burst of laughter in the background drowned out his voice for a couple seconds. I thought, wow, that other group is having some fun, but they are probably making it harder to Student D to gather his thoughts. Then I realized which group was being so noisy: it was the group I had briefly joined. That was my laugh. Oops. The voice recordings are a wonderful fly on the wall, allowing me to hear my class from all over the room. And since the technology choice I use is also social media, I regularly find pictures of myself posted, frozen at the front of the room in various unflattering poses with inexplicable facial expressions. The captions the students post to these pictures might be flattering (and appropriate for their culture): “my beautiful teacher” “my funny foreign teacher,” “My teacher—so cute!” But I see other students in the picture unengaged; I see the awful glare on the blackboard that obliterates my writing; I see the time stamp on the post! I’m not a fan of Robert Burns (my students each year get bonus points for identifying him as my least favorite poet), but this year has certainly been a “To a Louse” moment for me as every day I get to see myself as others see me.
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I enjoy thinking, theorizing, postulating, speculating—call it what you will, I enjoy it. I know, I know, as a pastime, it’s not really one that a lot of people talk about. When your friend asks, “Hey, whatcha doing tonight?” you can’t say, “Oh, I’m gonna think.” And, certainly, it doesn’t make for interesting scrapbooks. “Here’s a picture of me thinking. Here’s another picture of me thinking.” (On a related note, it does apparently make for a good sculpture pose.)
Fortunately for me, I have friends who equally enjoy a good thought puzzle, so we can share our thoughts and call it “hanging out,” a far more socially acceptable pastime. Over a cup of coffee (or a coffee-like substance), a friend recently shared one his theories about love: if there is a short, eligible girl, a tall guy will swoop in and woo her before any of the short guys have a chance. (Perhaps, this is because the tall guy can see her over the crowd while the short guys have to fight through the crowd before they even realize she’s there.) We thought through our tall acquaintances, and with few exceptions, our tall guy friends have married significantly shorter girls. But our tall girl friends are generally with guys of equal height. Another friend in the conversation added more data that supported this theory (though this data is all self-reported, so it’s hardly the most valid, but then again, this theorizing is just for a pastime, not for a federal report). She herself is rather short, barely passing five feet, which is the height she recorded on her on-line dating profile. We scrolled through her potential matches (guys who had expressed interest in her). Only two were shorter than 5’ 9”. Most were over 6’. Some even stated on their profile pages that they were looking for a short girl. My friend who proposed this theory is, in case you haven’t guessed, short. With the weight of our data making this look more like a tall guy conspiracy, he admitted that when he sees couples like these, he wishes he could run up and kick the guy in the shins and demand to know why he couldn’t pick someone in his own height range. On my part, I’m wondering about the dating websites. Do they have an algorithm set to match the tall guys with the short girls? (Yes, I also enjoy people-watching.) |
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