A co-creative title that maximizes the thought process!

Another long, boring day here in Korea. I stayed up way to late because I had some caffiene with my dinner, so I couldn't sleep last night. Not that it wasn't productive for me. I started sketching out a new layout for this site (what is that, number 4? 5? I've lost count). Once I get some time, and feel like the new graphics (!) are up to my standards, I'll probably work on getting it up some weekend this month. Not a promise, but just a plan to keep me busy. It's gonna look alot different, no blue in the design so far (the rest of it is top secret until the rollout.

Anyway, I had one of the more dreaded aspects of teaching English to cover today. In my last class, I was somehow supposed to explain the concept of "Silent E" and it changing sounds of the vowels in front of it. In Korean, each vowel has only one sound. The concept of shifting sounds for these poor kids has to be exceedingly tough to grasp. Luckily, one of the girls could explain it better than me in Korean, and they "knew" how the rule worked without knowing why it was that way.

Becoming an English teacher has shown me how little English makes sense. Words, spelling, grammer...what logic does it have that is true? The only "rule" I know that I say "always works" with is the "U follows Q" rule. Everything else is "most of the time this is true, but you know, this English, so just go with it".Yet, here I am, teaching an illogical system to a country who's written system is VERY logical, and getting paid fairly well for it. Got to thank the dominant view that English is the language of business. Of course, business is like a language on it's own, with it's own illogical acronyms and "buzz words" that I despise.A Story involving such a business word follows:

Any fan of the movie Office Space knows about some mythical piece of paperwork called a "TPS" report. My senior year in college, I saw Office Space one of the first week of classes. I made it my educational goal for the year to find out what the hell a "TPS" report was. I decided that if I found that out, the rest of the year should be considered a success in that whatever class I discovered it in and I wouldn't have to study. I explained my quest to my roommates the first time we got together to study our respective fields at home.

Within the first minute of sitting down to study my new Management text book, fresh from spending $80 dollars at the book store, I found out what "TPS" stood for. Tracking process sheet was what it stood for as I recall, or something along those lines.... I promptly shut my book to the amazement of my roommates and said "I looks like I won't have to study this year!" and went to play video games in my room for the rest of the day.

As I remember that I hated that Management class too, because I always resented having to actually study since I had already learned what I wanted to that year, and they loved to slather on those B@!#S!$# business words to describe everything too. I was quite the master of that lingo after 3 years of it myself. Ugh. I hated that.

No wonder I didn't go join the white collar world, eh?