::A Geek in Korea::

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In my Freshman English classes today I had my first attempt at the “grade everyone’s homework in the middle of class” structure that I was attempting to do. I’ll need to revisit that idea, because it was a tad too hectic. No wasted time or anything, but my classes are simply too huge to make it work. Anyway, my activity was pretty fun, so I got that out of the way.

The first thing I did was distributed a page with 20 different pictures of different facial expressions. The students worked in small groups to describe the different expressions with as many adjectives for behavior and feelings as they knew. They worked on this for around fifteen minutes, then we got back together after I was done with checking the homework. The students then shouted out their answers, and I’d write them up on the board for everyone. I have some students that were giving an honest effort looking up everything in their pocket dictionaries possible. Their vocabulary was pretty good.

After that I followed it up by distributing all the white boards I could find in the office. I gave each group two markers and an eraser, and told them to use the expression on the paper in a scenario they invent, without any text, to tell a comic in four panels. I’ve done this exercise before with a much smaller class size. With groups, the students have to discuss the art, the story elements, and all the other things they need to finish the project. I gave them another fifteen minutes to finish that drawing, then picked up their white boards. My intention was to have each group try to guess each other’s comics and write down their answers, but we never had enough time. Instead, I just held up each of the white boards and had one of the other groups guess in front of everyone.

The students that sat for five minutes talking about what they were going to draw always did better. I might start requiring the students to plan out the comic first before I let them have a pen. The best comics were clear instantly. The most difficult comics took three or four guesses. The one I drew on the board took five tries to get exactly right. I would make them repeat each step until they got the next part right. The students would pick up the right things from the previous guess and then make their own attempt.

A few of the comics were absolutely hysterical and made everyone laugh. I think the vibe in my class so far is pretty top notch. I know last semester it was sometimes difficult to get people speaking in class. So far with my classes I haven’t had the same problems. The lure of participation points was always an option too, if I wanted to keep track of the best answers and artists. It wasn’t necessary, as everyone was working so hard.

It was an entertaining class, for sure, and people got to learn new words. It’s also hard to clean up and set up between classes. If I had classes in multiple rooms I wouldn’t have bothered with it. Carrying around all the materials requires to do this with white boards is too hard for one teacher. It was a successful experiment, but I can only do it one week per semester. What will I do next week when I need to grade something? I’ve got a week to figure that out, or decide how I’m going to be handling homework from now on. The students have the books, so I’m committed to doing something with them now.

Glow has grown tired of her mobile and her animal dolls, so my wife asked me to look at blocks. Glow went on a play date at a friends house and was very active picking up and destroying different bits of blocks, so my wife thought it would be a suitable purchase to keep her entertained.  There was no doubt. This was my chance to recommend getting her first set of Lego bricks as soon as possible. We found a nice starter set of Lego bricks for her to use with proper supervision. She and I will be making cute little houses and blocky cars by the end of the week.

Glow wasn’t the only one getting bored by her animal dolls. She’s had those things for eight months now, and besides making the occasional sound or being chewed on, they don’t do anything interesting. We’ll be able to make some new things to play with, and then Glow will be able to play Godzilla and destroy them. Later, she and I can sit around building things together. I’ve still got her giant Lego Dinosaur kit assembled, but if things get desperate we can always run across the street and pick up another few buckets to play with. That’s the great thing about being an adult with an income. You can just go out and buy more Lego bricks when you need some for whatever project demands it.

Lego bricks are my favorite toys, bar none, ever, and I don’t know if I will ever outgrow them*. My brother and I would play with them for hours on boring weekends building different things, but we never, ever ran out of things we wished we could build with a little more time or imagination. Before the Internet was invented, that’s what everyone did with their free time right? I’m sure my entire generation feels a strong nostalgia for the classic building toys, and I can’t wait to start sharing it with my own daughter.

*(I say this now, as a person that hasn’t stepped on one of those studded bricks while trying to walk to the bathroom at night and had it embed itself into my foot in a few decades. Painful foot injuries aside, I really love Lego stuff.)

I was sitting on the rock wall that is next to the bus stop waiting for the bus to arrive when an older lady approached me. She had weird teeth and a gleam in her eye that said, “I’m going to say something amusing and possibly crazy, listen to this!”

She approached me and repeated something to me, to which I did the universal, “I didn’t hear you I was listening to something with headphones” gesture. Undeterred, she waited for me to remove the headphones and said (all in Korean), “Oh, you couldn’t hear me. Let me tell you, you foreigners should be thankful to live here in Korea.”

“Uh, sure. Yes (Baffled look)? Uh….I know? (Freigning confidence). I…I am. (Confused) Why?”

“You foreigners are so lucky to live in Korea. In all your countries, you have earthquakes all the time. You could be crushed by your house in some other country!”  She makes this hand motion. A little person, then the palm of her other hand covers them. “Under their own house because of an earthquake!”

She sweeps her palm in front of her to indicate the city. “No earthquakes in Korea, are there? Look! That’s why we have such a nice country, and you should be thankful to live here.”

“Oh, okay. Uh…the bus is here…” I make the plan to get on the bus and sit far, far away from the strange lady.

She sets a pretty low bar if her only reason for wanting to live someplace is that you won’t be crushed to death by your own house in an earthquake. I had five wonderful classes today, but that was by FAR my favorite conversation.

Today the nearly final attendance sheets were available for the first time. I say “nearly final”  because we’ve finished enrollment, but “drop week” is two weeks away. The first week of class you get a random bunch of names from the computer, 20% of which never materialize with a body associated with them. The people sitting in your class fall into two camps. Upperclassmen that added the classes before anyone else and fill seats, and frantic freshman hoping to add the class by getting into the computer if any of the other freshman drop. Right now in most of my classes I have as many Freshman as total number of upperclassmen. In two weeks the dynamics of the system might be different.

I’ve collected my student’s information on a sheet for my personal record keeping*. I went through each class and put the student information sheets in student number order, then transfered their English Nickname to the nearly final attendance sheet. Two different June/Jin male/female pairs in the different classes. THREE students named “Eric” in the same class. Those sorts of naming problems were exactly why I wanted original English names, but it happened AGAIN despite my pleas. Oh well. I’ve got their names all written in pencil if they need to change it.

I color coded the student sheets and attendance sheets by colors I’ve assigned to each class on my schedule. This keeps me from losing the different classes papers, or getting confused about which class is on which day. I’ve got enough classes in the week that I’ve got to do something to have an easy visual tracking system. I’ve got special markers for each class I use to keep their papers straight. This is by far the most organized I’ve been in class. I learned this from my predecessor who did the same thing with his schedule. Just a little time coloring on a corner of a paper can speed up your memory of a class.

I used this new information today to call on students and record their participation. It was great. I was calling on everyone! Anyone that put their hand up to volunteer an answer and got it correct got bonus points. It was totally worth the effort of organizing them all later on. It was probably easier to keep track of the attendance on the enrollment sheet, but participation and homework will go on the student sheet from now on. I can instantly see the student’s prior work and figure out if they can answer a question or not, and try to put a face with a name. At the end of the semester I’ll have tons of grades to calculate and use to track the students precisely, and will remember more of them on sight. Right now I still have the energy to keep this going. Ask me in four months if all this extra work was worth it.

Even in the second week of class I can post competitive grades when less than 5% of their total grade has been calculated. I’m not going to put up grades each week, but the option exists to scare the crap out of students already about the curve in the second week of class. If I weed out a bunch of students before drop week, that means fewer quizzes for me to grade. I was pulling class grades out of thin air last semester based on half of a normal term. This is a lot better for everyone.

*Other teachers in the office asked for more personal information than I did. They even went as far as to ask for phone numbers, which is not uncommon since students rarely check email. I learned that after my class surveys. Only a few students check email daily, and most only check once a week at most. One of the student forms another professor made was asking for date of birth! In a freshman class there is a chance that some of the students are actually legally underage (under 20) for a portion of the class. Yuck, inappropriate question! What would they need to know that information for?

Feeling organized and getting all my stuff in order to make my class better is awesome. It sucks transferring grades and everything from the first week to the next, and I spent an hour or two adding grades to the student’s books for the first two classes, but now that I’ve got my system up and running I’m happy how it turned out.

I’ve spent the past week or so freaking out about my class load this semester. It’s not that it’s that much work, but it feels like a lot this early in the semester. My children’s classes thankfully got canceled, which means I have some time on the weekend to unwind if I so choose. Proper planning and regular attempts at keeping focused have given me enough time to get my work done. All I need is some quiet time alone so I can focus. If I have distractions like music playing, a baby crying, or an RSS feeder ticking away in the background, I’ll lose it for a few minutes. Once I get started on something …(starts checking my usual sites….realizes he hasn’t finished writing this blog post…what was I writing about? Oh yeah focus.)

Forgive me if I get distracted from time to time, but I did get a lot of work today. I sacrificed the entire day to work on the stuff that needed to get done for class in the next week. I scanned documents for the next three weeks of classes. I edited lots of presentation slides for clarity and accuracy. I took my preparation for my Freshman class and put it online so that I’ll eventually be able to share it with students before their examinations in a few months. That’s how far out in advance I’m trying to plan my classes these days. I’m thinking months down the line. I figured out a solution so my students can print the documents I make in class if they want them, but doesn’t force me to waste thousands of pieces of paper. I’ve moved to a digital classroom that is always available for review and for the students to use much more than ever before. I’ve got activities for a few days set up and ready to be used. I made quizzes. I planned classes. I did work today, and it was awesome.

Between all that work I walked the dog, took it to the vet, cleaned the floors, washed the dishes and cooked all my meals for the day. I got all this accomplished because my wife spent the majority of the time hanging out with her family, and she took Glow with her so I could work. Helping with the baby is fine when I’ve got a handle on my class work, but when I feel that stress of class hanging over me, I just need some time to work through it.  I’ll never get four months ahead on all the things I need to do, but if I can make it to the middle of the week I can plan again and keep ahead. As long as I get some work done in bits and pieces it isn’t that bad. At least that’s what I am trying to tell myself.

I enjoy working and getting things done to my satisfaction. I know there is a certain level I need to achieve on the things I prepare before I can feel confident in class. Usually when I walk out of a class that doesn’t go well I feel like if I had done more work to prepare I would have done better. Realistically though, after a certain point of time it’s just got to be “done” and you have to move on. If my students see that I spent time on the materials and did my best to explain them, I think I’m doing my job. That’s all I can do.

The adventures of my Orc Paladin and demented Human Invoker have continued despite not updating this blog about it for some time. Having found a strong “voice” for a character with elaborate back story and a culture involved in the rituals of their particular religious beliefs, I’ve really gotten into writing both of those characters. The DM for the play by post game I am in has put the party in a few interesting situations recently that has let me get my writing and character firmly established.

The first incident was when we ran to a fort that was about to be overrun by a bunch of undead creatures. This battle was a long time coming, as the party split into two groups and I was role playing how my characters were going to outrace and slow down the approaching army. We had to warn the fort to the danger of the oncoming army before we were eaten, while the rest of the party picked off the creatures before they approached. This was a long, slow process that got delayed because of a vacation or two, and some scheduling problems. Once we got going again, it was clear that the DM’s ambitions for the battle to take place at the fort had outstripped our willingness to control dozens of characters and have lots of battles going at once.

A clever solution was provided when the DM ran the entire battle as a giant skill challenge. He gave us bonuses whenever we rolled skills we had, but we had to justify why those skills were being used in battle with lots of undead monsters. We couldn’t just roll the best skills repeatedly. We had to use different skills, or use them in new ways, and role play how it was supposed to affect the battle. The DM had worked out different skill check numbers we had to roll to beat with the different skills. “How can I justify a History roll where I have a huge bonus in the middle of a battle while having it make sense?”

If we rolled successfully, the fort’s soldier’s succeeded using our leadership from the rolls and we had a stronger force fighting for us for the rest of the battle. If we failed, some of the soldiers would fall. If all the soldiers fell, we lost and were eaten. We could use specific skills with harder difficulty levels to raise soldiers that had fallen in the previous round, but it took multiple successes at harder rates to bring them back to battle. It was a mini-strategy game inside the battle to see who was going to be best at raising and fighting, who could keep the soldiers alive, and who could come up with different ways to use their skills to keep getting bonuses.

After that unique large scale battle, the players in the game celebrated while the DM added two more players to the party. Now there is actually a large enough party we can play table D&D again, but logistically that’d never work out anyway. My Orc character is used to getting his way in the party. He’s schizophrenic to a delightful degree, but I don’t think it discourages anyone’s play at all. The DM loves the way I’ve been using his strange cultural and religious ideas to relate to the other party members. As this character has leveled, I’ve deliberately stacked his powers and abilities to be more sacrificial and risky. He will often do damage to himself to do even larger damage to someone that stands in his way. I’m continuing to build on that theme as he gets more and more powerful, but more and more suicidal. Usually the Paladin in the party is someone that can heal and help out raising someone in a pinch. Not the way my Paladin plays. He has a voice and a logic all his own, and I love playing him for that reason.

One of the  new players told me that he was more disturbed by my Human Invoker character that has fallen in line with the demented Orc’s religious beliefs. I hadn’t thought about the image of a human eating rotting meat or ranting about how righteous a Cruel Orc God is in my mind. It seems along the way the “sidekick” character I had used as a convenient way to round out the party has grown into something worth developing too. I’m glad I’m not just building a bunch of boring stock characters in my free time.

The most recent story arc involving the Invoker was after the large battle with the undead. During the battle he had used his high Arcana skill to search for magic around that might have been influencing the battle. There was a gigantic funeral pyre erected in the fort to dispose of the undead after the battle. As a throwaway idea, I mentioned that the character was going to sit in front of the fire and watch it while he pondered the information from the battle. He also had some other related skills that let him know something funny was going on with these particular undead attacks. As he sat down to watch this fire, he had a vision. I got a personal message from the DM who wanted to share the story with only me. This isn’t unusual. The personal message is how all messages from my Orc God are delivered. It’s up to me to share the information I want to divulge to the rest of the party.

This time was different. Instead of the normal visions my character has after performing an elaborate ritual I worked out from scratch, he saw something through the flames of the fire. He was contacted by a hostile, evil God who offered him a Faustian bargain. This particular God is Orcus, The Prince of the Undead, had already made a brief appearance earlier in the campaign. He’s a real jerk. Anyway, the offer I got from Orcus was insufficiently tempting for me to take, so the Invoker just taunted him and really put Orcus in his place. It was all righteous and character driven smack talk that worked from the story’s perspective, but will probably have huge consequences for him later on. I decided to take the risk and not just reply, but make a statement as well. This is the same God that tried to have undead monster eat this character. No way he is going to hold his tongue. I can’t imagine that going out of your way to piss off the God that has a death cult and lots of influence in the world is going to bode well for this character’s long term survival strategies, but for role playing opportunities? It’s a gold mine.

Regardless, my DM sent me a follow up personal message that gave me the thumbs up for my bold response. I even got a bonus Action Point for my role playing. Heh.

I’ve taken this twist (which has yet to be revealed to anyone in the party) and added to how I want the character to act. This Invoker is going to be more bold and reckless when confronting enemies now that he believes that he’s angered a God and needs to speak for his own God all the more strongly. His first combat after the vision he dropped a huge Daily Power on some goblins, while hostile, might or might not have been a threat, simply because he wanted them to burn in a fire and roast painfully. He serves a cruel Orc god (not to be confused with Orcus), so he should start acting the part. The other players thought he was disturbing and a little strange before. He’s got a reason to be a little more weird now.

While I like my big, dumb, slightly insane Orc Paladin alot (easily my favorite character), this new twist on my Invoker is getting me pretty excited too. I enjoy telling a story with my characters a lot, and having a strong voice to bring to the play by post game is really rewarding. It’s not easy. It’s like having a second blog, but when it works I think the time is worth the effort.

I’m afraid of pancakes for the first time.