::A Geek in Korea::

I’m afraid of pancakes for the first time.

Autotune the News #10 is fantastic.

This is a commercial for the Lollipop 2 phone.

It also comes in brain scarring “song” variety.

Yesterday I was trumpeting my return to productivity. I was going to sit down and plan all of my classes in detail. Syllabus! Activities! Grammar and Speaking exercises!

Yeah, none of that happened. My attempts to be productive collapsed. I have the attention span of a fruit fly now, and the more connected and wired I get, the worse it becomes..

Case in point: I discovered “Reddit is fun”. This is a dedicated site app for reddit.com. You might as well punch productivity goodbye if you start surfing Reddit on any regular basis. There is something there for almost anyone, and you can participate or just click links all day if you aren’t careful. It doesn’t matter on the mood I am in. If I want amusing pictures, there are hundreds to look at. If I want to look at something political, I can. If I am just trying to learn something new, there is subreddit for that too.  It is like a forum board that you customize with your own interests plucking the most interesting things off the web for karma points. It is like a fractal. The deeper you look, the farther down it goes. I already am on a few good news sites throughout the day, but Reddit on my phone is just going to stop me from getting anything done if I have any sort of WiFi and free time on my hands. One of the people at work got me reading that site, and now I am hooked.

Not only that, but my normal Google Reader addiction can now be checked from bed, or anywhere else for that matter. The Android phone gets a special version of that site which allows you to check it away from the computer with a minimal loss in comfort due to the screen size being reduced. Check all my news while I’m away from the computer? Yes, I do believe I will. It’s hard to describe, but I take pride in finishing approximately 150 stories (33% of which I might actually click or read through on any given day) that I would compare to taking out the trash on recycling day, or washing the dishes. It’s not going to make or break my day, but when I get it done, it’s nice while it lasts. It’ll be there tomorrow to do again, if I so choose, and if I don’t, I’ll have a hell of a lot piled up when I try to do it again.

Luckily the site isn’t fully integrated into my phone. I still have to visit a bookmark on a browser. If something was sitting on my home screen just mocking me with “Unread Stories…” like my email does when something is sitting in my inbox. I might only get a dozen emails in a week which I check and act on them to as soon as I see them, but 150 news stories spread out over the course of a day begging to be checked? Forget about any thinking. I’d be a slave to “News Inbox Zero“.

While I might whine and moan about my time, at least I can choose to check my information habits when I want to instead of being trapped in front of a computer scrolling down on some list. If I am out on a walk with my dog and I need to wait for a coffee, checking something while I have down time is better than be sitting in front of a computer trying to get through the stuff I check each day. I realize I don’t actually NEED to check all of this stuff, but I do. I need to work on my filters, my ratio of “gold to shit” is still out of whack. I’ve already made plans to limit my distractions tomorrow and go to the office to get some things done. Being away from home and being forced to sit in an office will get me out of the easily distracted habit I have with the news feeds, baby, movies, Youtube, and everything else I do that zaps my focus.

Stop me if I get this bad.

I got a “surprise!” text message and email from the children’s camp director shortly before I was supposed to teach today. This usually is a signal that disaster has struck and I’d quickly need to find a solution to put out any fires started by this abrupt change. Instead there was an improved plan for the classroom activity today! Instead of rehashing the same materials I had used in a previous class, I got to try something new. We had to make a poster to represent the class. Interesting.

Since I had the “B” class, the students needed to represent themselves somehow with the theme of the letter “B”. This is the theme I chose for their poster, as it was the only thing neutral and harmless for them to all agree upon. We started by brainstorming “B” words suitable for a poster.

The winning words were:

Bear, Bird, Book, Bee, Brain, Big, Best

I then handed out six small white boards, assigned teams, then let them prototype different designs with any words they wished to use from the list. They had to draw, write, and design everything on the white board first with their teams. Then I collected the white boards and did a secret class vote for which designs they liked the best. The top three winning designs were selected.  The teams were enlarged to include the other three teams that didn’t win, and then these larger teams had to recreate one of the three winning posters on the final poster board that would be hung up in the hallway outside to represent their class to the rest of the camp.

The winners were great! First place was a cute bear mascot that said, “B Class is Best!”. It was a group effort by six girl students that got this one colored and looking perfect. It could have been sold in a store it was so well designed. I designed the second place poster myself with the theme “B Class has BIG BRAINS!” My poster had a girl at a desk, the top of her head removed, and a giant, pulsating brain popping out of her cranium “Mars Attacks!” style. I wanted the students to use a scary font for the word bubble, but they didn’t get it done fast enough to even get it colored. The fusion between the cute and the horrific was captured very well by the artist in the group I put in charge when I went to sort out some of the other group’s problems. I took all the troublemakers into my group to keep an eye on them personally, so I didn’t get much work done with them. The other winner was made by a group of boys that was designed by students was a large mural with lots of animals that started with the letter “B” that said “We are class B animals!”.

Advice for those willing to try this some day:

Korean students get overwhelmed when you have them try to design something without a lot of hand holding at the beginning. Give them a target you expect, or show them an example before too much time passes and they get distracted.

If you don’t watch a group of boys carefully, any male stick figure they draw will inevitably have a penis dripping fluids if you give them enough time. Just don’t let them get that far, or get bored.

Girls do not like letting new people into their group if they think they are in control of every step of the progress. Be sure to delineate each student’s role perfectly so that everyone can participate at each step of the way.

Do not tolerate any sabotage of a group activity by a bored member that has bad ideas and wants to derail everyone else’s fun. Kick any student that is unhelpful and petulant about others out of any group. As soon as someone gets upset because their ideas aren’t liked by the rest of the group, give them their own paper, and tell them to work alone instead.

Secret votes help save fragile egos, but make sure students know what they are voting on.

Establish firm time limits for the design and final steps, otherwise students never get to work fast enough.

Good luck!

Keyboard Cat ultimately will have to play itself off.

“Hello, I am having a Taekwondo exhibition.”