Today was the first day back to class for the new year, and it’s also the start of our winter intensive classes. This means I get up extra early and teach, get some new classes, and have a completely different schedule for a month. Then in February, we mix it all up again, and then in March, we settle on the students and classes we’ll teach for the next six months or so.

I had done my morning classes. They were a mixed lot of new students, returning students, students I used to teach, and students I haven’t seen in a year. They went well enough, despite the first day problems of never having enough books, students wanting to switch classes, and an uncooperative copy machine. They got done quickly, and I had a good time seeing some old faces again.

I had been busy fighting for a new book series for one of my classes that I’ve taught for a long time now. I know the level of these kids, and the book these students were assigned wouldn’t be suitable for them. The teacher that taught it last time said it would be too hard for students two years older than the students it was assigned. I needed to come up with a replacement, so I wasted a lot of my lunch break making sure my students weren’t being forced to have a good book. I found a nearly perfect replacement, but some of my directors demands, “MORE SPEAKING, MORE WRITING, MORE EVERYTHING!” makes if tough. Anyway, the students said the book was acceptable for now after the class had finished.

Fresh off that victory, I hadn’t had time to prepare my last class well enough. My coworkers couldn’t finish one of their workbooks during the normal session, so I’m giving the students a chance to catch up and finish a book I never taught before. Before the class started, some of the students came into the office to show me their new Nintendo DS games. One of the students had a new Korean version of Metroid Prime Hunters. I told them I had the game already. They wanted to see my new game, Worms Open Warfare 2. The students said it was like “Fortress”, which is cute but insulting. Fortress lacks the depth of weapons, strategy, and skill of Worms to a very large degree. Not realizing they were in my next class, I taught them about the DS’s “Download Demo” function.

On certain games, you can send a game demo that sits on the recipients DS in ram memory. If they don’t turn their DS off, and don’t run out of power, they can keep playing the game. I wanted to show them how to play the game, unaware they would be the very same students that I would be trying to teach the very next hour. Two of the students had their systems with them, and a third had a DS but had broken it’s hinge by dropping it and left it at home. The students were so excited they could play a game the didn’t own, and would keep opening and closing the lids of their DS to see if the game was still there. Every time they’d open the system with the sound on, it was shout a wormy “Hello!”

This got rather annoying about five minutes into class. One student killed his battery half way through class and had to turn it off. The other student still had the demo on his system when he walked out the door of the school. I taught him the controls, and advised him STRONGLY about NOT picking up the Korean language version of the FIRST game in the series. I made it clear that ONLY Worms Open Warfare 2 was worth buying, and that the other Worms game was terrible. He told me I had to bring another game with a different demo the next time they have class. I’m not sure how many of my games have a “take home demo” feature. The best one I know about is probably Worms for sure. It might be limited to a few weapons, but a game of Worms rarely plays out the same way even with a limited set of weapons. Brain Age might have a demo feature too?

The other DS games I have require the sender to act as the host for a mutliplayer game. I’m not going to be doing that between any classes for sure!

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