::A Geek in Korea::

Basically everyone and their mother knows about the launch of Grand Theft Auto 4 by Rockstar. It’s been getting rave reviews, and the message boards are all a buzz about how awesome it is. I’m a casual fan from the first game in the series, but I haven’t played most of the recent installments. I enjoy the games, but I find them violent, but really pretty fun in a juvenille sort of way. The way Rockstar manipulates the press to get free exposure is shameless, and they push the borders of taste simply because they know it will get the most free advertising possible.

Since I don’t own an Xbox 360 (30% RRoD failure rate? Intolerable.), or a Playstation3 (Way too expensive), I won’t be able to play the game without visiting a game room. Of course, the problem is that South Korea has banned the last few versions of Grand Theft Auto, and other Rockstar games, from import.

There are some games in the past that used conflicts on the Korean pennisula as parts of the plot that got banned for cultural insensitivity, and potential bad relations with North Korea. These have been lifted recently. However, the Rockstar bans are due to violence and cruelty.

It’s hard for me to accept censorship in any form. I passionately believe that people have the right to produce art to express themselves, and that it is only in the most extreme cases where the government should place any limits on those rights (Yelling “Fire” in a crowded area, etc). To me, a video game like Grand Theft Auto doesn’t pass the test to qualify for banning. It has enough merits as a game that it should be allowed.

The Manhunt ban I’m more apathetic about. The recent second game in the series got an Adults Only rating, then was pared down for release on consoles. I haven’t personally played it, but that game seems more about shock value than actual game play. The reviews pegged it as a mediocre to poor game, with lots of over the top violence that was designed to stoke controversy and sell games. How much game does there need to before I need to defend it? I’m not sure, but Manhunt was panned by everyone. Make a better game, then I’ll care.

If ratings were enforced for games like they are for movies, Grand Theft Auto would be a “Hard R”, while Manhunt would be a NC-17. If people actually followed the reviews and content warnings, no children should be exposed to content unsuitable for them. I don’t think letting children watch violent, gory movies is okay, so I also don’t think they should play very violent games. Should young children play Grand Theft Auto? Absolutely not. Should parents be allowed to? Sure.

Banning content and removing choice for adults is bad. If I want to see something with violence and sex, I can, but I can also choose to walk out and tell people NOT to see that piece of entertainment. I’m not going to protest the theater for showing the film, even if it wasn’t my sort of movie. I don’t think anyone is getting hurt by the release of a video game, so I think if people want to play it, they should. GTA4 might not be for everyone, but why is that the government’s decision?

Since my game room can’t import the game en masse if the ban stays in effect, the likelihood I can play it is very slim. The multiplayer aspects of the game look like a lot of fun, so it’s a shame I wouldn’t get to play it with friends.

peech contests are the bane of students and teachers alike. The topics the students discuss are supposed to be written by the students themselves. Of course, all the journals are graded by the teachers prior to the speech, and I’ve had the hand in personally writing some of them with the students. We went through two or three iterations of the speeches before the students got up to speak today.

We graded them on a sliding scale with nearly everything involved in making a speech included. From the point where they got up, to the point they were sitting down, we had to constantly monitor their speaking ability.

All the students need to do is memorize the speech, show up, and say the lines in front of their peers. Some of the students would memorize their own speeches exactly. A few students would paraphrase something we prepared together, and others would walk up, tell us their names, and sit back down.All of this was noted by five independent evaluators, and we will combine our scores and average them for a grand total to give rewards for the best speakers.

After the speech had ended and the students sat back down, we called them back up one by one to see if they could withstand the “Interview session” in response to their speech. The students had to quickly summarize their speech topic, than answer a series of three questions from the teachers around the room. I ended up asking 90% of the questions to students for some reason. I hate to be a guy asking the question that stumps someone in front of their peers. (No, wait, I love that.)

After the interviews were over, we broke back for regular classes. I’ve got 3 more speech contests to sit through tomorrow. I’ve been preparing my students for a week at the lower level, but my older students all have large examinations eating up most of their time. If they do well, I’d be surprised.

Some of the students have done speeches for their Korean elementary schools, but it has fallen out of favor. In the past, I had to prepare dozens of speeches for students, but these days only a handful of students compete in the school contests. Our school holds their own contest to compensate.

You can never start teaching kids the joys of alcohol on a stick. This school favorite is actually made in Mexico to my surprise. This is a very “Korean” idea, completely age inappropriate for anyone that would actually want to eat this candy.

Want the great taste of bulgogi when you eat flat squares of sugar? This is for kids that eat meat so often that even their CANDY needs to taste like meat. Of course, Korean bakeries make sweet breads, so perhaps this is for some sort of weird candy-bread sandwich.

I’ve established that the people that make candy HATE Korean chlidren. That’s why they have such weird candy here. Dog bone candy? Sure, why not. It’s sugar in a different shape. The kids will still eat it any way.

My time spent in the affluent, education focused part of the city of Daejeon, is giving me distorted views of Korea. I don’t think about it often, but yesterday I had one of “those moments” where you know people are less likely to be around foreigners.

I got off the subway at one of the outlying stops not far from where the line ends. This isn’t a rural area or anything, but compared to my part of town it is new and a little less developed. There are still parking lots in spaces where buildings have yet to go up, and every since exterior space on each building around these parking lots isn’t covered in neon signs. In time, it will become part of the overdeveloped sprawl, but it’s not quite there yet.

Anyway, as I was taking an escalator out of the subway, two people, probably brothers, were on the steps in front of me. They were standing shoulder to shoulder, so I couldn’t get by. (I hate this.) I was listening to my mp3 player, but I could see the one boy turn around to see who was getting on the escalator a few steps behind them. The boy turned around, pretended to be doing something else, and then whispered in his companion’s ear, “THERE IS A FORIENGER BEHIND US! BE COOL, DON’T LOOK.”

It’s like in Indiana Jones, when someone would have a snake right by their head, and you didn’t want to panic the person by telling them they are in great danger, so you tell them to stay very still and hope for the danger to go away. You know, like telling the kid with a bee sting allergy to be still after you accidentally hit a bee’s hive with a football. I am the bee. Try not to disturb him, and he’ll leave us alone.

This sort of reaction amuses me. I don’t consider myself enough of a spectacle that I am worth being the object of such attention. I think of all the strange stuff I see that DOESN’T get a reaction, and really feel that the bar is set much lower for foreigners. I could be alone, minding my own business and I still get people hopping away from me when I sit down on the subway. (Shrug) Any open seat is a welcome one.

To be honest, I start to stare at other foreigners now myself. The low baggy pants wearing, heavily tattooed people stick out here so much that even I fixate on them these days. It’s not that I haven’t seen any of that, but it’s just not common, and I wonder how they deal with all that attention. There used to be a time when I could pass for one of those fresh out of college, “I don’t give a damn” sort of folks, but my job, and my desire to be upwardly socially mobile in Korea has hemmed in my choices. It’s not that I miss wearing pants the don’t fit me, but eventually I stopped fighting everything around me constantly. If clothes don’t define you, then you are still the same person if you wear pants that fit, or something that doesn’t.

That still doesn’t explain why I hate wearing suits, but that’s for some other introspective blogging post. Anyway, even at my most gawking moment, I don’t turn around and do a “Don’t look, be cool, don’t look,  but LOOK at THAT FREAK” sort of thing, even with my wife who enjoys the occasional spectacle. (We honestly did this way more in America than we ever did in Korea.)

Anyway, I knew the kid was going to be turning around. I took out my ear phones with both hands, threw my hands up, and went, “Oogoogly Boogoogly! Wooooo!” I just made a buch of nonsensical sounds and tried to act as CRAZY as possible until the two boys turned back around. They shot out from the escalator and looked back over their shoulders to see if I was following them. Not the most mature thing to do. If I fueled any anti-foreigner stereotypes, at least it wasn’t in a neighborhood I teach.

I finally got to play that “Warforged” character I had made a few weeks back with a group of friends playing Dungeons and Dragons today. Since this was my first bit of role playing, I got to copy down my Internet generated character. They handed me a character sheet, as well as an entire binder of Eberron background materials.

This gave me total nostalgia flashbacks. Way back in middle school, I happened upon a copy of a D&D rule book. I used to keep my D&D character sheets and little squares of grid paper in a binder too. During study hall, I would roll characters and read up on monsters, but I never really got a chance to play with people. The books and rules are what really got me interested in gaming instead of baseball cards or something else kids around me did.

This was my first real Roleplaying experience with other like minded people. It was a lot more relaxed than I expected. It was basically a controlled story telling session, where we were the main characters directing what happened. The Dungeon Master, was basically there to suggest what we should do next, and act as a referee between the people in our party as well as the non-player characters we interacted with during the game. He also filled us in on what we could see and do at any particular time. I also go some advice on possible actions that my character could do, since I was new.

The statistics and rules that dominate the character creation process really only come up when you try to do something to affect the outcome of the story as it unfolds. Depending on what you were doing, whether attacking, or trying to lie to one of the other characters, you needed to roll dice to see how successful you were.

My character is a gigantic walking vehicle of destruction and mayhem. I’ve picked a Warforged Fighter, so I was encountering several different opponents of various sizes and shapes that I needed to bludgeon, stab, and pierce to death, for STORY reasons, of course. We were on a sort of mini-quest for a series of items that required discretion on our part, so we could leave no survivors. This suits my playstyle. Whenever I managed to score a hit, it usually did massive amounts of damage, which entertains me greatly.

We succeeded in seeking the items we needed, so we were handsomely rewarded. I even leveled up! Level 4! Two more levels and I’ll be a completely frightening bad-ass machine of death. Right now I’m sitting on a pile of gold, but I don’t know what I’m going to spend it on. I’ve even got a +1 flaming halberd I upgraded from our benefactor.

I’ve got a lot of background information to read up on now that I’ve been invited back to play the game again on Children’s Day in a week. I lucked out that playing a big fighter is usually just down to “hitting things” or “run at the next target”. The other players were on top of a lot of the terminology and choices available to them, so it was a lot easier for them to know how to react. They thought I brought something to the table, so I’ll keep playing. It seems that we’ll be drawn up into some intrigue and greater amounts of conflict starting next time. This was more of a “trial run” to see how the party would work out.

….before tonight. (WARNING. EXTREME CONTENT.)

Pathology is one of the most horrendous movies I’ve ever watched. I’ve got a tolerance for bad movies. I sat through D-War and barely flinched. I buy Rifftrax and sit through bad movies to laugh at them. Pathology was so bad I walked out, and I pulled both my wife and brother-in-law out with me. It’s the first time any of us had ever walked out of a movie, and I spent the entire car ride home apologizing for the terrible, terrible film I took them to. If I subject myself to a film that is bad, no big deal, but forcing others to watch something that bad I feel is a social crime most hard to forgive.

I picked the movie based on it’s RottenTomato score (which has now tanked). There has been relatively few movies with positive scores coming to Korea recently. We haven’t seen a movie in a while, so when I got off work early, I suggested we all go out to see a the highest scoring film. When I had last checked, it was in the “positive”, with a few critics saying “edgy” and “dark.” I like my occasional edgy dark film, though I’ve mellowed out from my Clockwork Orange watching days in college.

Clockwork Orange is a movie about horrible people doing terrible, terrible things. It’s also watchable, because the main character is forced to change his ways. You may hate him, but at the same time you care about what happens to him because he pays for his actions and his punishment is a critique of society. Did society hurt him? Was his price to society too high? He suffers for what he did, and while he isn’t redeemed, there is something behind the world hating nihilism.

Pathology starts with a group of forensic medical students recreating the sex scene from “When Harry Met Sally” with cadavers. No joke. It was as distasteful and completely over the top as it sounds. I held out hope that all the people involved would get caught by an astute criminologist, and the day would be saved.

We are then introduced to “Dr.Grey”. Instead of being a plucky do good, he is in fact an egotistical ass who wants to prove how smart he is to everyone. He quickly falls in with the wrong crowd. This group of fellow students happen to be of the sadomasochistic, bitterly nihilistic, crack smoking, mass murderering variety. They are generally known as “bad apples” to guidance counselors.

After a night on the town with their “leader”, Dr. Grey ends up at a man’s house who is pimping out his grandmother. Dr. Grey runs away, while the ring leader killer does his thing. When the pimp ends up on the morgue table in front of the class, Dr. Grey offers up a few suggestions as to how he was killed. This impresses the leader that knows he got to solution absolutely correct, because he was the one to have done it.

The group’s “game” is to see if they could kill someone and slip the murder past their fellow students without anyone knowing. The bring their kills to an abandoned wing of the hospital and try to stump each other through their dissections. This premise, while dark, is somewhat interesting. However, there is so much shocking shit going on, I couldn’t get into it.

While the film had been treading water, if there had been a cat-and-mouse sort of game, where the Dr. Grey character had refused to join in, but had tried to figure out, or stop what was going on, I could have walked away at the end of the movie.

Instead of trudging a line of questionable morality, Dr. Grey immediately jumps at the chance to start killing in subtle ways to impress one of the bi-sexual murderesses in the group. He didn’t even need very much prodding. It was like he was WAITING for an opportunity to show off all the dark evil stuff he knew, and this group was the excuse. He had a bag full of killer chemicals to use on his first victim, and when the girl asks him to help him with a kill, he is anxious to kill again. She uses him, they have sex on the floor in front of a corpses in the throws of murdering glee. Frequently the people in the group smoke crack and have orgies on the floor in the dissection room while cracking open chest cavities.

Yeah. Shock value.

There was no “shades of grey” that the main character’s name implied. Everyone is immediately as evil as possible ALL the time. It’s impossible to imagine any of the characters as surviving in their day to day lives. There is a scene where, while cracking open someone’s skull, the leader of the group pines that the world needs more corpses, because there isn’t anyone worth caring about.

The cynical detachement the characters displayed was so over the top and offensive it was amazing I sat through 10 minutes of the film. I hated EVERY single character instantly.

No one in the film, save Alyssa Milano who bookends the film, had any redeeming qualities whatsoever. Half of her lines are ill timed uses of the phrase “I love you,” that are probably supposed to be ironic, because she “feels” something. Haha, look at someone that believes in redemption. The movie seemed to be saying, “We’re all going to die, so let’s kill everyone because we can get away with it. Isn’t that AWESOME?”

All the other main characters were irredeemable murdering assholes. After the second crazy, disgusting sadomasochistic sex scene, the couple in front of us walked out. I think it was when Dr. Grey started using a scalpel to cut bisexual murderess’ tongue before they made out. I turned away during one of these scenes after the sex-violence levels got so out of control that even I couldn’t take it anymore.

I sat through Clockwork Orange because, while it made me uncomfortable, there is ultimately a point. This movie was so nihilistic and people hating, it wasn’t even fit to be watched. NOTHING the characters in the film could have done could have justified their actions. Nothing they could have said or done would have made them redeemed. The film hates the characters as much as it hates the viewers.

It does everything to get a reaction out of people, and for me, I’m not so numb. I was disgusted and repulsed. Is that supposed to make the film “edgy” and “dark”? Make something so disgusting people feel bad about watching a single second of it?

I can handle a movie that doesn’t end in rainbows and a song at the end, but Pathology was fucking terrible because it was ultimately pointless. Am I supposed to forgive the sins of the characters because they were murdering only “bad” people? EVERY character on the screen was TERRIBLE.

I had been contemplating how much longer I was going to stay as the film kept getting worse and worse. We lasted one more scene, where the head evil character had butchered several hookers before we left. Hating bad people, sure, but killing working girls is like one of the classic horror movie cliches I can’t stand. It was the last excuse I needed.

It crossed SO many lines, but for some reason I couldn’t watch any more. Shock, shock, more shock, then I was finished. I was only 10 minutes away from the conclusion of the film when we left, but there was NO possible way it would have ended well. There would be no “twist” at the end. No point.

This movie disturbed me deeply, and I’m sorry I exposed anyone to it. If you have any sense of taste, do not see this film. Consider this a warning. If you enjoyed this film, wow, seek help.

I’m used to not being understood 90% of the day. The only time I really want students to understand me perfectly clearly with very little help is when I am writing my homework. I write it as clearly and simply as possibly. I take five minutes of class to do this single task because it’s that important. I explain it to individual students that have problems with previous assignments. I check their notebooks to see if they are writing down my homework correctly. I really expect the students should know what they need to do when they get home to do my homework. For every good student in a class, there are a few bad ones that stretch my belief that they really are trying to learn any English at all. I have heard the LAMEST excuses for the past few weeks when it comes to homework, and it’s starting to really getting on my nerves.

“Teacher, I didn’t know how to do the homework, so I didn’t do it.” This excuse is lame, because I see students multiple days of the week, and students have a week to do the assignment. If they don’t understand the homework, they can ask me any other day of the week between classes. Some students take this advice and have someone explain their homework to them, or as a Korean teacher for clarification, but most don’t bother.

“Teacher, I didn’t know what the homework was, so I didn’t do it.” If you don’t know, you still have a week to do the homework, but you can also have your parents call the school and ASK me. I’ll field a homework question once or twice a week from parents that had sick students. Most of those sick students come to school with the homework completed, while someone sitting next to them will say that writing down the homework in their notebook was too hard, or that they had lost or changed their notebook and didn’t know what the assignment was.

“Teacher, I lost the paper.” This one had had a resurgence lately, since I’ve been giving out papers for students to do as homework for a month straight. One student today claimed to have left the work completed at his home, then opened his book and had the papers fall out completely blank. Ooops. In the same class, a student told me he was missing a book, asked me to copy the work for him, and tried to finish it before class started. For every bad student, there is another one that at least tries.

“Teacher, I was busy, I had a trip, I have tests, I can’t study.” Whenever I ask these “really busy” students what they were up to, every single weekend they tell me they were playing computer, watching TV, or playing with friends. Busy indeed. While I know students schedules can be crazy when preparing for tests, I know putting a few minutes in on my homework really won’t prevent them from doing something fun. They have a WEEK.

“I changed my bag/notebook/class time/schedule so everything I needed for this assignment is at home.” They don’t try to pull this with Korean teachers, because they’ll occasionally call their mother to make them bring the items in question to the school for proof the student wasn’t lying about it. I usually don’t bother.

I remember being a student. I know there are times when you forget things, or can’t answer them. I don’t punish students that make an effort to get things done. If students really can’t do the work, I won’t get upset. It’s just the same lame students doing the same lame excuses every day that get on my nerves.

In any class I’ll hear one or two of these excuses. Every hour, every day. It’s really getting annoying. I had a student that I explicitly explained homework to three times. I checked his homework journal, spoke to his mother about the homework on multiple occasions, and STILL had him not do the correct vassignment. Short of tattooing, there isn’t much more I can do.

day, the book had this incredibly lame one page set of sentences describing a character in the book. Then the students were supposed to describe themselves. You will never get a class of young children describe themselves in front of their peers, so this is a non-starter as an exercise I can do in class.

I made up a paper today to do descriptions of people. I had an empty box, then a comic “text bubble” popping out that had a series of sentences describing a comic looking figure. Big fat people, or tall thin people with exaggerated features. The third box and text bubble was blank. I drew the first person according to their description in the text bubble, making it as big as the board would let me.

Next, I let the students read the text bubble for the second character and made sure they had their pictures started before I put up my own picture. I didn’t want them to just copy my picture every time. Some of them had hilarious variations of the picture I drew, while others went off into weirder directions.

The third picture was for the students to let their own imaginations fly and draw whatever they wanted. The only caveat was that they had to write the English FIRST. This means that if they wanted to draw something crazy, they needed the language and vocabulary to describe it. The students were asking how to spell all sorts of body parts, and were trying to get the grammar correct so they could get their picture drawn before someone ripped off their ideas. They had some really weird, funny, tremendously creative designs considering their limited vocabulary and grammar skills. (It only required “I have…” and “I am…” sentences.)

The students would go around the class showing off their pictures, laughing at each other’s drawings. Everyone was very positive and happy about whatever anyone made. Since they saw me drawing exaggerated caricatures, they knew I wasn’t going for artistic accuracy. I only cared if the ENGLISH was correct and roughly matched the picture. If they wanted to draw a monster instead of a person, they could. I think the students really liked that freedon.

Over my years of teaching, I’ve gotten many chances to improve on my dry eraser art skills. There are many activities I do that depend on the occasional sketch on the board to help my students understand what I am saying. I like to doodle, but I’m not an “artist” in any stretch of the word. I had students laughing hysterically at my drawings, and everyone got to show me what they could do on paper. It was a LOT of fun.

For homework, I assigned them the paragraph about writing a description of themselves. That way they can look up the words they want to describe themselves, and don’t have people making fun of them when I check the paper.

Last week, my Cowon D2 died. Luckily, there is a service center in the city, so my wife could get it repaired the same day she brought it there. Unfortunately, when she got it repaired on Friday, they told her she needed to replace the entire motherboard, and that the repair would run close to 30% of the price of the entire player. She complained a lot, so they threw in a free battery replacement. Since my old battery was showing a little wear and tear from daily use, I was happy with this compromise.

Happy, until I noticed that whoever had replaced my motherboard had incorrectly hooked up the audiojack, and I only got mono sound in my headphones. For a company that prides itself on having the best quality sound and service, this was infuriating. I was upset that an expensive repair didn’t even get a proper diagnostic check as simple as LISTENING TO THE PLAYER to make sure it worked.

My poor wife had to return to the store Monday for me while I was at work late and get it fixed a second time. The service technician said that since we had only gotten it repaired two days earlier, it probably wasn’t our fault, just a defective product. Gee, thanks, you mean it wasn’t our fault you installed something that didn’t work right? They waived the fee for fixing the product since we hadn’t caused the problem, but my wife was still a little angry about having to go down to the service center twice for their mistake. They didn’t even apologize for their mistake either. Annoying.

According to them, I wasn’t cleaning the usb slot well and it might have caused some dust to get inside and damage the motherboard. I have no idea if this is true. I checked the local electronics store, and there is still NOTHING on the market close to the Cowon D2 in terms of battery life, features, and design. Even though I had to pay for a repair, I would have only ended up buying a new one of the price was any higher. It’s still the best in it’s class feature for feature in my opinion.

I’ve got my D2 back in time to avoid being bored on my long 2 hour break today, and I didn’t have to ride the subway without something to listen to. I’m catching up on a few of the podcasts that updated that were too long to listen to at home on the computer. Listening to short fiction at home, and not with the privacy of earphones is weird to me now. I also got my political fix during my walk with Yoshi, which is another one of my podcast related habits. I tried a few Linux podcast products. gPodder was the one I ended up using most often since it had a GUI and wasn’t difficult to figure out. It was easy to import my OPML list into it, which is less annoying than copying and pasting 23 podcast URLS. If I was big into automation and command line, I would have used hpodder (I didn’t check to see if it did OPML lists though).

I’m glad I can get back to listening to my podcasts now.

Today started on a completely sour note. While waiting for the subway, a woman was loudly berating her child with very harsh language. I was playing a phone game, and looked over a few times as the woman raised her voice. It seemed unusually loud for me, but no one else was batting an eye. The language not appropriate for adults to use to each other, let alone to say to a child who was only running around, not even doing anything terrible. The barrage of language continued until the subway arrived.

On the subway, the woman was squatting in front of a bench. This was pretty weird. The child climbed on top of the bench behind his mother and started to playfully rest his feet on the mother in front of him as if he was lounging in a chair. He wasn’t kicking or doing anything that looked to be anything more than playing for attention, since the woman had started to talk to a man across the subway car. All of a sudden, the woman turns around and punches the child repeatedly in the face and chest.

The entire subway car looks over as the woman is cursing and punching her kid. This wasn’t an open handed “swat”, but full on, fist raised PUNCHING. HOLY SHIT. I didn’t have my camera available at the time to record the abuse, and everyone in the car was watching this woman. No one said anything to her, but a few people were disturbed enough to get up from their seat to stop the woman if she had continued. I got off at the next stop immediately after the abuse, but I was really worried. The boy got up immediately and was running up and down the car laughing. I guess he didn’t think anything was unusual about such proceedings. WTF.

Once I got to work, I had a series of classes, one worse than the next. In my second class, I had students sick, students with no homework, students just being annoying. Then between classes I had students grabbing me and being annoying on purpose (They said, “Hey, let’s bother him!”). I was pretty grumpy by this point.

My third class is full of three bad boys and some kind, but quiet girls. One boy I put “in charge” of the class, and told him if something bad happens he will ALWAYS be held responsible for everyone elses actions if he knows about misbehavior and doesn’t put a stop to it. He is the oldest in the class, and should be more mature.

The eraser in the class had “disappeared” for the second time in two weeks. Last time, the student I knew was responsible cracked under pressure and immediately handed it over. This time, the ENTIRE class was in on the gag. After I had filled up the board, I told them I couldn’t help them on their homework because I had no more room to write anything. Only then, finally, did one student tell me where the eraser was.

After this class was over, I told my director that all the students were in on the joke. She pulled the three bad boys out of class and totally tore into them. They didn’t go home at their normal time, and needed to stay after to write their journals that were overdue under supervision. During the break I tried to blow off the stress and come into class fresh. It didn’t work.

The next class was worse. They have the lamest excuses for never doing their homework. One student said my directions were “unclear” so she didn’t do her work from a week ago. Her friend, who is usually my best student, tried to back her up and agree. Nevermind that they had 2 more classes with me after I assigned the work to explain it, or their mother could have called the secretary. They had left the class claiming to understand.

She was just trying to use an excuse to get out of doing her work. Three other students didn’t do their work either. Only one student in the class had completed it to my satisfaction, and another I left off since he had tried a little. The rest I was furious at. Some students go weeks without doing their work, and don’t keep notes of their homework, or participate in the rewards program at school. They hadn’t done their journals either.

I told the director that this class had been particularly bad. I told about all the lame excuses, and the students that didn’t get their work done had to stay after class AGAIN for an extra hour. By the time I had left school today, ten of my students were being kept after class for one punishment or another.

I made it home without incident, but I’m pretty worked up about today. I really didn’t enjoy much of anything that happened at any point today. At least my director is awesome and has my back when it comes to bad students from time to time.