::A Geek in Korea::

I’ve got a theme going with my collectible phone accessories. I’ve been attempting to purchase on Super Mario themed phone accessories to dangle from the lanyard strap that I have on my phone. I don’t do anything to show these large plush toys off or anything. I just throw my phone in my pocket, but whenever I answer a message or handle my phone outside of class, I have swarms of little students around me asking me about them.

My first of these was the small 1up mushroom. This was lucky, because it matched my stylish green case. Plus, it’s awesome. The students who have Nintendo DS would say, “1-up! New Super Mario-itta!” (It’s New Super Mario!). The PC only students would say, “Mushmam Bossot! Mushmam Bossot! Maple Story-itta!” (It’s a Mushroom monster from Maple Story!”) These students earned a glare.

It didn’t improve after the 1up split down the middle and I needed a new accessory. The ?-box came next. Again, students “In the know”, knew where this iconic symbol was from. People with PC games only thought it was an “I-tem boxsu! Kartu-Rider!” (Kart Rider Item Box.) Nevermind the whole Mario Kart spawned the icon racer thing, and Kart Rider is just an admittedly popular online imitation.

The funny thing about the situation is that the students are so young, and Nintendo’s character penetration is so new here, that the students that actually recognize these iconic symbols of my youth only recently got exposed to them. They only know them from the Nintendo DS game, or the Wii if they are super rich. Most of them grew up on online games, and the oldest game they know and still play is Starcraft. I’m now at the point that I have students playing Starcraft that are younger than that game.

My third purchase is the accessory on the left. I just bought the Pirahna plant. It’s hard plastic, and it lights up if you flick a switch. I won’t be putting it on my phone for fear it might scratch up my screen when I put it in my pocket. I’m now buying phone accessories purely to look at or collect them. What has happened to me?

My wife actually was with me when I bought this one. She called me juvenille. Whatever. She has a clear plastic head of Snoopy from Peanuts filled with tiny pink hearts on HER phone, so I don’t think she gets to talk about a light up plant that devours people as being “immature”.

Our school has hired a “Internet, Journal, and Detention” teacher. That is her job title. She’s in charge of holding students after when they didn’t finish the Internet program they are supposed to do on the weekend. She posts their scores for all to see, and grabs them before they head home to make sure they complete their work.

The students that write journals also have to check in with her at the end of the week to make sure that they’ve copied their corrected materials. I have to actually grade the papers, but she handles everything after that. I used to hand it to a secretary. Now I had it to a dedicated teacher. Nothing changes on my end.

The thing that does change for me is the ability to hand out detentions to students for not completing homework. Previously, we were supposed to warn students that didn’t speak English exclusively. That lasted about a month, but with no one to track students comings and goings, and parents being pissed off about their students arriving home late without notice, it was a lot more trouble that it was worth.

Now we have an automated check in system that logs the students arrival into school with an RFID enabled tag. The students can be easily scanned through the system, so we don’t have to worry about notifying each individual parent about a student’s departure. The computer system does that for us. This has led to the “Detention board” being placed on the desk in front of the machine for the new teacher.

Now when students fail to complete homework, we simply fill out the form,  who is staying after, what they must complete before they leave, and what class they are in. This new teacher does the rest like a vigilant parole officer. If the students try to leave early, she nails them and keeps them in detention. Right now the students are adjusting to this change.

In my first class, I had five students kept after class. The students were surprised that I was keeping them after for an hour. So was I. I was only alerted to this change in policy via email, and I had to confirm it with my director. She said that as long as I sent an SMS out notifying the parents of the students during my five minute break time, I could keep students after. I’ve got NO time to fuddle with the computer every break if I want to gather books, go to the bathroom, and perhaps munch on a snack, so this SMS computer message is a big annoyance.

I’ll probably abuse my detention powers for a few days to keep as many people annoyed as possible, ESPECIALLY in my last set of classes each day, which tend to be my worst. The fact that I can do all of this passive aggressively and keep kids after despite not being there to babysit them myself is awesome. I want to claim the credit for holding students after to gain more power, but I don’t want to hear about it the entire class. I’m torn.

Judging by my Internet Moniker, I’ve had a long standing connection with the show Mystery Science Theater 3000. Anyone that knows me and has watched a bad movie with me knows I love to crack jokes whenever possible. I’ve mellowed out on this more recently, more or less dropping it entirely unless it is a special occasion. I admit it’s something of a bad hobby for those people wishing to view a movie without an annoying neighbor. You shouldn’t do it unless you have some practice, or are a paid professional. Then it is more than okay. It’s encouraged. Expected even.

Anyway, I remember a time back when I was six years old or so. I had just discovered humor, and my idea of a good joke was repeating the setup for “Why did the chicken cross the road?” and then substituting a different reason, or changing the animal. I’d also change the answer to the joke if someone guessed it correctly. I usually would repeat the joke several times, as if I was talking to a person that spoke a different language and assumed saying it more than once would make the message funnier.

I guess I was under the impression jokes were like some sort of lame game show. I didn’t get why that particular joke was funny, and I still don’t. The “Chicken crossing the road” joke was what I thought comedy was at it’s core. Nonsense said in a particular way that made people laugh.

The first time I remember making a joke on my own that made other people laugh was during a movie. I remember I was sitting on our couch in my parent’s living room watching the movie D.A.R.Y.L.. It was this terrible movie about a robotic boy. Pinochicco meets the Turing Test. It was idiotic.

At one point or another, the robotic main character, Daryl, dies, or appears to die, to which I commented, “He forgot his batteries.”

It was well timed. This got a laugh from both my parents. I think my mom even repeated the line to my dad, which was more than she would normally do for my “Why did the…. cross the road” jokes. This was the first time I could remember making an off the cuff remark that got people laughing.

I didn’t do that sort of thing from that point on. My parents would speak while watching television, but it usually wasn’t an ongoing conversation about the show. I think somewhere in the back of my mind that experience of getting a laugh stuck with me, because as soon as I saw people on television doing the same thing, I was hooked. I was a fan after that.

My last class of the week is by far my worst. I dumped off this class onto my coworker, and was almost free of it, but he needed a break since he works the entire Friday schedule. His schedule got changed so he was able to get dinner, but that stuck me with a class of students that everyone knows I despise.

The feeling is mutual. One of the students today tried to hide in the bathroom stall as I walked through the halls into the classroom. His clever plan to hide behind a support pillar and wait for me pass by, then hide in a smelly toilet stall was thwarted by my higher than 10 IQ. I think he learned that tactic by watching Loony Toons or something. He was going to cause problems by making me go look for him, but seeing as I knew exactly where he was, I told him not even to bother and he returned to class defeated.

Today I had to teach a science lesson about wave frequencies of light being used to determine the temperature of the sun. This was not the most basic of vocabulary or lessons for me to teach a class that has a larger vocabulary of swears than it does actual English words. Two of the students had done their lessons, and rest tried to lie their way out of detention. These two students were able to follow my lesson somewhat, and by the end they could actually get the answers about wave frequencies and energy correctly. The rest of the students got very interested in their desks, and wouldn’t look up or answer anything.

Their homework was a space related crossword and word search. The only reason I gave them the word search was that it contained all the answers for the related crossword, and these students would never, ever be able to get the crossword without tons of help. I let them work on either paper before the bell rang. Usually we finish the work in class in about twenty minutes, and then spend the rest of the time staring in mutual disdain.

Their brilliant strategy for fooling me was to work in groups and pretend to lose the cross word puzzle. I’m not responsible for checking the homework I assign. This class is unique in that I assign homework and the other teacher grades it. I still give detentions based on the last homework assignment they were supposed to do, so the three boys got served. The next teacher has an answer sheet for the crossword puzzle so any denials about receiving the paper will be a lie.

It’s not like the students are good liars anyway. They act like the teachers have no idea what is going on in class, while other students are racing around them at much younger ages. Their book, while occasionally containing WTF hard topics isn’t actually as hard as material we usually teach at that level. They just don’t know that, and have a smug attitude.

Anyway, this is my one really loathsome class that sours me on Fridays. It sucks to walk home from work grumbling about bad kids when all your usual classes day to day are so much better.

I had reason to go dig out the school’s lamination machine. I had gone to the printer to make D&D Power Cards.These are purely a stat tracking, paperwork avoiding trick players can use to speed up the game. Small cards list out the powers each character have available for each encounter, and as the game moves along you manipulate the cards to keep track of what you’ve done. It was clear from our previous games that anything to speed up our games is something we should look into, and these will help tremendously.

The only problem is that the cards are color coded, and needed to be the same size for easy use. I had the idea of going to the print shop, getting them printed, and then laminating them. Some of the players had theirs done this way, but worked together to complete the task. I needed to work on my own, but they helped me find business card sized lamination sleeves that sped up the process considerably.

All I had to do was get the things printed off, cut, and then laminated. How long could that take? For whatever reason, the printing took a ridiculous 30 minutes for 15 pages! I was very annoyed by that. They printed off 300 pages of black and white papers faster than the color prints I needed. Completely ridiculous. After I got it printed, I was in for another shock. The 15 pages ran nearly 10000 won! I had no idea that it was so expensive, but from now on I’ll be working entirely in black and white for my printing needs.

I tracked down the lamination sheets, and found the perfect size (90×65mm). I went to work and was looking around in an old storage closet when I found a lamination machine. I didn’t know the school even owned one. It hadn’t seen use in all the time I had been working there. The thing was completely covered in dust. Since lamination machines require heat to work, I was nervous that I was going to end up burning down the school when I plugged it in the first time. I asked the director if there was anything I needed to do to prepare the machine. She suggested grabbing some wet tissues and tying to get as much dust as possible off the rollers. I did just that, accidentally sending one of the tissues through the hot rollers. It didn’t do any damage and I was able to get the tissues back out. Luckily they were thick and tough.

It took forever to find the right heat setting for the cards. It turns out the sweet spot was slow rollers, middle/hot temperatures. Anything too hot might cause the cards to curl, and anything too cold didn’t force them together and melt.

I started cutting the cards I needed on my lunch break. I got about six pages of 8 cards each done in an hour. I had all my cut cards laminated by the time the bell rang for my next class. 9 more pages left! I couldn’t get anything else done at work, so put the cards away and waited to go home. When I left work I returned to the print shop, bought a nice, proper pair of scissors, and went home.

At home I spent another hour or so cutting out cards. I’m ready to laminate them all tomorrow if I got to work early enough. I’ll still be the DM for the next set of adventures, but when I actually get a chance to play my character I’ll be set. The other players will be ready, and hopefully eager to try out the new cards next weekend.

This is the first full week of the “No Homework, Detention” policy. I’m still going to classes that have yet to be made aware of the change since last week. Now when I walk into class, students that have had me previously this week have their homework out, ready to be check. Students that haven’t yet seen me in class get defensive, argumentative, and then need to bring in outside confirmation that I’m not just lying about the change.

Today, I had to explain to one of my classes that has rampant homework problems why all but two students would be staying in detention. Students gave me a long list of excuses why they should have to stay after.

“I forgot my homework.”

“Detention.”

“I didn’t know what the homework was.”

“Check the website, read your notes, check with other students. Detention.”

“I have classes after this. I must leave exactly at this time.”

“Detention. Talk to the Director about changing the class time.

The student that started this last argument is usually just an annoying, noisy student. He never does his work, but never wants to be punished. I told him if he got the homework finished, he could avoid punishment. He then filled his entire paper with nonsense and tried to say he had completed it. I erased all of his answers, told him he had detention, and wouldn’t hear another appeal.

He started to cry.

This is something my class is used to, because another student in class, Test Anxiety Boy, usually cries once a week for some period of time in class. The student crying today was Test Anxiety Boy’s friend. He started crying, sobbing, and slobbering all over himself. The students next to him complained they couldn’t study with me because he was so noisy. I knew he was trying the sympathy card, so I sent him out to talk to the director.

The director came in and absolutely crushed any appeal. She said to the students, “The teacher in class has the absolute last word. Do not try to get out of what they say. If they say you have detention, you are staying here. I’m not going to disagree with what they tell you, so don’t even bother.”

Awesome. She had my back 100%.

So, the crying, wailing, and moaning about the detention continued by this single boy for another ten minutes. He was entirely over the top, but had worked himself up to such a degree he couldn’t stop. The waterworks were really flowing. Test Anxiety boy was laughing at him. “Ha ha, why are you crying so much? It’s only a detention. You’ll be fine. It’s not worth crying about.”

I was astounded that a boy that will cry over missing a single question was admonishing his friend about crying. I told him he should probably stop speaking that way. The secretary entered the room and seconded my concern. She said, “Of all the people to talk, you can’t be saying this! Everyone knows you cry all the time! Why would you be so mean to him?”

She had entered the class with the students vocabulary tests. Failing the vocabulary tests results in a detention as well. The secretary then read off all the students that failed their vocabulary tests. In a karmic twist of epic proportions, Test Anxiety Boy failed his test by one question.

When the secretary read his name, everyone in the entire class took a deep breath and turned to watch the student break down. He had already covered his face and had balled up his fist. Everyone in the class was like, “No way! He’s going to start crying now too!? What’s going on!” The girl sitting next to him was trying to comfort him, but it was too late, he had already started bawling.

Test Anxiety Boy showed his friend how to REALLY cry. He started hyperventilating, and then had to run out of class to dry heave in the bathroom. Twice. He came back with blood red eyes from the heaves. He couldn’t sit in his chair because he kept bending over as he sobbed. Between the two students, no one else could learn a damn thing, so I packed up the class early and let them prepare for their detention. In total, 90% of the class was going to stay behind. Only one student escaped detention. It was a new record.

It was easily the worst class I’ve had at the school in a year. No one got anyone done, and I was being held hostage by a crying child. Even sending the students out of class wouldn’t work, because they just didn’t stop. It was a total disaster.

The next class was only moderately better, with only 50% of the class going home on time, and another big fight about homework needing to be clarified to the lazier students. It’s getting pretty ridiculous.

My D&D group has found a neutral place for gaming that won’t force any of our wives, or significant others to evacuate their houses if we want to play. While we have no problem with our inherent nerdiness, our spouses and significant others flee at the sight of a 20 sided dice being rolled on a table. No female has ever witnessed me playing D&D…until now.

It’s in a restaurant with private booths, and waitresses dressed up like Little Red Riding Hood. I have no idea what the theme of this place is supposed to be besides innocent, rustic charm. Here we are ruining it by creating epic battles in one of their back rooms with dice. The booths in the restaurant have white boards. These are meant for students studying, businessmen in a meeting, or bored children. It works out really well for us to play. We take them off the wall and draw the maps directly on the board.

We can rent the rooms for several hours, and all we need to do is buy a cup that allows for unlimited refills of drinks. We also get a cup of free ramyeon, or cookies if we want included in the price of the room. It’s more convenient that any place that should be legally allowed to be. Not only do we get a place to play, but cheap food and all the drinks we want? Awesome. If we go over three hours on our reserved room, we pay a pitance per 30 minutes to keep the room. The manager always approaches our table carefully, as if we’d fly off in a rage when we learn we need to pay 1000 won an hour. Please.We need four people to hold a room, which is perfect too, because we can squeeze everyone inside and just play.

We’ve played in this restaurant’s booths for the past two games and they’ve gone swimmingly well. Everyone ignores the people around us and we cheer for high rolls, groan after low rolls, and sound out gruesome deaths and murders. I get into character whenever anyone does anything particularly amusing.  Some of the players were talking about moving into the actual room surrounded by people instead of getting a booth if it meant better air conditioning. I’m as used to being stared at as the next foreigner, but I’d still prefer a booth to be truthful if I have to pretend to be a dying orge.

I’ve been the Dungeon Master for both games, as we’ve switched to the most recent D&D 4.0 edition. Everyone else was trying to make their new characters before learning the DM rules. I’ve approached the situation backwards, learning the DM rules via Podcast and also via the free materials at the offical site.If no one is going to learn to DM, all the players in the world won’t matter. While I took on the DM last time as a chore and something of a challenge, I’m willfully volunteering my service for DM using the 4.0 rules.

I have as much fun running the encounter as I do playing the game from the other side of the table now. It’s so much easier now that their is prepared material I don’t have to write. There were adventures for the past rule sets too, but the new material is really nice and easy to use. We could potentially use our crop of free materials for the next few levels and never have to do the hard stuff ourselves. If I wanted to go back to writing custom adventures, I could still do that more easily than before, but right now the situation doesn’t demand it, as there is a plethora of materials to draw from, and more arriving all the time.

We scrapped a plan that was going to have us end the story line of our last set of characters dramatically and thematically and made a clean break for the new rules. I get to keep my epic storyline for a later date, and I can use the much easier 4.0 rules to host adventures that have been pre-written for me. I’ll be much more experienced as a DM by the time we’re ready to tackle that story line again.

I’ve been relishing my role as the arbiter of rules and the killer of characters. I’ve murdered one ranger, which happens to be the first time any DM had brought down a character from the party. In the last encounter we had, I had two characters on the ropes, and it was only because of some lucky dice roles in the clutch that they were able to save the day. I had wicked rolls the entire day, while my players rolled for nearly nothing.

Karma will probably balance that our shortly enough. I ordered an entire pound of dice from the Internet so that I can DM without borrowing dice from others, as well as provide other people with dice if we can find another player. We’re also trying to get officially recognized as a play group by the organizers of Living Forgotten Realms, which would set us up with free play material forever. We’d even impact the world we adventured in, like a twisted sort of massively multiplayer role playing game played in small groups around the real world. Considering the last officially recognized team of any kind I ever participated in was a bowling team in 5th grade, that’s pretty awesome.

My friends and I were the cleanup crew for a giant flea market in the amusement park we worked in not far from my house. We would go around destroying anything left behind before throwing it in the dumpster. This was a semi-condoned practice, as it saved space in the dumpsters, but often lead to danger. It was a stress relief for teenagers who loved to break stuff.

Someone decided a box of old 45 records. They looked like a perfect frisbee to toss. We were smashing them against a wall that was behind the dumpster, dropping them inside if we hit it right. Fun AND Productive. We started tossing them around and one missed. It was a jagged, broken, dangerous record of death.

I happened to toss it in the direction of the dumpster without thinking. Maybe I was pissed off about something. I don’t recall. Someone had been facing me, between me and the dumpster. The record of death bounced once on the ground, continued spinning, jumped off the ground, and headed straight towards this person’s head. We weren’t far away from each other, and as soon as it left my hand I knew it was going to do significant damage if it hit anyone.

I’ll never forget watching it fly through the sky as I shouted “WATCH OUT!” helplessly. It looked like a table saw blade heading straight towards the bridge of this person’s nose. The decapitation trap in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? It was going to take off the top of his head in one clean slice.

He moved his head out of the way in a Matrix style back lean duck. The timing was incredible. It missed by millimeters. It was so close to being lodged in his brain that I had a cold few minutes of panic and shock set in. The record skipped and bounced down into a corn field.  He ran and picked it up to show me. He thought it was awesome, and wasn’t angry at all.

I started cursing and saying, “Holy shit, HOLY SHIT, I could have KILLED YOU!” I think this is the event that broke me out of that “random destruction” phase everyone goes through as a teenager. I just sometimes think about what would have happened if it had hit him.

One of the best thing about living in a city of moderate size is that there are enough people to support nearly every kind of specialty shops you would ever need. For example, today my wife and I went to a specialty office ergonomic chair store to pick up a new chair for my computer room. I got her to come along while I sat in different chairs.

The man at the store would tell the various different features of the Duo-back chairs I was sitting in. There were about ten different points of customizing that could be done to make each of the chairs more comfortable. He’d have me sit in different positions, manipulate different knobs and levers, and attempt to make the different parts comfort to my body. It was like getting an eye examination where someone is constantly asking, “Is this better, or is that better”, except for my ass.

I had to leave early for an appointment, but my wife stayed to negotiate a better price. I headed home to catch the delivery man that was coming directly from the factory with our order. They delivered the chair to the house and set it up for me. The guy that unpacked the chair asked me to sit down and tried to use my proportions to set the chair to maximum comfort like it was in the store, but he failed wildly.

When the guy left, I paid cash to the nearest amount I had. In a normal transaction I could pay over the amount owed and expect change back. This guy demanded exact change for a near 200,000 won purchase! I had plenty to pay if he could have returned the change, but I wasn’t able to come up with the difference by about 2000 won. He was completely at a loss as to how to proceed.

I wasn’t about to give the guy an extra 10000 won because he was too stupid to think about bringing change. He said he would come back to collect the 2000 won later. I have no idea how often they are in the neighborhood, but I didn’t sign anything, and I didn’t get a reciept from this guy saying I paid. I have no idea how he’s going to prove who he is later. I’m going to have some chair delivery guy chasing me around for around 2 dollars for the rest of my life.

I’ve been fidgeting and resetting the different things all day trying to find the sweet spot for my back, arms, legs, and more importantly, the height I can use with the desk without smacking my arm rests on the table. I’m convinced that if I manipulate it enough it’ll be really, really comfortable, but I’m not there yet.

I have a class that spends most of the time ignoring me. It’s not that I don’t try, it’s just that their is an impenetrable wall of ignorance and stupidity surrounding this particular group of students that sit together in class. Seating charts are usually a method of crowd control of last resort, so while this class has been causing me problems, we haven’t split up these students through the class yet. There are also only two female students in the class, so there aren’t any real barriers to put up between the bad elementary school boys.

I was teaching class, writing something on the board, when I heard a squeal, a chair scoot forward, and a boy with his head down, crying. I turned around and gave a quick look at the crying boy. He didn’t tell me what was going on, but another student in his row told me why he was upset.

The boy behind him had stabbed him in the shoulder with a pencil, and his friend was laughing. I gave him a “What the hell!?” look, then walked out to grab my director. Children stabbing other children is far beyond what I’m willing to deal with in my class.

I pulled the director aside in the hallway and said, “I have a student that got stabbed with a pencil. I saw the mark on his shirt. It’s not bleeding, but it looked really bad.”

Remember the scene in A Christmas Story, where Ralph lies about where he heard a swear, and you can hear, “WHAT?!” and then the sounds of a child being beating furiously while the boy was asking, “What? What? What did I do…?”

The remainder of the class was something like that, except without the beating. You could hear the director yelling at the top of her lungs something indistinguishable, then the boy saying something, then “WHAT?!?!” over and over again. It was great.

The story that eventually emerged was that the stabee was leaning his chair back and resting it on the stabber’s desk. The stabber kept pushing the boy’s chair off his table, and eventually just brought the pencil down on the boy’s shoulder to prove a point. That was the motive. When asked why he would do that instead of just pulling his desk back since he was in the last row, the stabber just shrugged his shoulders. “Just because.”

Crazy.

I’ve had several behavioral problems with this student before, but usually he is content to just sit by himself and be bored. Now he has other people in class as stupid as he is so he has to show how tough he is to the rest of the morons in the class. I’m not looking forward to seeing him back in class, but he’ll be sitting in the front row from now on, prime backhand territory if he tries anything with a pencil and me.

I’ll issue him a warning the first time I see him back in class next week.