::A Geek in Korea::

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.

I did a “get to know your classmates” exercise that works as an icebreaker activity. The tension before the students did this activity compared to how relaxed they were was very obvious. The students are given three different surveys with different questions on them. They have to go around the room making questions from the statements by changing the verb forms, then chatting for a few minutes afterwards. The activity went extremely well. The students all jumped at the chance to get to know one another, and I heard lots of English being spoken in class. Some of the questions weren’t entirely applicable to everyone in class, so they had to try really hard to find people to meet those requirements. Here are some of the things I learned in class:

1. No one knows anything about Cincinnati, Ohio. When I asked people if they knew a single thing about my home town, not a single student in ANY of my classes (150+ students) could answer a single thing about the city. That’s about right. I struggled to come up with a few notable things myself that would related to anyone outside of southwestern Ohio. (P&G? Cincinnati Sports teams that rarely win important things? Roller coasters? Cows? Luckily I didn’t have to bring up “race riots“.)

2. No one in Korea swims in lakes. People who asked me this question would pose it in this manner, “This is ridiculous, but have you ever gone swimming in a lake?”

3. No one goes hunting. I’ve never gone hunting, despite being on safari with my parents who do hunt for sport quite often. I was the only person that answered this question in all the classes.

4. No students travel by taxi. The question, “Do you travel to school by taxi?” was greeted by looks that were surprising to me. I know a lot of students travel by bus, or walk, but you’d think occasionally someone would run late and need a taxi. NEVER. Students walk five or more blocks from the subway stop, but would never think of taking a taxi to get to school.

5. MANY students drink alcohol to the point of blacking out or memory loss. Four students in a single class admitted that they had lost their wallets because they had drank too much, passed out, then work up without any wallet on their person. All the students claim that they simply “dropped” their wallet will passed out and didn’t remember where it was. No one thought they got mugged. Several students told me they woke up in their own bed, not knowing how their got there but lacking their wallets, so they assumed it fell out in a taxi. Both men and ladies acted like this happened a few times a year, or frequently enough not to be a big deal. Yikes.

6. When you say, “Did grow up in the country”, no one knows what the hell you are talking about. There was a paired question, “Did you grow up in the city?” which was clear, but several students thought the former question meant, “Did you grow up in THIS country, Korea, or are you a foreigner?”

7. Students that eat at the cafeteria like to drink only water with their breakfast. They don’t spend money on coffee, or drink milk in the morning. Almost no one skips breakfast. No one eats toast in the morning.

8. Nearly everyone showers before their classes, but many people admit to not washing up before class. Even in the afternoon.

9. One student a class still buys CDs.

10. 20% of the class grew up living with their grandparents.

I’m going to repeat this activity a few more times tomorrow. I wonder how the answers will change in my later classes. The class was up and talking, which was a rousing success for me! I hope I can keep the momentum going through the entire semester.

I went back to revise several of the activities I’ve made for the classes I have for the rest of the week. Now that I have a generic syllabus that I can drop and drag into a text document to make a boilerplate set of class rules, I can start any new semester much more quickly. All the other teacher’s worked that out their first year on the job, but since I started in the middle of the semester and had to keep afloat, I didn’t have the luxury last semester to get all my paperwork in a recyclable form as much as I would have liked. I might have had to repeat some work this semester as I got my materials more refined, but I won’t have to do it all over again. (In theory.)

I’m challenging myself to take a boldly independent and very different take on class from last semester. I didn’t find my class was talkative enough. I really focused on participation when outlining my goals for class this time, and I am determined to let students have time in every class to speak in a variety of different activities and situations. As such, I need new ways to track how students work in class. I’ve made a “Student Information Sheet” that is going to track everything students do in class. I put the finishing touches on this today, with all the grades I intend to calculate for each student. I’m being wildly optimistic to think I’ll be able to chart everything that goes on in class, but it’s a start at changing my approach to class. When someone asks a question, or starts an interesting conversation, I now have a tool to reward them for it. If someone sleeps or comes late, I can now address that issue.

I’ve actually added homework to my syllabus, and have also added class time each week to answering questions about it from students. There is a chance this might backfire immediately if no one does the work, or if it becomes too time intensive to cover well in class. Worse yet, if no one has any questions, what am I supposed to do with the time left that I added to the lesson? Should I just put on music and do a sexy dance to waste time? Too late now for those sorts of concerns. The semester has already started and it’s full speed ahead!

I’ve also built in quizzes, which also take a lot of time to correct and grade. Well, they are “mini” quizzes, but still. More grades. More data points. Way too much work. Every class I teach will now have grades that aren’t just created out of thin air by someone else’s judgment before I even arrived on the job. By the end of the semester I might actually know the majority of my student’s names and faces. I might have something approaching an actual class underway here. I’m approaching a class with the goal of doing work and trying to get results that I can check and verify as they progress through the semester.

I’m becoming an actual professor. What the hell am I thinking?

I had my first set of classes today for the University semester. It consisted of me reading through my syllabus four times. Four classes in a single day is a lot for me. This will be the last time I have four classes on this particular day, because next week they add another class to my schedule and I’ll have five classes all on the same day. Three in a row in the morning, a short rest, then two in a row in the evening. My voice is raw after one day from all that talking! I can’t even imagine how froggy I’m going to sound when my classes run the entire length they are scheduled and I teach another hour on top of it. Brutal. It’s going to be a really rough semester.

Tomorrow I luckily get the day off to recover, and I can also get the activities and lessons for my warm up class finalized. All the work I had done for the rest of the week’s classes, and all the time I spent preparing materials for the rest of the work I have to do, and I still have a full day of planning for my first week. It. just. never. ends. The ONLY good thing about my schedule is that I see all my classes once before I see any class a second time. That means I only need to carry or prepare one lesson at a time. Doubling up last semester and needing to be a week ahead at all times was a pain in the ass.

My classroom is tiny. I have twenty-five students assigned to a class that feels full with 20 students squeezed inside. I teach all my classes in the same tiny cramped room. If everyone shows up to class there aren’t even enough desks for all my students. People were asking if they could show up for any lesson during the day since I have several back to back classes. If everyone did that, I’d end up with people sitting on the floor if there was a crush of students all trying to sit in the same class. Right now I have a feeling my earliest class all wished they came after lunch, and they all want to sign up at a different time. I had two students beg to get into my class together, but they couldn’t get the computer to register their names. Luckily a few people dropped the course and they got in.

The majority of students haven’t taken the class preceding mine last semester. They went straight to level 2. I’m teaching the upper level course, and only about 20% of students have had the first course. I don’t have any way of restricting who signs up (I don’t get to set enrollment policy), and there are no prerequisites in the computer system, so if they want to jump in feet first I’m not going to stop them, but I’m also not going to lower my standards. Sink or swim freshmen, don’t let those Juniors and Seniors eat you alive!

The best thing to happen in class was when I wrote the name of the class on the board and turned around. “This is my name, and I’m teaching this book and this level. Are you all in the right class?”

One student grabbed his bag and schedule and ran out. “Guess not.”

It never happened again every other time I tried it. A student lasted 30 seconds in my class before they ran out!

There were a few legitimately excellent students that stood out already. One student asked if there was a “Koreans Only” rule for admission to the class. I said that anyone could study in the class, but was curious why she asked. She appeared to be Korean, but spoke excellent English. “Oh, I’m Canadian. I just wanted to know if it was okay for me to sign up for this class too.” Cool. I have my first Canuck in class. (The Spell Check suggested “Canker” for a correct spelling of the word “Canuck”. Heh. That doesn’t seem right.)

The Canadian even helped a student who was looking to sign up for class. He didn’t speak any English at all. I have no idea what he is doing in the class. He didn’t understand anything I was saying. I’ve also got two male students competing to be teacher’s pets. Whatever. If my long winded syllabus speech, with lots of promises of homework didn’t scare off a few people, nothing will.

The science-y presentation class continues to amuse no one and is growing in size and scale in failure. The registration for the class has been a total disaster, with classes available to be taught with staff scheduled but classrooms sitting empty, while other classes that don’t exist on anyone’s schedule being filled with students without teachers available to teach them. The registration started TODAY, after the first sets of classes were supposed to start. There were classes opened only after they were in session. No students were able to sign up before the class began. WHOOPS! That made it easy for the teacher responsible. Show up to an empty classroom and wait. There is no roster, no attendance sheets, nothing. Utter madness. Somehow this class is well know and highly desirable, yet all these mistakes are no one’s fault. No one takes responsibility for the mistakes, and they just pass on the blame to the computer system. Lucky that exists in a non-humanoid form. When the schools finally get around to replacing all the teachers and staff with robots, the robot that get’s blamed for all the mistakes come student registration time will likely go on a shooting spree.

Today was supposed to be a somewhat hectic day. I was going to go to different stores and do the weekly shopping. I needed a haircut, and to finalize a few documents for my classes which begin this week. It was raining, so any plan to talk the dog for a walk, or the family along for the trip around town got canceled. Most of the day was spent hanging around with Glow and trying to catch up on sleep. The girl just doesn’t want to go to bed early, and when she does go to bed she wakes up in the middle of the night and wants to play. I predict a long, sleepless semester.

Most of all, I’ve been spending the entire day trying to think of what I might need to do to make the beginning of my semester start smoothly. I keep trying to recall all the different things I need to copy, correct, view, print, and whatever else I need to do before class starts tomorrow morning. The first week of class is an adjustment period for everyone. Nothing of educational value will actually be done for the majority of the first week. No one has books. No one knows anyone else. It’s all awkward and quiet. I come in, explain my syllabus and answer a few embarrassing personal questions, assign some homework, and then do it all over again for every class I see. The next class is spent doing group activities and ice breakers, then data mining for personal information on each of the students so that I can have the background information I need to start evaluating everyone.

I’ve been trying to decide how much paperwork and tracking I want to do with students through the semester. I’m making a personal sheet for each student in the class to write down homework scores and participation grades. This is going to be a huge headache to deal with, but I’m doing it so that I’ll be forced to remember each student, their name, their information, and something about their behavior and activity level in class. If I student comes to me at the end of the semester, I want to point to this particular paper and say, “Well, you got a C+ because you just didn’t talk enough during this particular month of activities.”

It’s hard to keep everybody straight, and learning names was a big challenge that I’m hoping the students will help me with this year. Their first homework assignment, besides getting the right book, is to get a picture for my student sheet. This is so that I can keep a face and a name in mind while I grade them later in the year. I can’t tell you how many times androgynous names like “Jin” or “June” cause me all sorts of problems when I have to keep students straight between multiple classes. I’ve also got to get nicknames or some sort of way to call on them in class that makes each student distinct. It could be “snaggle tooth Jin” or “Big Glasses June” when I get a picture. That would help keep the students with the same names straight. In addition, I need email addresses so that if I need to contact them outside of class I’ll have it available. I need all this stuff now because students show up the first week and then disappear until the end of the semester. If that happens, I need to have a record of their disappearance.

I’ve tried to pick through all the different things I might need to do in the first week or two to keep my class moving in the right direction. I think I’ve got it worked out, but I just don’t know what sort of headaches to expect. In a week’s time things might have gone off the rails and I’ll need to completely rethink everything again. Setting the class up correctly and getting the tone and atmosphere correct the first time is important. Being prepared and professional looking, while friendly and approachable takes a balance too. Thankfully I’ve got a few days this week to stop and plan the last few details before the semester starts in earnest. Then it is a long grinding marathon to the end of the semester.

Right now approximately 50% of the projects, activities, tests, quizzes, and various other assorted items I am doing in my Freshmen English class have either been prepared, thought about, or done before and only need minor tweaking. I’ve planned six weeks out, which is impressive for me. If all goes well, all I need to do is prepare a few quizzes based on what we get to in class, and find a few more things to fill up my class for time if I notice I’m letting students out too early. This early preparation gives me time to think of what I want to do, work on improving it, and hopefully avoid any last minute dash for materials that need to work the first time perfectly to avoid disaster like I had last semester.

Still, I can’t shake that nagging feeling I’ve forgotten something.

Seeing as I am getting paid to entertain people studying scientists with Power Point slides for a few hours each week, I thought I should go through and start improving the slides I was given by the people in charge of creating the materials. They’ve collected information from sources they didn’t bother to cite. The notes are liberally based around things taken from Wikipedia. I’ll just leave it at that.

Anyway, since I have to get up in front of people and use them in a class, I decided that anything I present should at least be investigated a little, expanded when needed, and corrected when proven inaccurate. I’m willing to bet I’m going the extra mile with this class for no goof reason, but I’d rather be talking about something interesting than reading off boring slides any day. I’ve got plenty of other work I could do, but I’m three weeks ahead with my materials in this particular class so I can spend a little time indulging myself to keep the quality high.

Basically I open up the presentation and find definitions and further clarification on any topic using the Internet. This is not scientifically rigorous, but I’m not being paid enough, or have enough time to be scientifically thorough. This is a “science-y” class, not a “science” class. All my slides should contain a disclaimer that says, “While not independently verified to be entirely accurate through scientific means, these ideas are generally know to be true by more than a few people on the Internet.”

Anyway, while “researching” some of my slides I discovered lots of interesting stuff. For example, the difference between a Rod of Asclepius and a Caduceus and how they are commonly confused for being the same thing. I do this sort of stuff all the time in my own free time, but now I get to use that random knowledge in my class. All I have to do is focus and keep on topic while I start diving into links related to links related to my topic and I can find all sorts of interesting stuff. I have to avoid the pitfall of using Wikipedia, where you get off onto some sort of tangent and lose three hours.

Weird Flickr Pool dedicated to Traffic Girls in North Korea.

More Traffic Girls.

Today I went in with a problem with my schedule. It turns out my “final schedule” was just what the computer said it knew I was teaching, but not the actual “final schedule” that I had to teach. They had dumped an extra class on me during the week the computer didn’t know about, and I had only gotten an email about a few weeks back which could have been a “suggestion” or a “actual class addition”. I wanted to know if the schedule was right and the class has been canceled, or the email was right and I had a class that was a “surprise” addition. Classes get added and dropped all the time, so I wanted to make clear what I was responsible for before I finalized my materials for next week and started printing everything off.

The coordinator in charge of adding the new class to my schedule was succinct in her judgement. Her claim was that “the email was the final authority”. It was “absolutely correct”. Any additional class she put on my schedule that didn’t overlap a current class time on my final schedule from the computer was added officially by her account. Okay then, one more class for me. My base schedule has non-optional overtime built right in, which is a violation of my contract. I’ll bring that up at performance review time. This starts at every school that looks to make money wringing the free time out of their teachers. Sad it’s happening so soon at this job.

The surprising thing about this “absolutely correct” email was that they had assigned room numbers to all my classes, but the assignments made no sense. The presentation class for this new program was assigned to a room with no projector, computer, or any means to teach the class. Every teacher in the entire program would teach Power Point slides without the means to do so, and it would have been a nightmare sorting out the room assignments once the semester started. More than a hundred or more people would have shown up to the wrong room for their first day of class if I hadn’t pointed out that the “absolutely correct” email wasn’t correct about those rooms.

I saved everyone enrolled, and everyone on the staff the headache by pointing this out early. She said she could handle it because she was in charge of assigning rooms to all classes. Whoops. I caught her mistake and made her fix it in front of her coworkers in the office.

To her credit, the coordinator did issue a correction to the “absolutely correct” email, noting that I had pointed out the need for a room change. The other people in the program will get spared from having to deal with this particular coordinator on this issue. The worst part is that I know I will be dealing with her for the ENTIRE semester, catching mistakes and little cute errors that she is too busy to notice, but make the teacher’s lives impossible. As long as you catch it early through vigilance it is not too bad, but otherwise you never can be sure what you read is right or not.