First day

4 Sep 06

I got up today with the intent of riding over to my college building first thing in the morning. As fate would have it, it started to rain. It is still raining pretty heavily. Once it stops I will go on over.

This is the first day that I am teaching. The good part is that I only have one class today, and it starts at 17:00 [get used to it, all time here is in 24 hour convention]. The bad news is that I have done, essentially, no prep. Consider that it was at about 16:00 yesterday evening that I was even told what I would be teaching.

I went to the building that I will be teaching in. I felt pretty good that I managed to find it. Along the way the road was flooded and I ended up riding on the sidewalk after the water got up to the bottom bracket on the bicycle. I then went I to get an idea as to what I am to be doing at this class.

I went to my class. I was told that I am to be teaching a film-based class. The in intent is to show films and to explain and discuss the films with the class. I discovered that the college had no movies and expected me to be able to provide them. The issue is that I was not told about this and arrived with very few movies. I brought a small number of DVDs that interest me.

The first shock was when I showed up for class. The issue was not that there was no power. That is an act of God and I can deal with that. The issue was that my classes had no projectors. There was no way of showing the movies. There are no audio video carts. There was nothing.

This threw off my whole plan. It is very hard to talk about movies when the student has not sent the movie. Many of the lesson plans that would involve ideas, such as, think of a movie that you have seen, will not work simply because that relies on a western style of thinking and are nearly impossible to communicate.

I muddled through the class and returned to my apartment in order to try to develop a new idea for approaching this class.

Upon my return Michelle invited Zeneta and I to go out for dinner. We tried a local restaurant and liked it. To order we pointed at what another diner was eating and indicated that we wanted one each. It was a sort of a egg, vegetable, and noodle dish.