New York Times

New York is an adult Disneyland. No, not that kind of adult! I mean, it's a living amusement park for human beings. You could walk for miles and miles, exploring neighborhoods, eating different foods, watching different people, and never get bored! Here's a play by play of our trip. We got off the plane and decided to take the bus and the subway instead of a cab. I was amazed at the diversity! Even California didn't have the kind of diversity that I saw in New York. In this picture you see all kinds of different people sitting towards the back of the bus. I wanted to take a picture of the front of the bus but the Klingons, Wookies, and Nazgûl told me that they didn't want their pictures taken. I shouldn't have brought these shoes. These shoes are cool but they hurt my feet. There was so much walking! I should have brought my skateboard instead. Disneyland has Mickey Mouse. New York has the Naked Cowboy. Part of me regards him as a hero. The other part of me is taking a hot shower and scrubbing vigorously with soap. We went to Rockefeller Center which, along with every other building in New York, has a lot of offices. It also has a shrine to the Office. I was disappointed by how small it was. That's what she said. We tried to get tickets to see Wicked. We couldn't afford the face value tickets so we tried to get the lottery tickets instead. It was so exciting! You would put your name down and they put it in a cylinder and would roll it around and then pull some names out. It was exciting because you knew that you didn't have a good chance of winning. But this was true for everyone there. So it was especially exciting to see people get super pumped when they won. This was one of my favorite things about our trip. We did this three times! And we didn't win any of those times. BUT IT WAS SO EXCITING! Anne and Jason were such a blessing to us. We got to stay at their apartment and they put up with us even though they were super busy. I got to teach Anne how to lose in chess. I told her if she ever got better, I would never play with her again. I hope the motivational talk worked. Jason loves to eat. It's a good thing I do too. I also played a lot of Wii that week. I could've probably played Wii all week. But my wife wasn't going to let me do that. We saw these amazing cupcakes. I think Mike could make better cupcakes. But I'm not sure. I guess he'll just have to make me some so I can see if they're better than these cupcakes. But seriously, these cupcakes were A May Zing. One of the wife's friends is the layout guru for Seventeen. I asked if I could get my headshot on the cover of Seventeen. She told me to send her my stuff. I hope to get some glamour shots done soon. Chinatown was fun. We ate some ice cream at the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory. Totally worth it. We were going to eat some dumplings but because my wife makes awesome dumplings I was afraid that I was going to be disappointed. We ate Malaysian food instead (which was delicious!). Afterward, we saw this sign. Apparently people have been leaving dumplings everywhere. Probably because they aren't as good as my wife's dumplings. I'm glad we didn't eat dumplings. We ended our trip at the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge was a pretty awesome piece of architecture. Walking across it was really fun. Coming back from New York made me realize that I love living in cities. On the flip side, though, it would be difficult to raise a family there. If you're interested you can see more pictures here: http://picasaweb.google.com/MisterAvery/NewYork

I'm not Japanese

Games and highschoolers are a weird combination. On the one hand, high schoolers hate traditional lecturing so they're all ways suggesting stuff like "Mr. Chan, can we play a game?" But once they start playing a game you start hearing a lot of whining: "That's not fair!", "Can we stop playing this game?", "Can we just sit around and talk?", etc. My troubles all began with my our impending trip to New York. Casey and I decided to schedule the second diagnostic while we were gone, since it would require very little work from the sub. So, being the good foolish teacher that I am, I decided to have a review week! On Wednesday I decided to do a review session and to toss out Japanese (Kasugai) gummies to students that answered. That worked pretty well, but the initial reaction to the candy went something like this.

[Student catches candy] [Looks at candy] [Squints, unable to read the wrapper] [Realizes it is in another language] [Eyes it suspiciously] [Eats foreign candy] Student: Hrm. Not bad! Mr. Chan, where did you get these? Me: From the store. And I want everyone to know that I'm not Japanese.

So they ended up liking it. Which was cool. The funny thing was that on Friday we played Jeopardy and they came up with their own team names. Here's a picture of the board: Notice that one of the students decided to name their name some of the Japanese characters they found on the wrapper. I thought it was very funny. And very difficult. Because now I didn't know what to call their team. Shrug. I know that people in Ennis probably don't have any access to the kind of cultural diversity I take for granted. One of my dreams is to invite a Japanese chef to come and make sushi for my whole class. It'd be fun to watch different people get grossed out. It'd also be cool to see if some of the kids enjoyed it too. Back to Jeopardy. So in the end, it seemed like everyone had fun, but it was so much work that I'm having second thoughts about doing that again. Which is too bad since I loved (and still love) playing Jeopardy.

Adventures in Babysitting

This isn't my usual Sabbath post. I'm here at TJ, subbing. Some highlights or interesting bits of my day so far:

• They have a computer in the classroom. Which means that I can check email and surf the web. It's good but it makes me think that the real teacher here probably wastes a lot of time.
• 1st period:

Student 1: What's that book for? Student 2: It's to read. What do you think a book is for?

• I have to begin each quiz with a spiel on cheating. They still tried to cheat even when I told them I could see them cheating. I had to step in and ask them to put away their crib sheets.
• 4th period:

Student 1: Why don't you want to play basketball or baseball? Student 2: I play tuba. See how strong my shoulders are?

• During roll call:

  Me: Miguel? Student: Call me Michaelangelo.

  Are you for real?
• 5th period:

Student: Can I go to the bathroom? Me: No. You're an adult. You can hold it for 30 minutes. If you can't hold it for 30 minutes, I hope you're wearing a diaper.

• Here's a picture of what some of the students drew of me. I thought it was hilarious! For whatever reason, they're really into drugs. They thought it would be awesome to draw SpongeBob smoking crack.

I really like TJ. I'd definitely teach here if I could. The students here are receptive to authority and I think they would be receptive to good teaching. There's definitely a difference in culture here between my regular teaching gig in Ennis. I feel that the students here are more interested in participating as a group, rather than just individual performance. I also feel that there is a higher level of respect here. But that might just come from being a mean, old sub.