desert gophers

I gave the new class a mini quiz this morning and within twenty minutes the wheels started coming off.  Students who don’t know how to answer questions look just like prairie gophers, popping up looking around and there I am looking at the gophers and it doesn’t stop the wanderings eyes and in today’s folly the talking got louder until I turned off the a/c and one row of lights and told them I was leaving without their quizzes in five minutes. 

It bothers me greatly that students begin to cheat right in front of me, as if I am supposed to accept it. It not only bothered me, it angered me.  It’s disrespect.  But it also bothered me because I wanted to know what didn’t they understand and was any of their lack of knowledge a result of my teaching.

The 32 question quiz was made by another colleague and for the most part it was a fair assessment of the first two units.  One question was incorrectly answered by everyone and I’ll have to figure out how to explain it, but truthfully, it wasn’t exactly covered in the lame ass textbook.  The lame ass textbook, damn, made for people to learn English in stinking cold London for crying out loud and you ask why the hell is the administration using it and that is an even more absurd question because those in charge shouldn’t be in education. 

I quickly wrote ‘cheated’ on the guilty student’s papers when they handed them in, one rather loud girl was annoyed because I wrote the word on her paper, are you serious, girl, I could have heard you blathering answers from another building.  Aside from the usual it’s a community thing, we are helping each other and in university studies we haven’t learned to distinguish the difference between individual learning and community help, well here is the front line. 

The whole depressing place is exacerbated further with a printer that is used by ten teachers and ran out of toner which means no printing for who the hell knows how long it’ll take to have it replaced.  Yes I bought a printer and it will be called upon to provide the kind of work necessary to make my gophers keep their eyes on their papers.  But I also do not have an overhead projector.  This really stinks because the visual so easily keeps students on task, they know exactly where I am when I can point it out on the board. 

So, two days away from the lame house…I got work to do, I have to pass on church tomorrow, I know I feel kind of bad about it but I’ll cross early in the morning for a McD’s breakfast and then go shopping and return to the grotto early. 

Thankfully I didn’t need the a/c this week, I hope and am grateful everyday  I don’t use it but I know the days are numbered.  The equinox is fast approaching and the sun, which now comes up thirty minutes earlier than it did a month ago is slowly baking the dirt.

So anything else you’d like to get off your chest, it seems it was an aggravating week for you.  It was.  And I try to keep the tv off because that only makes life just about unbearable.  I envy those with enough healthy distractions to keep themselves away from the news. 

If you return me to my home port I will kiss you mother earth.

A colleague made a call for me to the agency that could get me back to Salalah.  Oh, Salalah, land of oceans and mountains and people closer to earth than you’ve ever known.  Bring me back to the Earth, Lord, for if this is your handiwork I wish to be amongst your creation again.

Have you already given up on returning to school to rewrite that old manifesto?  I guess so, I wrote a whole prayer beseeching one to help and nothing has come of it.  I am lazy I know.  I want the opportunity but I don’t want to create it.  Believing someone out there thinks I have a gift or talent worth cultivating I’d be all over it, but the kind of ambition that comes from within just isn’t there and that is a bummer dude.

And an update before I forget, the gal who sacked facebook because of her selfie flirtations took herself off because of exams.  Good for you girl.  Damn.  Imagine a 19 year old American unplugging from the matrix in order to study.  It leaves me imagining some people aren’t addicted to the internet as I assumed.