oh Susanna

8:30pm

It’s almost a better time to watch a good movie than type now, I might be needin to download something if that’s alright.  I did watch walter mitty again a few days ago and oddly, there were parts in it that now I don’t like but it’s still good.  I don’t know what to watch what I have.  I used a small amp with excellent speakers for today’s test and I can do any video if I can get the OHP lense to change from purple to something clear. 

I don’t know about corruption anymore.  It's easily understood in the west, large amounts of money disappears or is given and spent unfairly, but with students, when students, once  refugees who live today in an ever present unsettling fear around them I have to ignore and redefine the meaning of corruption with more compassion.

Take the cute kid here has a 42% attendance record.  She needs 70%, she never took the first quiz and did 1 out of ten hw assignments.  So she comes and I gave her the quiz, when she finished it I gave her the nine hw assignments and told her she needed to do these.  She worked at another desk in the office and I graded her quiz which got a 69, and when she finished the homework I changed her 1 to 10 and I turned my laptop and showed her score on the spreadsheet. Passed by a point.  Then I told her  Haroon Azizi had to approve this note with a stamp that wipes away those 14 absences and of course I walked with her to his office two doors away ‘is this legit?’ he laughs yes, it’s from a doctor.  Of course.  For whatever reasons whether that piece of paper accounted for all the days became a mute point.  We were already going through the motions, playing the scene and when I congratulated her she tried to apologize for being a difficult student and problems and family.

I have no idea what you must endure every day, life can really suck here.  Your effort was enough and those homework assignments too, I’m glad we can’t say a paper with some signatures and a stamp is legit, it is.  No matter what’s written on it.  Corruption was avoided because there no gain that wasn't earned.
 

As for the other student I railed on a few days ago I was told to let him take the test and they would withhold his certificate until he shows other proof he wasn’t just in Dubai for fun when I passed out the tests to the class I stapled a 250 writing assignment with his test.  If he wants to pass my class I can find a negotiable deal that wipes out the lame ass excuse for missing classes for some extra work. 

Corruption is managed, I haven’t given in, I won’t be corrupt but I will expect him to work a little harder in order to, what’s the word, save face, I mean they’re Afghans.  Everyone under 30 lived in Pakistani camps.  If he gets over 70 passing mark whatever, if he falls below I will not find him any points.  There’s only so much you should do for a wealthy teenager  who may have fled to Dubai when the Taliban took over Kabul in 1996…wait…he was only two then.  Who knows.

11:46pm—we’re coming into a real slow time here, with only one class three times a week until I hope to leave, a month from today.  How can I remain in the game when it is slow, oh wait, Ramadan will start in two weeks, this should be a serious time of doing nothing and enjoying it.

I watched ‘Legends of the Fall’ and poor Susanna, through no fault of her own a cultivated woman  lost it all.  The movie isn’t as I remembered it the first time at Nasr Cinema in Dubai in 1995 or so.  In fact I didn’t remember anything except horses, Anthony Hopkins and Henry Thomas getting shot up.

But there is a lot to do.  Ireland, Belgian waffling in the Bronx, you have to get cracking and get it all in order and I hope it will, surely it will, why wouldn’t I have a plan before I left here?  I feel so bad for Susanna, can’t stop thinking about what bad luck see suffered.  If snow hadn’t buried the tracks she would have returned to Boston and she wouldn a become such a tragic figure.  So sad.  If only if she had fallen in love with someone other than a long hair Brad Pitt, perhaps she would have been ok.