Monday, January 11, 2010

Shooting for zero and accomplishing it!

My family owns a large KEEP in the south of England. When I was 18, I studied WATER at college so that I would understand farming better. My brother is in charge of one part of the business and he PICK cows and sheep. Some of these are HARVEST and sold for their meat. he also sells AGRICULTURE such as maize and wheat. We DAIRY vegetables for a few years, but we didn't make enough money at it, so five years ago we GROW a lot of apple and pear trees instead. In the late summer we have extra workers to help FARM the fruit and AGRICULTURE the wheat. Some years are very difficult in farming. Last year, there was no rain for two months, which caused a PLANT. The CROP was very hard and we had to GROUND the maize every week.
This is a student's long-winded, fill-in-the-blanks way of saying "I didn't bother with homework at all this term".
Since I hurt my leg in the accident, it's been difficult to BITE my knees.
I should bloody well think so!
Do you think I can OVERDO my homework if it's not very good?
I rather suspect that in your case you will not be overdoing homework at any point in the foreseeable future.
The alarm didn't EXPLODED this morning – there must be something wrong with it.
Talk about a strict morning routine!
The police believe the young boy was responsible for HIS PARENTS.
The RCMP is teaching cops abroad now?
I had to COMB my nose in the middle of the lecture – it was a bit embarrassing
I can only imagine.
I always sit ON the table for dinner.
"...but I can't figure out why people have stopped inviting me."
Put this coat on – it'll MAKE you dry if it rains.
Does it only dry me when raining or will stepping under a shower do?
  • How many MISTAKE do you MAKE at school?
  • About twelve including two languages and all the sciences.
...Words fail me....
  • What's the matter?
  • I don't know but I MIGHT BE getting headaches. I think I should make an appointment to see the doctor.
My arm might be broken as well and it is quite possible I've been decapitated.
If you don't go to bed when you have a flu IT OFTEN GETS DARK.
...and if you get out of bed when you have muscle cramps it often snows?
remove writing from the board = PUT it off
Yeah, I procrastinate on cleaning up myself.
The children were here a minute ago, but now they've RECHARGED.
Never ever recharge your children. It takes forever for them to run out of energy.
A fall in sales could lead to A PAY RISE FOR ALL THE WORKERS.
I wish my employers were so enlightened in these harsh economic times.
If you start to recover from an illness YOU PROBABLY DON'T GET BETTER AT IT.
And I was trying so hard to perfect my flu too!

Lest you think I'm being unusually cruel even for me, keep in mind these two points:
  • These are university students planning to study abroad.
  • This is all lifted directly from the homework they were supposed to have been doing all term.


Oh, and every entry up there is from a different student.

Exam time cruelty

So, my first exam of the term is behind me: English Vocabulary. The students were concerned about this one for the past month or so, constantly asking me if it was going to be difficult. I was always on-message when I told them "if you've been doing your assigned homework this will be an easy exam".

This is literally the case.

The course texts for this class are a pair of books called English Vocabulary in Use and Test Your English Vocabulary in Use. I assigned homework in the form of the mini-tests in the latter every week to be done for the next class. Each class I would spot-check the homework by taking one of the mini-tests and grading it. Each mini-test is worth 30 points (in question sets that varied from 1 point to 15 points each). I was getting an astonishing number of people passing in mini-tests with scores of 29 and 30. Well, astonishing unless you noted that the back of the book had answers to all the questions.

The silly students thought I wouldn't notice. (Hint: if you're copying the errors from the textbook's answer page, I'm going to notice!)

So, back to the exam. For the exam I made up eight pages worth 20 points each. Each page had exercises taken directly from the book they had been assigned as homework. I did eight pages but each student only had 3. This was done as an anti-cheating mechanism: no student was going to be sitting next to someone with the same mix of exam questions and at first glance it's going to look like I actually did what I had threatened: made 31 different exams. (Cheating is an epidemic in Chinese academic environments, you see.) But the key is something I have to stress again: each question was taken directly from the book they had been assigned as homework. So quite literally this exam would have been a cakewalk for the students who did their homework.

I haven't graded the exams formally yet, but I have glanced over them rapidly as a sampler. There's going to be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over this one.

Maybe writing the following on the board in bright, cheery red letters before the exam was going overboard:

EXAMS ARE FUN!
(for the teachers...)

Amusing small minds.

So, being the only person in the adult portion of the family with a sense of fun, it is always left up to me to find ways to warp the mind of amuse the kid. Here's one of the simpler things I do.

This game is played in the bathroom (or anywhere where there is a sizable mirror). When the kid is looking in the mirror, make a face. (I personally suck in my cheeks until my lips protrude like fish lips.) Wait for the kid to spot you in the mirror. Almost invariably the kid will look to the real you to see what's going on. The trick is to make sure that you erase that face before his eyes focus on you. Now he's faced with a mystery: the you in the mirror has a distorted image. The real you looks perfectly normal.

I can keep Lucas entertained for quite a while when I do this. He hasn't managed to catch me in the act yet.

Sunday, January 10, 2010

How to spoil a birthday in one easy step...

Get struck down by fever.

So yesterday was Lucas' second birthday, but I got some nasty virus or other and spent most of the day and well into the night wandering in and out of semi-consciousness. I basically missed his second birthday. This means everything here is second-hand information.

First, I have to apologize to my mother. There are no pictures because Joan forgot to take the camera when she went out with Lucas and her mother. You'll have to do the same as me and just imagine.

The first thing the intrepid trio did was go shopping for some foodstuffs. In the process they got a small cake and ate it with Lucas. After shopping they went to a small park in the middle of Wuchang called Hong Shan park (literally "flood mountain park"), meeting up with Joan's cousin with whom we have a very close relationship. There he ran around and looked at everything and generally had a good time. There was some kind of "drumming for kids" display there that Lucas partook of, apparently striking his drum with great zeal (but no sense of rhythm if I know my boy). Indeed he thought it was so much fun he stole the drumstick. (Nobody noticed this last point until they were a looooooooong distance away from the park, so now he has a drumstick.)

After the park it was time for the restaurant and eating. This went as usual but for one small thing: Joan's retainers accidentally got left on the table, wrapped in tissues. She didn't know this until everybody made it home, however. She called the restaurant and asked if they'd seen them but nobody had. She had to make the long trip back to the restaurant and then root around in the (dry) garbage until, just shortly before she was about to give up, she found them. Some extreme cleaning measures later she has a pair of retainers again.

I'd like to post more, but I'm still a bit dizzy so this is it for today.

Saturday, January 2, 2010

Shopping with the master of disaster.

So, we were shut in most of the day yesterday between the annoying drizzle of rain and the low (for here) temperatures. Lucas, my sweet little idiot, was all ramped up on energy because the apartment really isn't big enough for him to safely release any. (When he starts things break. Or get annoyed. Or both. It all really depends on the sentience levels in question.)

Finally, after dinner, and after a few hours without rain, I'd had enough. After having browbeaten Joan for long enough we finally left the apartment as a family to take a longish walk.

Lucas has a new game, incidentally, that causes heart stoppage in the adults in his life. It follows these steps:

  1. Run full-tilt down the sidewalk.
  2. Suddenly collapse to his knees.
  3. Follow that up with collapsing to the ground in a sprawl.
He loves it and plays it endlessly while we look on in shock (the first few times) and annoyance (Joan and her mother) or laughter (me).

This is where shopping enters the picture. While we were out, we walked past a small supermarket. I'd been there lots before but Joan and her mother had never stopped in. Since we needed some vegetables, Joan's mother decided to go check it out. (It turns out that some things are available there cheaper than the usual haunt.) I took Lucas inside partially for warmth and partially for the sheer fun of it.

Lucas, in his inimitable fashion, and after the initial wariness of someplace new, took to the place like carassius auratus auratus takes to oxidane[1]. He ran up and down the (very narrow) aisles happily looking at all the strange stuff while his father desperately tried to keep up without knocking anything off the shelves.

Now, I've seen badly behaved children in departement stores before, especially in Canada where parents seem to think that it's perfectly OK for their children to pull things off of shelves, open packages, etc. In China this is more rare. Even by local standards, however, Lucas was a marvel. For example quite by accident we stumbled over the toy aisle. This was like kiddie crack for Lucas: dozens of interesting things that he wanted and wanted now. Here's the difference, though, between Lucas and tens of thousands of other children I've personally witnessed. He'd follow these steps:
  1. Point excitedly at an item and say "要!" (want!).
  2. Look expectantly at me with a grave face.
  3. Listen to me gently say "no".
  4. Move to the next item.
  5. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Note the absence of any of the following:
  • Tantrums.
  • Whining.
  • Clinging.
  • Grabbing. (Well, he did grab one thing, but this was after looking at me and me nodding because I was considering actually buying one; I decided against on quality grounds.)
Other dumb things he did included playing shy with the store clerks (who subtly flocked in his general vicinity like flies to sugar) in just the right way to charm them and, get this, quietly going past the bulk candy (which he recognized excitedly) after being told, once again, "no".

I actually enjoyed going shopping with a toddler. Man, I must have done something really nice in my past life to warrant this kind of son!

[1]Goldfish takes to water.

Friday, January 1, 2010

A glimpse of the future.

Living in China has its disadvantages. It is, after all, a brutal communist dictatorship so it's like living in Exxon or Microsoft or the like: a corporate state. (Anybody who disagrees with this parallel has either never worked in a medium- to large-sized company or has never lived in a communist state.) It is heavily polluted. It is alien beyond all belief at times.

One advantage that I have, however, living here in China, is that I know the future before you do. While I'm writing this, for example, most of the people who read my blog are still living in the year 2009. I've been living in the year 2010 for almost a whole day now. Magnanimous guy that I am, however, I will give you a glimpse of what the future will bring you.

The future is pretty much the same as the past.

There you go.

And 新年快乐 (Happy New Year) to you all!