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There are lessons that go so badly

Monday 28 February 2005

that I stand there with the awful truth rattling around in my head–that which I only admit even to myself only rarely. Sometimes the class dynamic is such that I could teach the class drunk or sober, I could teach new material or review material that I know is problematic, I could be a hard-ass or totally relaxed, and the result in each case would be the same: a complete waste of time.

Really, I walk out of some lessons thinking I wasted my time and their time together. A class of twenty — that’s fifteen man-hours down the tube.

And I wish I could put all the blame at students’ feet. After all, it’s only human not to want to fess up to your own failings. But truth is, I waste as much time as they do sometimes. The trouble is, I only realize that after the time has been wasted. (Nice passive attempt to avoid responsibility.)

The upshot is that there’s always tomorrow’s lesson to make up for it. But sometimes tomorrow’s schedule looms instead of sitting there passively.

Tough Breaks

Saturday 26 February 2005

I never thought I’d complain about too many breaks, but I always find myself doing just that during the second semester of a Polish school year.

Basically, the beefy part of the Polish school calendar ends with Christmas break. Because the two-week Christmas break does not coincide with the completion of the semester, it marks the beginning of the on-again, off-again season of the school year.

This is how it’s playing out this year:

  • After three weeks back at school after Christmas break, the semester ended and the students got a much deserved two week break.
  • At the end of the first week back, seniors got two days off to go to CzÄ™stochowa to spend all night praying for their exit exams. (I wish I was making that up, but I’m not. More later.)
  • This year, we get an entire week back at school for everyone after the senior prayer session before “rekolekcja” begins. After the first three lessons on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, students head to the church for something like a revival — an effort to get everyone spiritually prepared for Easter
  • Which provides about another week off in late March.
  • Three weeks back and it’s time for the matura — exit exams.
  • After the matura, there are no seniors — not exactly the same as a break, but my hours this year will be cut almost in half.

Put all that together and it’s clear why the last day of school is 24 June.

Numa Numa III

Friday 25 February 2005

An idiosyncrasy of turning relatively high in Google searches for a “hot query” is that you receive this kind of email:

Dear Publisher,

Hello! I came across your site while browsing google for sites with content related to “Numa Numa”. My name is Henri Duong and I am the Sr. Media Buyer for the (ASN) Ad Serving Network and we are looking for an elite group of publishers that can deliver quality US traffic.

Out of curiosity we are currently looking for these minimum requirements and would like to know if your site qualifies to be a part of our network opportunity in remainding Quarter of 2005 and ongoing.

  1. Alexa rankings under 100K or can maintain a minimum of over 30K US impressions a day with at least 5K unique visitor traffic.
  2. Current creative ad sizes that we are buying include: 720×300 pops/ 300×250 cubes/ 728×90 banners other banners can be served on a case by case basis.
  3. We pay a CPM basis for creatives with net 30 payment terms.

Please contact me for further details if you are interested and fall in these categories. We look forward to serving you with the Ad Serving Network.

Best regards,
Henri Duong

With an average lately of about 1,500 hits a month, I certainly don’t qualify. But since I was sent a generic “Dear Publisher” letter, I didn’t write back to tell Mr. Duong how flattered I was.

Answer 35

Thursday 24 February 2005

Would you give up half of what you own now for a pill that would permanently change you so that one hour of sleep each day would fully refresh you?

The older I get, the more inclined I am to answer this question in the affirmative. Sleep is only truly pleasant when you’re not forced to put a premature end to it with an obnoxious screech from the alarm clock. Otherwise, I’m fairly neutral about sleep (especially since I almost never remember my dreams) and am positively annoyed by it when I can’t shake the initial grogginess of waking up — those days you’re sure you would pay to be able to stay in bed.

Question 200
In conversations, do you tend to listen or talk more? (Additional questions: What are you looking for when you converse with people? What kinds of things do you normally discuss? Are there other things that would be more interesting to you?

I’m not sure that I feel I don’t have enough time; it’s simply that I think it would always be a good thing to have more time. Right now, I have a great deal more free time than Kinga because of the nature of my teaching job (not to mention all the damn breaks we get) and fairly hefty project Kinga’s been working on. No kids, either.

The idea of having an additional five to seven hours a day brings all kinds of wonderful thoughts to mind: think of all the books I could read, all exercise I could do, all the time I could spend with friends.

As far as sacrificing half my belongings, the only qualm I would have is that I would be very hesitant to agree if someone else chose which of my things to take in payment. Take all my CDs, (almost) all my books, my clothes, furniture — neutral objects that can be fairly easily replaced. Yes, I know books are hardly “neutral” objects, but I have very little sentimental attachment to them when compared to the glass paintings Kinga and I received for wedding presents or selected old letters from my naïve youth or the cast-iron skillet that my mother gave me which was her mother’s and so on.

My motivation for saying “Yes” also derives from the simple fact that as we age, time seems to move faster. That’s probably because each year represents a smaller percent of our lives. When I was ten, a year was ten percent of my life; when I was twenty, it was five percent of my life; how that I’m over thirty, it’s only a little over three percent. By the time I’m a grandfather, a year will be a mere one and a half percent. That explains why summer seemed endless when I was in grade school, while now the entire school year passes in a flash.

Lastly, considering my non-theistic views, I’m not inclined to believe there’s any sort of life after death, so the more time I get here, the better.

Something to Gain

Wednesday 23 February 2005

Regarding the fact that more atheists tend to read Christian apology than vice versa, Nina commented,

There is no reward in keeping an open mind to atheism, whereas we atheists (I’m not including you here, I noted your rejection of that concept as well, though I don’t understand where that places you) are given plenty of incentives to open up to the possibility of a God. I would be curious whether you have talked about this with Poles? And if so, how have they reacted?

I’m not so sure that there isn’t a “reward in keeping an open mind to atheism.” I recall a sort of relief I felt when I finally admitted to myself that I didn’t believe in much of anything, perhaps something like the peace Christian converts say they feel when the “accept the Lord.”

Could it be that others might feel the same if they “let go” without the “and let God” addendum? Perhaps.

But I guess Nina is right — if someone really believes something, what does she stand to gain in doubting it, especially when it’s something beyond proof, like religious faith.

In rural southern Poland, the notion of being a non-believer seems to be virtually unimaginable. If the subject of religious belief comes up, I general start broad and wind my way down, from “I’m not a Catholic” eventually, if pressed, to “I don’t have any positive belief about any diety.” “I can’t imagine my life without God,” is a common reaction, and that is probably more ontologically true than the speaker imagines. It’s like imagining life without, say, breathing.

Religion — rather, Catholicism — is so deeply infused in the Polish highlander’s culture and worldview that it is as natural as a blue sky.

Sure — you can imagine the sky’s red, but what for?

Numa Numa II

Sunday 20 February 2005

America, it seems, is lagging behind Europe in the Numa Numa video craze.

The song it’s based on, O-Zone’s “Dragostea Din Tei,” was the hit of the summer in Europe, but largely unknown in the States, I think.

I wrote about playing the Numa video at a party and as the comment invitation asked, “Who in the States has heard this nonsense?” It turns out that a friend had heard the song because she’s dating…a Frenchman.

My friend Gruby (Polish for “fat,” though he’s not) in Warsaw sent me the link to a Hungarian site that had the video in early January. My first reaction: “Gruby’s brother!” Indeed, they do look similar, but Gruby assured me that it wasn’t.

Since the song had been popular here in Europe, I didn’t need to make any assumptions about the music. The boy in the video, though, I assumed to be Hungarian.

I wasn’t the only one to make such a connection: Bob at I Am A Christian Too thought it was Hungarian techno.

The upshot of all this is that because the lad in the video is in fact not Hungarian but a Jersey boy named Gary, I’m getting hundreds of hits from Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

So — a Romanian pop group makes a song that a Jersey boy named Gary lip-syncs to, which a Warsaw-Pole sends to an American living in southern Poland, who in turn ends up getting tons of hits from the States because America has finally discovered the Numa video…because his name too is Gary.

Answer 4: Memory and Happiness

Thursday 17 February 2005

And waste an entire year of my life? How can anything be called “perfect happiness” if we don’t remember it later? “Without memory, our existence would be barren and opaque, like a prison cell into which no light penetrates, like a tomb which rejects the living,” wrote Elie Wiese inl his Nobel Lecture.

Question 35 Would you give up half of what you own now for a pill that would permanently change you so that one hour of sleep each day would fully refresh you? (Additional questions: Do you feel you have enough time? If not, what would give you that feeling? How much has your attitude about time changed as you’ve aged?) Answers due 25 February Class dismissed

I am, admittedly, in love with memory. Obsessed, at one point. Willa Cather wrote in My Antonia, “Some memories are realities and better than anything that can ever happen to one again.” It could have been a summary of my general view on life at that time, many years ago, when I was unsure of the future and only certain that the past had often been wondrous.

I was so worried about forgetting something, and I soon found that in fact I remembered insignificant details about things that my friends perhaps didn’t even notice.

Once I sat in horror as a friend told me that not only could she not remember what we’d talked about in a conversation six months earlier, but she couldn’t even remember having the conversation. It was not a lighthearted talk about who’s going to make it to the World Series – it was a discussion of our entire friendship up to that point. “And she can’t remember it?!” I lay in bed thinking that night, unable to understand how it was possible.

What would be the good of a year’s experiences that would leave no mark upon us? In many ways, we are our memories:

How much of what we are, what we know about ourselves, is really true? We are merely the sum of viewpoints, and human memory is treacherous and inconsistent.
Ilan Stavans, On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language

Learning is memory, especially learning from mistakes. But we don’t just learn from our unhappy memories, and so the notion of a year spent that leaves no memory is absolutely horrifying to me.

It’s a year spent completely drunk. When drunk, we’re often perfectly happy; the next day, we often don’t remember our antics. Take that and multiply it by 365 and you get Question 4’s “one year in perfect happiness.”

But what is meant by “perfect happiness?” I’ve always tried to act as if happiness depending on me, not on other people. “How I choose to react” and similar notions. In other words, for a middle class guy like me, happiness is around every corner. I really lack nothing materially–food, clothing warmth–and so what is there to be unhappy about? That statement reveals quite a bit about my experiences, I realize.

Happiness has also included the thought that, when I look back on a given moment, I’ll still be happy – no regret, in other words.

Second, what is meant by “remember nothing?” Does it mean I would immediately forget every moment as soon as it passed? Or does it mean that I would accumulate a year of memories, then suddenly they would vanish? Either option seems horrible to me.

This question is somewhat shallow, I must admit, because I can’t think that anyone would answer in the affirmative. Even without the extreme view that the present moment doesn’t really exist and instead is something trapped between what was and what will be, the present moment is so brief that it represents an atomically small percent of our lives. Much more of our lives are spent remembering the past or planning the future than living the moment.

Perhaps that’s the trick, having your Book of Questions cake and eating it too: make the most of the moment. It’s easier said than done.

Polish Jumping Bean

Tuesday 15 February 2005

My mother-in-law says that when he was young, Kamil, her brother’s son, used to run everywhere and jump off of everything.

His jumping in particular paid off. Now he’s on the first squad of the Polish national ski-jumping team, and he recently participated in his first World Cup event.

He finished in seventh place. That was two places higher than Polish hero Adam Małysz, three-time world cup winner.

Of the surprising win over Małysz, Kamil’s father said,

In all this happiness, we mustn’t forget that beating Małysz was an accident. Adam is a great competitor who had a little weaker day yesterday, and Kamil made the most of it.

According to his trainer, Kamil has the best technique of the entire squad. “A real pearl,” summarized nation team trainer Heinz Kuttin (Source: Onet.pl).

At our August wedding, it was Kamil who casually reached down to grab my thrown tie.