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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.

I don’t know much about electricity and wiring

Wednesday 19 January 2005

but I’m pretty sure that strange things as were happening around here last night should not be happening.

I’d literally just finished complaining about the techno hell I was scheduled to endure and had gone over to C-Span to watch some more of the Rice confirmation hearings when suddenly the light on my desk went out and the icon indicating that my laptop had switched to battery power.

Frank made the comment that it could be due to the age of the building, speculating that it could have been pre-WW2 and originally unwired, then wired and re-wired. I’m not quite sure of the age of the original building itself, but it could very well have been pre-WW2. In 1999-2001, though, it was completely rebuilt. I don’t mean renovated, I mean rebuilt — all that’s left of the original building is the foundation and the outer walls. The floor Kinga and I live on was actually non-existent then, so everything here is about four years old.

Short-term power outages happen around here (super-rural Poland) semi-regularly, so I thought nothing of it. In fact, for the first time in my life, I was happy about the apparent blackout. “Peace!” I thought.  But the thum-thum-thum-th-th-thum-thum-thum was still going on downstairs.

And Senator Bidden (bless his compromising heart) was still making me smile via Real Player and the LAN router across the hall.

Intrigued, I tried the kitchen light. Nothing. Still further intrigued, I went out into the hall and tried the light switch there. “Ba-ba-ba-PING!” and the incandescent lights were on.

Odd.

As a side note, I will very irritatedly report that most of the students were not hooting and hollering but just sitting at the edge of the room — a typical dance. Why the music has to be so loud for that, I’ll never know.

I put on my coat and descended into Techno Hell. The teachers’ room there was without electricity, but the adjacent areas had power. In fact, as I left, I noticed that there were lights on almost throughout the school. Talking to the teachers there, I learned that they were just as confused about it as I was. No one knew what was going on.

Returning home, I decided to start cooking dinner by candlelight — a minor irritation, compounded by the bit of back luck that had given Techno Hell a different electrical fate than me. “Why oh why didn’t they lose power?” I muttered.

Then the fridge switched on and I thought I was saved.

I reached over to turn on the light — nothing. Fridge running, no light. I checked the lights in the living room. They worked. I went to the bedroom — nothing going. So then I did the only logical thing: I systematically went through the apartment switching on all the lights to see which power outlets were live and which were not.

The bizarre results:

  • The bedroom and bathroom were completely without power.
  • The living room was fine, even though one of the outlets was in the same wall as one of the dead outlets in the bedroom — directly opposite it, in fact. In theory, on the same line.
  • The main light in the kitchen didn’t work, but the small light above the sink did.

Now, as I said, I don’t know much about electrical wiring, but this seems pretty damn odd to me.

And it seems to indicate some pretty weird construction practices. When the maintenance man came, I stood talking to him for a moment with my neighbor, and I found out some even more bizarre info:

  • Most of the wiring for the upper floor where we live goes through a fuse box on that floor — which makes since.
  • Some of the lines run through another fuse box two floors below us.
  • My neighbor had power everywhere except where his fridge was plugged in.

“Who the hell thought up such a wiring plan?!” I wanted to scream/laugh, but I bit my tongue and thanked the maintenance man for his help.

An hour or so later, the power all came back on, but I’m still scratching my head over it.

That’s not the only example of weird wiring in Poland. The switches for most bathroom lights are outside the bathroom. You flip it on as you enter. In the first apartment I lived in, though, the lights were on the hinge side of the door, so if you forgot to turn on the light (which happened when I first arrived), it wasn’t just a matter of sticking your hand out the door. You had to go back out into the hall, close the bathroom door, and turn the light on…

Hootin’ ‘n’ Hollerin’ in Polish Schools

Wednesday 19 January 2005

We have an apartment above an elementary school. That’s living hell when they have school dances. They usually last from two in the afternoon until eight at night: the first two hours for the younger kids and the last four hours for the older elementary school students.

I remember the after-school dance I chaperoned while student teaching in a junior high school. It was an hour and a half.

Four hours seems a bit of an exaggeration.

Our apartment is one floor above the area where they dance, though not directly above it. The junior high kids who come in and serve as DJs turn the music up so loud that the floor of our apartment literally vibrates, and the you can hear the super-low-frequency bass tones reverberating throughout the whole apartment — walls, glasses, ceiling, everything shaking.

You never truly notice how repetitive techno music is until you can only hear the bass and drums. Then, “variation on a theme” seems to be too generous a description.

For an elementary school dance.

I asked one of the teachers if she didn’t think that was perhaps a bit too loud for such young ears.

“It could do serious, lasting damage,” I said.

“Yes, but if we didn’t play it so loud, they couldn’t hoot and holler as they like to do during dances,” was the response.

I’ll pause for a moment to let that one sink in.

All sorts of things were swirling in my mind, and the delicacy of the moment was highlighted by my lack of Polish fluency.

First reaction: “Hum, I always thought it was the teachers who ran a school.” Tactless no matter the level of fluency.

I settled for something along the lines of, “Well, why not simply tell the kids, ‘Look, it’s too loud. You’ll have to be quiet or you won’t hear the music,’ or, ‘This is as loud as we’ll play it. So if you don’t like it, you don’t have to come.'”

“We should,” she laughed.

But they won’t.

So here I sit, thirty-six minutes into a four-hour marathon of “thum-thum-thum-th-th-thum-thum-thum” techno hell.

Middle Ages

Thursday 9 December 2004

Your Honor, the State would like to conclude its case with two exhibits:

Exhibit A:

My client and his recently spent a weekend in Krakow. With Advent coming, that Saturday night was the last big party night for a while, and they were supposed to go to a club opening with some friends. It all fell through, and everyone ended up going back to my client’s friends’ apartment and having a small “impreza” there.

The aforementioned friend lives with five roommates; each of them has a girlfriend–throughout the evening, people were coming and going. The thought of living in such conditions was enough to make my client’s steadily-approaching-middle-age entire body queasy. No privacy; no silence; an apartment always full of strangers; never pausing, let alone stopping — my client got goosebumps just thinking about it.

Exhibit B:

When younger, my client swore to himself that he would never let these two sentences fall from his lips:

  • “That’s not music!”
  • The stuff I listened to growing up — now that’s music.

And yet.

And yet my client has said those very sentences — thankfully not to anyone but his wife — about techno, which my client refers to as “that abomination, that assault to the ears.”

Your Honor, on the basis of the case presented, it’s clear that Middle Age is preparing a full attack on my client, and I, as his counsel, am forced to respectfully request a restraining order be placed upon Middle Age.

Irritation Squared

Friday 12 November 2004

Today I went with Kinga (my wife, for the uninformed) and my father-in-law to Kinga’s brother’s house, which is being built just outside of Krakow. Kinga’s brother is now out of the country, so my father-in-law is taking care of the building process while he’s gone.

The house is “standing raw,” to translate directly from Polish. This means that the walls are done, the roof is done, and it’s ready for the interior finishing.

Houses here are built out of blocks and concrete, not the tooth-pick contracting familiar in America. My friend who spent some time in American working in construction said, “A house like that wouldn’t last a week here. The father would come home drunk one night and destroy the whole thing!”

Recently, the concrete for the floors was poured. There was to be five centimeters of concrete on each floor, poured over ten centimeters of Styrofoam insulation. We went to check that that was done.

“You can’t trust anyone here!” says my father-in-law. When he really gets ranting, he likes to say,

“This country has no right to exist!” and “Poland must be the richest country in the world, because everybody’s stealing and cheating, and yet there’s still something left to steal.”

So Kinga and I measured the area of all the floors while her father drilled random holes in the concrete to check its thickness. The upstairs was fine, but the downstairs floors were one centimeter too thin.

“It’s ridiculous we have to do this,” I muttered as we went throughout the whole house and measured everything. I was talking to my father-in-law about this, and he said, “Oh, it’s surely the same thing happens all over the world.”

And suddenly, we litigation-happy Americans looked pretty good, because, as I said to him, “At least in the States, you could take this guy to court for not fulfilling the contract. What can you do here?” I asked.

“Not much. We’ve already paid.” The point of all the measuring was this: the same company is supposed to come and finish the walls as well, and the hope of negotiation is what motivated the day’s measuring.

But what struck me was the fact that no contractor here has a reputation for being honest.

As my father-in-law said, “You can’t trust anyone here.”

Inexplicable stupidity

Sunday 31 October 2004

Sorry, but I had to bump this up to the top. Come on people — this is utterly ridiculous. I’m making a big deal out of a mole hill and nothing?

I live outside the US — Poland, to be exact. Surfing the net, I found a claim that people outside the US couldn’t access Bush’s official web site.

So I tried it.

I get the “Permission to view this website is forbidden for this server” message.

Just what is Bush doing? There is no justification for this, and no logical reason for it either.

Here are some articles about it:

According to the Expatia article,

Scott Stanzel, a spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign, was reported by the BBC on Thursday as saying: “The measure was taken for secruity [sic] reasons.” He declined to elaborate.

Security reasons?! Does al Q have the capacity to strike through IE? First Homeland Security is raiding toy stores (thanks to Thud for this info), and now Bush is shutting down his website for non-Americans? What kind of “security” is this?

There is just no logical reason for this blockage. If Bush’s team can’t “defend” his web site, what makes people think Bush and his gang can defend the country? Setting up a firewall is a lot easier than keeping out terrorists, I would imagine.

There was, in the Expatia article, some speculation as to why this was done:

Mike Prettejohn, president of Netcraft, speculated to the BBC that the decision to block usage was made to cut traffic to the site in the run-up to the 2 November poll and make sure the site remains active.

Google doesn’t seem to have this problem, and I would wager they see _a lot more traffic_ than Bush’s site. If this is really a concern, I would suggest to Bush’s technologically savvy web team that they look for a better host.

From the BBC article, further speculation, which puts the previous quote in context:

On 21 October, the George W Bush website began using the services of a company called Akamai to ensure that the pages, videos and other content on its site reaches visitors.

Mike Prettejohn, president of Netcraft, speculated that the blocking decision might have been taken to cut costs, and traffic, in the run-up to the election on 2 November.

This just doesn’t wash either. How much could this possibly cost? Besides, in addition to campaign funds, Bush has a sizable bank account himself — he could pay for this out of his own petty cash, I’m sure.

Is it a conspiracy to keep non-Americans from viewing the site? I doubt it. Expatica claims that there are ways to get to the site:

However, keen net users have shown that the site can be found at other addresses, including: https://georgewbush.com; http://65.172.163.222 and http://origin.georgewbush.com.

However, none of them worked for me.

They all produced 404 errors.

I Hate This

Tuesday 17 September 1996

I hate this. I hate almost everything about this place. I hate the rude shop keeper who is always impatient with me; I hate the apathy of IIB; I hate the rain; I hate my noisy water heater; I hate the mud pit which serves as my front yard; I hate buying food everyday; I hate Polish; I hate the chair I sit in for endless hours at night and on weekends; I hate being lonely; I hate being away from C. I wish I had never been accepted into the Peace Corps. Then I would be going about my merry way, at grad school or teaching in America (of course the apathy would be there, too).

I am becoming more and more reclusive. I teach, then I come straight home. I know no one–I can’t talk to anyone because I can’t understand a word of Polish. I feel so lost, isolated, and helpless. And so lazy.

I could never ET–my pride couldn’t handle it, wouldn’t allow it. I have to stick it out, and that makes me shudder: two years of more of the same of the last three weeks is the most horrible thing I can imagine.

I hate this all–everything.