For future reference:

http://www.whynotchemeng.com/uk-and-ireland/teachers/top-ten-flash-bang-demos

Eric borrowed my lab twice today, once for 11A and once for 11F, so that they could write their maths tests there. I supervised both times, and those kids don't seem to know how to write an honest test. Well, that's not quite fair. Most of them probably were just trying to write the test to the best of their personal ability, but so many were ( Read more... )

Yesterday was interesting. After school, I drove to The Hill, a suburb not too far from the halfway mark between Tokoza and my home in Randburg (which is just about as far from Tokoza as anywhere in Joburg). There, I met an old colleague of my mom's, and his wife, who live there. They have a garden cottage that I'll now be renting from March ( Read more... )

Teaching went fine today, had a lot of kids coming to me at break for extra lessons, which is both a good sign & a bad one. Good in that it means they're taking an interest in the work and making sure they're up to date, but bad in that it means I didn't get through to them the first time round. And I'm not sure why ( Read more... )

Look what I've just discovered:
http://www.uj.ac.za/Default.aspx?alias=www.uj.ac.za/homoeopathy

My own bloody alma mater, teaching people how to be quacks! It's bad enough when primary and high schools push questionable things like religion, and perhaps worse that you can study utter crap like homeopathy at all, but when a *cough* respectable ( Read more... )

Today did not start well. I got out the house a little bit late, then managed to clip my left rearview mirror on another car (leaving him with a tiny scratch and me with no mirror for the rest of the day, plus a R830 bill for a replacement), and then my carefully-planned route was screwed up when what I expected to be a right turn was in fact a ( Read more... )

I've completely left that wretched hotel now, and it's great to be home again. There was some sort of 'graduation' dinner last night, but I didn't go. Didn't feel like it. But I also don't really feel like the training meant anything much, so what's the value of the graduation? That's like asking a professor of nuclear physics a few basic questions ( Read more... )

The school-teachy part is going ok. I'm not having as much fun as I had originally hoped, but I've had worse jobs. And more importantly, that small minority of interested kids are getting more interested and more comfortable asking me stuff as time goes by. I even had a couple of grade 12s coming to me today to help them with work they're ( Read more... )

I don't feel half as rotten anymore, but I'm still exhausted. The weekend helped, but not by much. I'm physically relaxed, and I'm mentally unflappable (ignore previous post), but I've just got so much stuff to do and no time to do it. My MA work, in particular, is something I've been really eager to get stuck into, but just haven't had the time ( Read more... )

Meh. I'm fucking miserable ( Read more... )