Peace of Mind

Oh all Friday nights should be like this. Pajamas, a cold beer, and a kick a** guitar. Currently strumming some Neil Young, since my own creative juices are in the midst of a nasty draught.

Outside it's miserable, but here in Summerge Four #102 the kerosene heaters are humming and all is warm and cozy. Outside the temperature is in the limbo right around 33 degrees. It's that horrible temperature at which precipitation can neither be rain nor snow, which means it's just butt-cold and wet. Perfect 'get sick' weather. Hence, I am hunkered down and comfy for the evening.

We were back to work on Wednesday, and the unanimous feeling amongst myself and my coworkers is that a 3 day week has never been so long. It seems going back to work after 2 weeks vacation, no matter for how short a time, is just something that is not easy. Funny though, the students seemed to feel the same way. At times I was totally happy to see them again, surprisingly so. At other times, we were mutually not psyched to be in the classroom. Alas, I am the teacher, and must muster some level of enthusiasm. It's funny how there is a collective kind of atmosphere in the class. For example, there is always one student who is all pumped up to answer questions, raises their hand EVERY freaking time you ask a question just dying to answer. On the rare occasion that this type of student is either a) absent or b) not totally pumped to answer questions, the class deflates. I am very appreciative of this kind of student because the rest of the class responds to him or her, and if they don't, at least there is one person who is paying attention to me. Anyway, this week, my standby, pumped up people were not so pumped up, and the energy of the class was all over the place. So, hopefully things will be back to normal next week, now that we've all accepted the fact that it's back to school time.

I sympathize with my students though (sometimes). They are at an engineering college, which means they are math people, not language people. Granted, there are the few shining stars who are very smart and very motivated. But most of them are just normal college students, like I was. Their passion is in building things and tinkering and measuring stuff and approximating and estimating and building models of things that I don't understand, yet they are required to study English. I think I'm pretty respectful of the fact that many of my students have absolutely no interest in studying English, and I'm not walking the Earth on a mission to make people like it, so I don't demand much of them, and I don't expect them to even like English, just at least come to class and don' sleep. Not a very taxing experience, but some of them aren't up to it. At times this pisses me off to no end, at other times, like now, I am more understanding. Neither of those states of mind tends to last very long; generally I have other things to think about. But tonight, it's cold and wet outside, and I'm warm and cozy inside. I've got two days to kick back and strum, so enough of this blogging thing. I'll be back when I have something worthwhile to say, or some nice pictures, or something. Night.