Why I Shouldn't Be Allowed To Teach

There are a lot of things I should blog about, but none have struck me with the magnitude of my own stupidity like the happenings in my classroom the other day.

To begin with a list of excuses:

To start with, my birthday was the previous weekend, so there had been much celebrating and late nights.
We are in the middle of ‘intensives’, so I am currently teaching 10 hours a day on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
The days that I do teach 10 hours I have 4 hours of Grammar class (Wah waaaaah) and the WORST class I have all week from 7 pm - 9 pm 

My teaching style has been called by the students as “loose but tight”-- I generally go over all the information, try to start discussions, etc, but I am known to wander off topic and talk about things with no pertinence to really...anything or anyone in any situation. Every week we have 6 listening tracks: 3 for our advanced students and 3 for our beginning students. Going over these 4-5 times a week can get tedious and make one a little loopy. 

This week the tracks were about Al Gore’s Nobel Prize and the Trash Island in Singapore where the government dumps all the trash of the country. The last classes of the day are infamous for being pretty quiet; no discussions, no movement, no interest, no enthusiasm, no life. A lot of times it’s like teaching in front of a room full of cadavers. It’s not the kids fault, however, most of them are in school or going to other academies for science or math all day. By the time they get to our class at 9 at night, you really can’t blame them for being tired and not wanting to move at all.

My last class this Monday was one such class. One of the students, Jun, is really good. He participates, answers questions, jokes around. He’s a really good student to have. Even he was a little quiet this week, so it was pretty rough. The tough thing about this situation is that we have about 8 minutes of material with the listening tracks, which means we have to fill the other 42 minutes with lecture, going over the tracks, explaining things, discussing, etc. With this class it was going to be a long, long 40 minutes. 

So we start talking about Al Gore, global warming, etc. I brought up the point that my previous class had talked about the benefits of global warming i.e., the ability to swim everywhere with high ocean levels, having the ability to tame sharks to travel around, etc. I joked about this and then asked what the kids thought--they, of course, had no answer. So I did my serious talk about how global warming really is bad, go green, yadda yadda, and then I talked about how the polar bear is kind of a symbol of global warming and its devastating effects. At this point I was boring myself, so I told the students about another devastating threat to the globe.

I brought up the point that maybe if we simply shaved all the polar bears on the poles they would be happier with the warmer weather too. They would be cooler, they could swim in warm water, eat some tropical fish, etc. I then went on to point out the fact that if we stop global warming, the bears would, in fact, perhaps be angered at losing the prospect of free internationally funded haircuts. The idea that we had already messed up the poles a lot and started global warming and then were just going to try to keep the status quo and not give the bears haircuts would probably lead to some kind of Polar Revolt. With the proper tools these angry polar bears might rise up and send armadas of ships to attack strategic world cities--with their polar connections this would mean that penguins, reindeer and, perhaps, even Santa Clause himself would be fighting alongside them. I then went on to draw the conclusion that really, stopping global warming could have more devastating consequences that not, as the Polar War could take a huge global death toll. It really comes down to a choice of wanting to die with skin cancer or be mauled by a polar bear. It’s a tough question--I didn’t expect my kids to have an answer.

It was half way through this ‘lecture’ that one of the girl students just looked at me with a look that said “I’m really paying this guy to stand here and talk about this...” Luckily Jun thought it was enjoyable. He even went so far as to suggest that one of the threats of Global Warming was “Shaved Polar Bears” when I was writing notes on the board. 

So, that is how I teach if anyone believes it. I can get the lecture from the CCTV in our building if anyone is interested.

The Polar Bear Jihad is real. Melanoma or Mauling? The choice is yours.