Some Photos

Looking out of my window across the way. Friday June 29, 4pm.


My empty classroom. Room A501. One day before the final move to Cyberport. June 28, 5pm.

Waiting in Central to cross Des Voeux Road. Friday June 29, 7pm.


Looking down Ka Ning Path (the road that goes behind my school). June 27, 10pm.

Back on the horse?

In April I finally started to use Google Reader - and with it all sorts of fascinating blogs. (While I admit the word "blog" still makes me shudder...).

I suppose I have Jeremy Wagstaff to thank for that - a Technology Columnist for Wall Street Journal Asia, he visited my school with his wife and a class of mine had a fabulous time sharing what they were learning with him. So I started reading his blog whenever it was updated...and then got annoyed with having to check it all the time.

What he writes about is how to make technology make sense to normal folk. And since he had written about how he always checks his blog feeder (Google Reader), I decided, wtf, I'll check it out.

Now, two months later, I only need to go to one bookmark to find all sorts of fascinating thoughts on teaching.

And I don't even go to CNN for news, either, and I don't buy magazines like the Economist or New Yorker with regularity - a friend of mine whose job is to sift through the news to prepare reports for the government on current trends has added me to an email list. I get about twenty emails a week from A. - on fascinating things from Hong Kong to education to global warming. (Which I still think is a hoax.)

But teaching.

I love reading Dan Meyer's blog. I feel like I read somewhere that he is a teacher with a similar level of experience to me (~3 years). Maybe I'm wrong. But the guy is young. And he pours his energy into his high school math lessons. And he writes about it all with intelligence and wit.

Just followed a post of his to H.'s blog - sounds like another young teacher who is similarly intelligent and thoughtful. And...H. apparently had been on a blogging sabbatical for a while.

So that made me think...

Back on the horse?

Write a bit more on here. Why not? I have lots of things I think I think about teaching. And lots of things I think I think about life as a foreigner. And while I haven't read nearly as much as I used to, I have started to watch a lot of good movies and shows. (Finally getting around to buying those 5 HK dollar / 65 cents US DVDs while traveling in China helped that trend a lot. Although I am still pissed that the second season of Prison Break is scratched and won't play the second half of the season.)

<><><><>
So. This is the opening post. Has nothing to do with teaching. Guess it's just the inside of my brain, on one single thought. Man I wish my brain would sit still sometimes.

This opening post shall conclude with an anecdote, about living in China. It had been a long time since I've used this blog - so I had to put my password back in, etc. And since I live in China, apparently Blogspot changed something in their software so that the language defaults to the language of your ISP address. Thus, all of those opening screens were in Chinese. Thanks to my rudimentary skills (I recognized the characters for "chinese language" and switched it to "english language") and guesswork, I'm back surrounded by my English.

More on teaching, and not just the lessons, but working with new colleagues at a new institution, later. Think I'll start with my reflections on my first year working in a middle school. But who knows what will come out when I sit down.