Mark your calendars

There are exactly 7 months to 9731/02 (31 October 2008).
Posted by kungfuzi at 7:42 pm | 0 comments

  Some holidays those were

Japanese Occupation down: 18 pages of notes and 30 lecture slides. Now for Decolonisation: how incredibly complex the Indonesian Revolution was! (One of these days, I'll pick up Kahin's book on it.) Fortunately or unfortunately, we do not really have to make sense of it all, just examine it through the nice little categories that Cambridge has provided: nationalists, colonial powers, international factors.

Marking will kill me.

Here's a lovely Mark Edmundson article about kids these days. He's talking about American college students, but he could very well be discussing RJC ones:

For students now, life is elsewhere. Classes matter to them, but classes are just part of an ever-enlarging web of activities and diversions. Students now seek to master their work — not to be taken over by it and consumed. They want to dispatch it, do it well and quickly, then get on to the many other things that interest them. For my students live in the future and not the present; they live with their prospects for success and pleasure. They dwell in possibility.

Posted by kungfuzi at 9:00 pm | 0 comments

  Term 1 over

Watched The Stage Club's performance of Black Comedy and Light Tragedies last night with the class. The first two plays were okay, but Black Comedy itself was brilliant. I don't think it can be the Learning Journey however!

The term is over, and the so-called holidays are upon us. Only the J1s really have a break. The J2s are desperately preparing for their Common Tests, and we teachers (or at least new ones like myself) are preparing next term's work. J1 marking and JO / Decol notes will take up most of my time, but I also have to get debriefs done, fix the History notice board, and finish other random tasks which often seem more appealing than the most important ones.
Posted by kungfuzi at 9:09 pm | 1 comments