25.9.11
Happiness is when Sunday evening comes, and you're looking forward to the coming week of work. I am not a happy man. But then, who is? I sure have a lot to be happy about. I live overseas, which I still find extremely fascinating and enriching; I only work four days a week, Monday through Thursday, giving me three day weekends on most weeks (I understand there will be things to do ocassionally on Sundays); the food here is good - what more could one ask? Nevertheless those four days haven't been easy, nor do they promise to get much easier. On work days I've usually been getting up around nine a.m., putzed around for forty minutes, started preparing for work around ten, left my flat around twelve to head to the central school to print out materials and make any necessary copies, arrived there after a forty-minute commute on the metro, left after an hour for the school where I work, which is only one metro stop from my flat, hence another forty minute commute back, arrived at the school, eaten lunch, made any final preparations for my lessons, if there was time, thought about the next days' work, then given lessons for two and a half and five and a half hours on Tuesday and Thursday, Monday and Wednesday respectively. There's a threat of getting another class on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, which will keep me at work until about ten p.m. Monday through Thursday. So the schedule is difficult to get used to. I don't really like eating dinner at eleven p.m., but there are good things about it too. I can sleep in on most days. It's give and take.
Needless to say, I've been an inefficient worker. I think I spend too much time planning. I've limited myself to mostly planning lessons on the same day; I try not to think about the next days' lesson until the next day comes, because I find that any one lesson might consume me completely and leave me with nothing left for the other classes I have to teach. There's always something that could be better, better explained, better presented, more interesting, instructive, organized, pertinent. Teaching English, maybe teaching in general, is a perfectionist's nightmare, because no matter what you do, your results are always far from perfect.

There were lots of interesting things in the news this week. I heard that a company in Germany tested a computer-driven car in downtown Berlin. There was a guy in the driver's seat who could've taken control of the car at any moment if the need arose, but it never did. The computer was able to deal with all the other cars around it, as well as stop signs and traffic lights. A spokesman suggested that within fifteen years or so, there would be computer-driven cars all over the place. I really like the idea. The word 'automobile' will take on new meaning. Imagine a highway filled with these new automobiles. Every passenger will have entered a destination at the beginning of their trip, the cars will wirelessly communicate with one another in order to negotiate onramps, exits and lane-changes. There wouldn't be nearly as much traffic. Private transportation will become much more efficient, without there being loss to any privacy or freedom. People can still drive in their cars whereever they want to. They won't, as I may have previously advocated, be forced to ride public trains or busses and then walk their fat asses a short distance to their final destination. I imagine that some people will be against the idea of letting a computer drive their car. And these people sort of burst my bubble about automated transportation, because it only takes a few bozos to turn off their computer to create a lot of problems on the road. Look, if everyone rode on autopilot, then the cars could see each other and communicate their intentions from far away, as though each car were a telepathic metal creature, travelling from point A to point B. Turning off the computer amounts to turning off the telepathy, and suddenly the creature becomes a retarded renegade that everyone else has to reckon with. What's the point of that? And yet, people will insist on driving their own car.
In other news, a group of physicists reportedly clocked some neutrinoes at a speed slightly faster than the speed of light. This is a big no-no according to the laws of physics. (Somebody call the particle police, we've got some speeders on the lose; but how are you going to catch them when they've got the fastest ride in the universe! Einstein come back!) Evidently, the leader of the group was inclined to believe that something was going wrong, but he couldn't figure out exactly what, so he just decided to publish the group's results, and let the scientific community rip them to shreds. That is, he wanted some help finding out what was going wrong. You have to appreciate this feature of science: It corrects itself. Either the community will find out what the group was doing wrong, have a few laughs, disregard the results, and carry on with life, or the results will be repeated by another scientist, and they will figure out how to proceed without Einstein, who will be replaced with someone more modern, just as he replaced Newton on his turn.
This self-correcting feature doesn't work so well with religious theories. I find that where scientific theories strive to grow, religions strive to remain constant. Try as they might to avoid it, they do change over time, but their stubborness goes a long way. Creationism, for example, has slowly given way to an idea more fit for survival in today's climate of thought, called intelligent design, and yet I bet there are still some presidential candidates out there who aren't ready to accept such a radical idea that God isn't watching us as much as sHe used to be. It makes me wonder how many centuries it took for Christians to accept that the earth revolves around the sun. But far be it from me to put science on a pedastal above religion; above Christianity, Islam, and maybe some other ideas, sure, but not above religion as a whole. In the end, science itself is a religion. Its God is Logic; it's Commandments are known as the Scientific Method; it's language is mathematics, something so divine it hardly requires translation between any of our menial spoken languages; it has its disciples and prophets, whose connection to God is remarkably strong. But what sets it apart from many other religions is its continual development. Science doesn't change and grow reluctantly, it grows, because that's what it is supposed to do. Science maybe be but a form of religion, but it's the best one out there.

1.10.11
Hello from Dolgoprudny. I've left Moscow and relocated to the suburb I was supposed to go originally. It all happened pretty quickly. Last Monday the director at the school I was working told me she had been informed that I was to start at Dolgoprudny the following week. Funny I hadn't been informed, I told her. She wasn't happy that I was leaving. She said from the beginning that I should tell the administration to keep me at the school. I was glad to hear that she was happy with me, but couldn't answer her request with sincere gusto, since I wasn't sure I wanted to stay.
The following day I went into the central school to ask them about my relocating. I did in fact indicate that I would have been happy with staying where I was (although I could have been a little more enthusiastic), but I was told that teachers' placements at various schools had already long since been decided, that I was going to move to a very nice flat, everything was going to be fantastic, and that they would be in touch with me regarding the timing details. I left the office not completely disappointed, though not beaming with glee either: In my first three weeks back in a teachers' boots I'd grown accustomed to my work and living place, now I was about to role the dice again to see if I get dealt a better hand. The more I thought about it, the more I felt satisfied with my current situation and the more apprehensive I became about the coming move.
At work that afternoon I got an email about moving to my new apartment - did I prefer moving the next day, or the day after, when I was scheduled to give my first lessons? I answered that with current lessons scheduled for tomorrow, there's no way I could move the next day. I asked if I could move on the weekend and commute for a few days from my current apartment. I got mixed answers.
I went back to the central school again the following day to sign my class assignment forms and get my textbooks and accompanying audio CDs. This was where the dice were roled. I walked into the office not knowing if I was going to be assigned nothing but groups of snot nosed ten year olds whose proficiency in the English amounts to having seen the latin alphabet a few times before. I did get assigned one class of the sort, except instead of ten year olds, the students are between four and six years old.
Fortunately there are only five of them, and only three of them showed up on the first day. That was hard enough. Challenges abound when the students know nothing and don't really see the importance of learning. We spent the first lesson trying to learn the words for members of a family: mother, father, daughter, son. We didn't get to sister and brother. We attacked phrases like 'I'm Peter,' but 'What is your name?' proved to be a little too much for them. I figure they might think of that phrase as one really long word which is hard to say. If I'm not sharing that class with one of the other teachers, then next time we'll start the alphabet and writing some of those simple phrases. I have a big classroom, and the kids have lots of energy, so I'll have to get them running from one corner to another, maybe chasing letters and numbers (I'll have to tape these up before class).
Fortunately, that's my only permanent class of really young people. I am covering a few classes of the same sort of group I had been struggling with at my temporary assignment, the group of little monsters (who suddenly, after my lesson with the five year olds, aren't so little anymore), but this group pleased me better. I think their level of English is not as varied as in the group I left behind, which makes it easier to keep students focused together.
I had those two class on my first day, and finished that day with a group of adults with a much higher level, which made things more interesting for me. The next day I had two very small groups of teenagers at beginning and intermediate levels respectively, and then a group of five adults at the beginning level. We worked on statements like: I am Russian; I am not from the moon; He is this; He isn't that; We are this; we aren't that; Are we/you/they from the moon? It can be pretty difficult if you haven't studied much English.
And now it's the weekend, and here I am. I just had a pot of Pete's spicy pea soup. I put some tomatoes and bell peppers in it this time because they still haven't got too expensive and I might as well eat them while they last. Food here is cheap. Regarding budget, an apple addict such as myself is surprisingly better off in Russia than in an agricultural wonderland like California.