KXVU

School years have a set number of school days(barring some kind of emergency like last years fires), and I heard a variation on the above “joke/cry for help” a bunch this week.  How much was I chanting it?  Suprisingly, not so much.

It looks like my classes might turn out okay.  It is early, so I haven’t figured out how much of a problem my problem kids are just yet, but so far most of my kids are trying to do the work and seem to be following my directions.  Due to my unusual schedule, I have to spend a lot more time than even most 1st year teachers do on logistics, and I hope by the end of the year I am not doing as much with that as I am now.  I am also trying not to be a freeloader and just leech off the other teachers for all worksheets, powerpoints, and lessons, which just adds a lot of time to my schedule.  Basically the other teachers told me to stop doing the latter and just let them carry my curriculum this year.  I have two different preps(means I teach 2 subjects and have to prep for minimum 2 lessons a day), 4 different rooms(on 2 different floors) and the grading has just begun.  I’m thinking I will take them up on it, for it will at least save me from having to get all my stuff to duplicating.  My only problem with that is I won’t feel as prepared to teach the lessons because they aren’t my lessons.  I didn’t write the stuff, so I don’t automatically know what is going on in them.

Positive stuff:

- All classes are manageable size.  My class of 40 seems really mellow.  Too mellow for now, it actually drives me crazy they don’t talk and it feels I’m talking to a wall.  I’m used to more interaction.  Probably they are mostly bored right now since we have to cover the basics before we get into the real science.  All other classes are smaller which is good as they are all 9th graders in those classes.

- Really nice department and unbelievably supportive.  Even the teachers I don’t work with directly come up and ask what they can do to help me.  My union rep, my BTSA support provider(beginning teacher support a-something), my vice principal, and my principal have all come by at some point to say hello and see how I was doing. 

- We have a computer genius in our department.  The gradebook program they have at the school is for Mac, and at home I use a PC.  He personally wrote a gradebook program and gave it to me(he didn’t write it for me, he already had it).  He doesn’t use powerpoint either, he makes flash presentations.  He’s due to retire soon, we’ll be sorry to lose him.

- Air-conditioned classes.  This has been the mildest summer I can remember, but last year at my non-air conditioned school it was 95+ the first week.  Ties were a bad idea.

Negatives:

- I don’t have a laptop from the school yet.  I do my prep work in the library(shades of student teaching) and use my flash drive for everything.  The only problem will be powerpoint presentations and how I will get them set up in each room.  Each teacher has a laptop in their room and a projector, but some need it to work on while I am teaching. 

- 3 of my classes I work in the same room as the subject I am teaching in that class.  That means the labs are set up for me by someone else.  The 4th room teacher teaches different subjects, so I have to coordinate with that teacher and not get in his way. 

Conclusion:

In 2 years we get a brand new building with state of the art science classrooms, 12 rooms for a department with 10 teachers so there is room for growth as well.  Right now I get a ton of sympathy for my traveling situation and a lot of admiration for how calmly I am dealing with it.  The best part of my day is definitely the classes themselves.  I feel slightly on edge all day before class(I have the first few periods off) worrying I am missing something critical to a lesson that I won’t have with me when I teach each period.  I am also slightly on edge after school as I didn’t have a gradebook program till yesterday(still catching that one up) so I spend most of my time thinking about logisitics and not forgetting key stuff while I am doing that.  I didn’t sleep well some days this week as a result, even though the teaching itself did not tire me out as much as other years did.  I know this is the right move and I will really enjoy it here, I just hope I am not still worrying about logistics in March when I am trying to finish BTSA and start on my masters. 

Beamza and I may not see many people for awhile.  She is getting more translation work and got a new calling at church that will probably be more work than her old one.  This week our biggest interaction was dinner and throwing stuff at each other from the 2 computers we are simultaneously working on. 

Watch out Beamza, here comes a map of Iran!

Hard-nosed enough to tear into McCain while allowing Barry to mostly remain above the fray of angry rhetoric.  Being from Deleware, he will be palateable to fiscal-Republicans as he will have much knowledge and respect for corporations, and palatable to social-Republicans in the sense that he knows more about foreign policy than most other Senators.   And so the dance continues, I need to remember to register for my absentee ballot.

Oh right, that whole professional development and career thing, doing something that was less mundane and more challenging which required schooling… yeah… maybe that was overrated.  So my time in CA has been great so far, but has mostly served to amplify my longing to return.  Friends in San Diego, blond girls in bakinis in Malibu, Asian girls in sweats in Berkeley, the weather everywhere in California… I could just fill this post with more ellipses…

I’ve greatly enjoyed turning my brain off for the past week and a half; reading the forgettable Star Trek novels my brother has in abundace.  There are emails I have to write in order to make sure life when I return is set in place, but really, I am doing nothing and loving it.  The only thing that keeps me on edge is trying not to criticize my family each and every time I think they could be doing-something-in-a-better-way, or not arguing too zealously when they make such comments to me.  Overbearing generosity and an insistant desire to see those close to you do well; I know I’m lucky that this is my primary family problem, but it is still enough to make me want to strangle my family within 2 days.  It is already day 4, with many to go… including a family trip up to Yosemite… I might be ready to return to DC sooner than I think.

I thought I’d expound on DC, talk about young urban professionals here and how they’re unlike those in Boston or San Francisco; how those other cities have people interested in urgent political change while here everyone parrots whatever Krugman just wrote or what Bob Novak just said; how in the other cities you’d find buddhist temples and streetfront evangelic Iglesias, and here you see massive churches and synagogues that sit empty while everyone stays home and watches Bob Novak on CNN; how those other cities have cafes and bookstores that are full of people talking about ideology and philosophy, while here the bookstores have bars in them, and the customers discuss TV celebrities like Bob Novak.

But since none of that is really true, instead I’m just going to post a picture of a book I saw for sale in the checkout lane at the Gay DC Safeway and let you figure out for me what demographic they thought would buy it.

I’m guessing gay catholics who don’t like big words.

Yesterday, instead of getting my stuff together for the flight this evening back to SD, I went to brunch with a few friends.  This started at 11:45 at a hotel in the neighborhood with a buffet lunch and bottomless mimosas & bloody marys.  Holy crap.  If this becomes a habit, as it might with these friends who have a regular brunch group going here, then my Sunday’s are shot for the foreseeable future.  The food was great, solid omelets, great hot foods, tasty but not overwhelming breakfast carbs, good salads, great desserts.  We didn’t leave until after 4:45 and after I-don’t-know-how-many bottles of champagne.  Of course, at this point, one already knows being productive isn’t going to happen, so instead we all went to the driving range and hit golf balls for an hour or so.  Then, back to the pad to drink and play Monopoly.  I wasn’t staggeringly drunk, but we were drinking and enjoying the whole, gorgeous day outside.  It was a great, relaxing, full day, and one of the better days I’ve had in a while, and I fully understand why affluent people can just spend their weekends doing nothing in such a fashion.  The new friend I met through all of this is a full-throttle sort of girl; more than a bit crazy and heavy drinking.  I think we have expanded our social circles to overlap and there will be much more fun with new (non-law related) peoples.

Additional humorous linkage:

• William Shakespeake is lol-ing in his grave, though its mostly funny if familar with Facebook.
• You can’t type that in public.
• Overheard lists are just the right amount of privacy invasion without being disturbing.

See most of you all soon-ish.

I’m apparently a wanted commodity; I got a headhunting cold call today at work.  This is because I have my phone number associated with the public information of my Patent Agent Registration Number.  Thus, large anonymous law firms will use headhunters to seek out people capable of prosecuting patents.  Lucky me, in that I will have opportunities coming to me in the future.  Of course this guy was looking for electrical engineers & computer science folks, so less opportunity for me.  And unlucky me in that I’m going to have headhunters cold calling my personal number.  Regardless, it was weird to get a job recruiting phone call out of the blue when I’ve had such agony trying to get a job straight out of school.

I am actually looking forward to getting back to school, because that kind of stress seems much less exhausting right now.  Of course, if things “go well” with the place I’m at for my summer job, odds are that they will want me to work there part-time during the school year.  Thus, I will be enjoying both school and work stresses… and I need to change my schedule because right now I have 6 classes and that is about 2 too many, but I still need the credits to graduate… yay.  At least it is good and interesting work and study.

And note, I will be in SD from Aug 4-9 and Nor Cal Aug 10-21.  Hope to see you all soonish.

…and a video for fun which raises two questions: 1) Has Sesame Street always been insidiously imparting hipness to children & 2) Is Leslie Feist a muppet?

I’ve been disconnected from the Internet for a while as I mistakenly thought that my wireless card was having weird problems.  Orangejello mentioned that I might look at my firewall settings, that they might be set too high; he was right.  I was the dumb.

I was treated to lunch today at Fogo de Chao and discovered something interesting, even though I ate myself silly, I was not tired afterward.  I was able to work in the afternoon and not in a food coma; I think this is because all the food was protein and I ate no carbs.  Just sirloin, leg of lamb, bacon-wrapped-chicken, sausage, beef ribs, round steak, garlic crusted spareribs, etc.  I also avoided getting “meat drunk” which is apparently something that happens to my friends who have gone to Fogo.  So, so good, but I don’t think I want to eat meat for the rest of the week.

I’ve swung a few more lunches like this recently, as I reach the end of my summer associate time at this firm.  Ideally, I’ll get offered a job at this place, because I don’t want to have to scramble for a job this fall, with the thought of oppressive debt hanging over my head.  I feel like I’ve been doing a fair job, not extraordinary, but competent enough and learning a lot as I go along.  I don’t feel like I have done anything to risk not getting an offer, but I still fear and stress that I will have to explain to interviewers why I didn’t get an offer from the other place while trying to study for too many classes.  Argh.  Argh. That said, the patent practice itself is going decently; the application I’m working on I’ve been able to do what has been asked of me and I have not been asked to use a document in Korean for interpretation and analysis (my co-summer has, its pretty hilarious, as he knows as much Korean as I do).

Once I get back to California, and I don’t have to think about being “on” all the time… well I’ll probably just turn my brain off. I’m looking forward to that and seeing you folks out there.

Below the fold are my thoughts about The Dark Knight, hidden with spoilers below.  Reader beware of this in the comments. » Read the rest of this entry …

It has been an eventful couple of weeks in the Beampong household.  Beamza got her first translation job, translating a 7 page spanish document about smog emmision regulations of the Mexican government into English.  She spent literally about 25 hours over the 4th of July weekend doing it, and got about $200 for it.  She enjoyed it very much, and hopes to get further work from the same people.  The upshot is that she already has the wordbank needed to write about smog emmisions and related fields, so if she got one similar it would go super fast. 

What did I do while she did all this?  12 hours of one video game, several hundred pages of reading, and a few trips out of the house. 

But what invention do we need?  I need an alternate reality splitter machine.  After several months of applying and several interviews that went nowhere and one that yielded a job offer I turned down(we just couldn’t move to Morgan Hill) I received 2 job offers in the last few days.  Both are reasonably local and both are really good schools with departments I got along with quite well.  Both are telling me they want me and if only had one job offer I would snap it up in an instant and be more than thrilled about it.  As it is I have to make a choice and try not to wonder how the other one would have turned out.  The choice has already been made and once I call tomorrow to accept it I will send out e-mails with particulars. 

The sucky thing about teaching is that if I were in many other fields I could leverage this position for a signing bonus or a better salary.  With teaching all of you can see my salary schedule which is unalterable and if you guess right about how many post-bachelor’s units I have you will know exactly how much money I will make in the upcoming year(well actually that will be my base as there are ways to pick up a little extra cash here and there). 

I know I will do well because my program prepared us well and I think I was among the better teachers in an exceptional bunch of teacher credential students.  My hunch that we were just quite good is being confirmed as all the teachers I considered really good are getting jobs at the best schools in San Diego.  Moreso is my summer job where I work with one teacher friend who moved to LA last year to teach math.  In my opinion he was the best teacher in our block and now I know that by the data he is the best math teacher at his school.  In his first year of teaching he taught his students to a higher level and they performed better on all common assessments than any other math teacher at the school. 

In a month I’m going to be a science teacher at one of the best schools in East County.  This may be my job for 30+ years, I’m a little amped up right now.  Gotta go.

As the paparazzi and E! have continually mentioned, and I’m sure you’ve all noted, I’ve moved down to DC, just in time for the fireworks Changston described (amazing from both my apartment living room and from the complex’s roofdeck).  Some parts of my move went really smoothly - the actual movement of some people (me), some clothes (two bags worth) and acquisition of furniture (thank you Zipcar, CostPlus, Ikea and Mastercard) - whilst other mishaps were bound to occur.  Suchas?

• lemonjello, bearing good tidings and also carrying some of my stuff, got stuck on the chinatown bus for 6 hours between New York and DC, normally a 4 hour ride.  Apparently traffic was motionless on the freeway for 2 hours in Delaware, clearly suffering Dover’s notorious traffic.
• my company was gracious in providing me with a moving company.  since I own next to nothing, the moving company’s decided to wait a little longer to schedule my delivery, until they have a more full truck.  so most of my stuff is in some warehouse somewhere in Massachusetts, beginning to smell more and more like mice pee.
• not all Ikea furniture, it turns out, is ready-to-assemble.  This piece, in particular, requires a drill.  WTF? When did Ikea decide that its customers had any skills, or tools for that matter?
• I’ve dithered for so long on calling Comcast / Verizon for internet service that, one week in, I’m still using the coffee shop for internet access.  I welcome your opinions - should I feel comfortable shopping online from here, let alone checking my checking account?  What about file-sharing?  Pron?

Okay. Lots been going on. For the catching up:

• I moved into a new place.  Living in a 4bd/2.5ba subdivision of a house with 3 girls.  Moved in last weekend and helping move the other new roommate in this weekend. Exhausted, but the place is very nice, actually somewhere to live.  The people are cool, the neighborhood is better (all of 2 blocks west from where I was), & I have TV again.
• Work is still good and challenging.  That I have a patent to write which is due before the end of the month hasn’t gotten a lot done on it yet.  It will dominate my week, except for the other stuff that is time critical this week.  Oh wait, that’s everything.
• I’m not at all interested in the Olympics except for the hope that it turns out to be embarrassing for China.  The government needs to be portrayed as fascist and unacceptable to the rest of the world.
• Question that was asked, “How many wolves would it take to kill a bear?”  The best reply was from pacrand, which was, “One, if you fired it from a high-speed wolf gun.” Other answers were more useful.
• I saw the 4th of July fireworks overlooking the White House, just across the street from Lafayette park, pretty damn solid.
• And finally, a famous person death I’m not sad about.

Hope everyone had a good 4th.