Read online and comment at http://aufrecht.org/content/article?id=8419

Thursday

I went to breakfast with Art this morning. The noodle lady gave me a look which integrated resignation, amusement, and loathing, but she did give me plain noodles.

On my way out to class, I inspected the bare ends of the bundled wires that have been hanging next to switch box in the stairwell.

Today I had a not-half-bad teaching experience. The first class has clearly checked out, and I just hope it's not a lost cause. Some of the reading suggests that classes gel during the honeymoon, and if you aren't on the ball then they lose respect for you. That definitely happened with both classes, but it isn't getting any better with one class. Fortunately, the other class mostly wants to learn english, and has cut me some slack; in that class we actually had a bit of fun. We were interrupted by the bell, the first time in twelve classes that the bell wasn't simply blessed surcease of sorrow.

Looking around on the web, I got fired up by the idea of getting a basic teaching certificate ($2000, two months) until I remembered that I don't like kids.

Coming back from class, I noticed a bunch of plastic bits in the stairwell, looked up, and saw all the wires had grown RJ-45 jacks.

Hunt treated Art and I (and Fannie, whom we bumped into on the street) to a bowl of home-cooked soup at dinner tonight. Vegetarian, even.

The foreign students' trip to Longji has probably been canceled due to security concerns. Apparently a radical Muslim, inspired by promises of the afterlife, might suddenly knife the first American he or she sees.

English corner tonight was much more calm and sedate than before. Smaller crowds.

China's playing the United Arab Emirates tonight, game starting at 10:45 pm. Judging from the sounds rattling around the buildings, China is up 1-0, with two or maybe three near misses, and the UAE hasn't had any good chances on goal. I think I'll go plug in the TV and see if I'm right.

I got mail today, a postcard, a letter, and a package, all postmarked Sep 5 or 6. I love to get mail! Thank you.

Friday

Today I went to the English department bright and early and had them make one hundred copies of a handout on citations and plagiarism (http://aufrecht.org/content/article?id=8414). The dean of the department (you may remember him as the Stilted-Mao style public speaker) had a chat with me to the effect that 1) the leadership provides only a limited budget for faculty copying 2) You want to make four hundred copies a month, which exceeds that budget 3) Your material is like a textbook, which by policy students must pay for. 4) (reason unintelligible) We can't ask students to pay

"No problem. I'll pay. 120 yuan a month? No problem."

5) You can't pay for them.

This went in circles until he called some central authority, after which the new strategem was that I would ask the student monitors to ask the students to pay. But I'll probably just secretly pay myself. Heck, maybe I can even find an off-campus copying or printing facility that's cheaper.

Then I headed over to Building Six, where I had tactical information suggesting that my students would all be on the second floor. Although they were in two rooms with four doors, (forgot his name) happened by and I enlisted him to stand in the hallway by the back door of one classroom with fifty papers, and I stood at the front door of the other, and so we had everything covered.

The internet is slow but stable today (4% packet loss, 1.3 sec delay to home) so I suspect we've been routed through a satellite.

My source for keeping up on attack-related news has been Phil Agre's Red Rock Eater Digest, a generally excellent mailing list of essays and links. If you want to drink from the firehose, visit the attack archive at

http://economics.wustl.edu/~bparks/agre.attack/agre.attack.html

or see his regular RRE page at

http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html

Here are some lesson plans from previous weeks:

Week 2 Notes

* lists: 1, 2, and 3 * spaces before and after . and , * punctuation vs quotes * staple pages together * don't use pronouns when the subject of the pronoun isn't clear * learn vs study * You know, as you know, I believe, In my opinion, Now, So, And, * But, Honestly * run-on sentences * which vs that * length of papers - I stop reading at 200 words * Everybody write "good job" on their papers * New late policy - total of four late or repeated papers in the * semester

Week 3 Notes

* Quiz * Review Quiz results * River of English Metaphor * Punctuation Handout * Break - hand out papers * review common mistakes this week * So * And so on, etc, and other things * "the" means a specific thing: "The Basketball in China" * Subject/object/indirect object * Plagiarism lecture and examples * Survey * Homework assignment