Dirty Tea Towels

I guess Wednesday is as good a day as any to engage in a little self-flagellation and record my progress. Excuses abound for my dismal performance this week.

I've given up on drinking full time and have cut down drastically on my social life, but the quality of my work isn't really something I can sacrifice to accomplish the rest of my goals. Summer teaching started yesterday and I'm still tackling it with tea-fueled fury. I drank four cups of 信阳毛尖 tea before class this morning and unleashed a barrage of devastating Expo English on my unsuspecting second-graders. Oh boy we had fun. Two more hours with them tomorrow, and on top of planning for that lesson I have a Life Club tonight (sort of a "teach whatever to whoever shows up" class). My weekday first-grader class has double for the summer, so I have to write two lesson plans for them a week and I still haven't planned my six classes this weekend. The elephant in the room is the huge pile of ungraded papers (starting from a month or two before I went back to Denver) that I need to burn through with a red pen before my impending parents meetings. Monday I decided I was going to stay in the office and work through lunch on Tuesday. I was hungry on Tuesday so I went home to eat, telling myself I'd get cracking on Wednesday. Today I went to Renato's house and went home for lunch again and I really have no honest idea when all of this is going to get done. Probably Friday, which sucks because it's my only day off and that's when I wanted to get to all of the other stuff I'd been procrastinating.

It's been hot as hell this week, so I haven't lifted or ridden my bike or even done much walking. Just crossing the street turns my head into a sweat hydrant. The lazy fat kid voice inside of me is convinced that there's something fundamentally wrong with working out with the air conditioner on and the human side of me refuses to turn off the air conditioner. It's a nasty little impasse.

I did get to some math on Monday and I spent a lot of yesterday picking up useful Chinese and practicing using my modals, so not all is lost. Tomorrow I do actually need to get ahead on work work so I can spend Friday looking through schools, catching up on some international dev. reading, mathifying (still stuck on that one problem) and drinking borderline unhealthy amounts of tea.

Photo by peruisay

Summer Fun

Today I started teaching a new intensive summer class. Instead of meeting for two hours once a week, we have class for two hours every day. For many teachers the name of the program, "Summer Fun," sounds like gallows humor. Our class load is doubled, we cram six months of classes into six weeks with leaner teaching materials. On top of that, we only have one day off and overtime requirements go up, so we aren't paid more. Last year I had two two hour classes four weekdays a week...with teenagers.

Well, I lucked out this summer. I get 6-11 year olds, and boy are they cute. They're also have a lot more enthusiasm than anyone should have at nine in the morning. Here's Jerry, imported from one of my weekend classes. Sometimes Jerry's so excited to answer English questions that he falls out of his seat.

Before class, one little boy's grandfather had an English map of the Shanghai World Expo splayed across the boy's desk. He was telling everyone and no one in particular that his grandson was there to learn "世博英," or "Expo English." All of the kids are super cute and well-behaved (so far). We talked about the World Expo, played some games and made passports. I have a good feeling about this summer. Maybe it's the ten cups of 信阳毛尖 tea I drank today. Whatever. It's better than adderall. Now I just need to stop making excuses for not working out, but it really is too hot today.

There's a mission statement in here somewhere

Welcome to my blog. Hopefully it's longer lived than the last few I've started and abruptly stopped. One constituted semi-drunken rants about things that pissed me off in China (mostly foreigners). My good friend Renato and I were going to start a blog dedicated to making fun of foreign journalists and their awkward attempts at covering China, but we got stuck on coming up with a good name.

This blog isn't really dedicated to anything specific, which might just give it some legs. I'm going to use it as a way to publicly collect my thoughts and keep track of the projects I've started now that I'm in my second year teaching in China. Among them:

-Researching graduate programs in international development, economics and development economics.

-Reacquainting myself with higher math, specifically what I'll need in an econ grad program.

-Improving my Chinese. I want to become semi-literate (at least reading and typing) and more conversational.

-Working towards a healthy body and healthy mind. Insane amounts of tea and my trusty weight machine are my starting points.

Along the way I'll also be discussing the ups and downs of the newfound more sober me, China, development, teaching, my awesome bike (it's awesome...you'll see), cooking and whatever else crosses my mind. Comments and feedback are way welcome.

Also, anyone interested in ESL teaching in China should check out Renato's awesome blog.

Math Homework of the Day 1

Fifteen to twenty-one year old me hated math. It was a function of me liking things that came easily, like English and French and politics and primate diversity (fuck yeah monkeys!), and I'm sorry to say that it took two or three years working for a living for me to understand the value of hard work. It's pretty embarrassing, but now I've changed. I swear. It's sort of the reason I started this bloggy thing: to keep tabs on myself and my productivity.

It's sort of like the three years in college where I tried to convince myself I was too punk rock to follow any sport other than European futball. Thank FSM the Broncos sucked then, but I missed out on some great sports moments (save for me playing NFL ambassador to a packed pub of British students for Super Bowl XXXIX) in the name of commiserating with my one futbol friend about the (once) awesome blackness of Thierry Henry.

The main difference is that I took a three-year hiatus from following sports (something I loved) because I wanted to be cool, but an eight year break from math (minus a required undergrad algebra module) because I hated it and convinced myself that it was worthless for my future career as a writer. It's the reason that architecture appealed to me when I was younger: I could make cool stuff and not bother with hard math, right? But somewhere along the way I decided that I wanted to go into development studies, and some time after that I decided that an economics PhD was the best route. After some quick research, I realized that I have almost no credentials to get into an econ PhD program, but am pretty well qualified for an MA or MS program in development studies, and can cross-study in econ while there.

Thus, one of my new projects is learning Mathematics for Economists by Carl P. Simon and Lawrence Blume, all nine-hundred or so pages of it. I never made it past trig in high school, so this should be a fun adventure, and I'll be posting any successes and [probably more of my] failures. It's like learning a new language, only with more mental blocks and fewer applications in my (current) daily life.

So, with that lengthy introduction, here's what I'm currently stuck on:

In economic models, it is natural to assume that total cost functions are increasing functions of output since more output requires more input, which must be paid for. Name two more types of functions which arise in economics models and are naturally increasing functions. Name two types of such functions that are naturally decreasing functions. Name one type that would probably change from increasing to decreasing.

(Simon & Blume 15-16)

Hmmm....can't cheat with Google. This isn't economic, but according to my future doctor friend Paul, lifting weights longer than forty minutes to an hour per session can cause your muscles to start breaking down and cannibalizing themselves. So maximum output would increase until forty minutes where it would start to level off and start decreasing after an hour of lifting. I imagine the graph wouldn't be a perfect x^2 asymptote, but something like that. I just tried to write it down and only managed to confuse myself. I'll give this another college try tomorrow, armed with more tea.