My blog don’t lie, I said I’d make time soon for an actual blog and Lagasse BAM, here it is. Actually I managed to complete the planning of tomorrow’s lectures so I bought myself some time between this and watching this anime series about a pirate made outta rubber and sleep. AND this is the last day of class before the Chinese New Year break, which is weird seeing as I’ve taught only 2 weeks and I get the next 2 1/2 weeks off. Ohh well, god bless the monthly salary contract.
Book news first: an acquaintance of mine, who also happens to be a roommate with my press’ poetry editor, has a blog about all things Can. poetry. He does this series of “what’s coming” of poetry collection from literary presses at the start of the year and it got to mine, which you can find here (don’t read the Exile excerpts if you want to maintain even a smidgeon of respect for me, they were my very first published poems and the spelling mistakes, don’t even get me start about the story). Nothing new for those who read this blog, except the release date. March? I didn’t know that. I haven’t even heard back from the book cover design yet and neither have I typed up an acknowledgments (a slight headache: I know it looks stupid to have a long list, but it’s the first book as well so… And am I supposed to have two different pages for it: one for the official stuff like Art Councils and journals that have accepted poems in the manuscript, the other people who contributed to the making of the book, etc.?) Re: book design, there’ll be an unicorn on it!
As the heading suggests, a friend is coming into town, in a week’s time actually. He’s one of my best friends (I ain’t the sorta douchenozzle who has like 17 BFFs, I follow the rule of 3) and I haven’t seen him/hung out with him for a little over a year, so I’m excited. He’s a Jew tho. A vegetarian or vegan Jew. And you know dem Jews with their stomach problems. He’s already agreed to take a sabbatical from his dietary regimen and while we used to drink our fair share, I don’t think he’s drunk much since I left Toronto so he’ll most likely spend half the HK excursion on the shitter. It’ll be funny in that no-one-is-laughing sort of way.
The teaching job, it’s been swell in general. Reminds me of my disgust for the multiple and stratified educational systems they have here though. One of my students has never taken an English lit. course prior to community college because you’re denied access, within the same school, from certain classes if you fail to meet certain standards in previous classes. Seeing that a bachelor degree is the basic benchmark now, this kinda system scales severely in favor of those from better socioeconomic backgrounds. Did I ever mention that it’s the basic assumption here, not only from the students and their parents, but also the school teachers, that the students are expected to pay tutorial centres or private tutors to keep up? The notion shifts the responsibility from the school teachers to tutors/tutorial centres, and since the public schools are rated from band 1 to band 5, with 1 being the top, the teachers’ sense of responsibility (generally, of course) degrades exponentially the further down the number goes. As a consequence, tutoring is an industry here, with some companies’ stocks traded publicly, with star tutors’ faces plastered on advertisements on sides of double-decker buses, with their classes being taught simultaneously in a bunch of centres via video streaming, and in one story that was hot-potatoed around awhile ago, one of these star tutors was sued by his former company in the 7 digit range USD for jumping ship to another.
Anyway, I am glad to have an opportunity to teach at a post-secondary level that falls outside this education porn. My classes are really small, as the community college is only in its third year of operation. The students are generally willing to engage critically, participate in class and know the amount of work it takes to do well in my classes (thank you tiger moms lolz!), even if I’ve cautioned them that I am not going to be an easy teacher material-wise. I covered Umberto Eco’s lazy machine in the second class of my 2nd year class (the other being 1st year, naturally) as part of the analytical structure that I want them to use, and after some work, they understood it, so that was a WINRAR! moment for me.
Was planning on blathering about an article I recently read about Derek Walcott and something about aesthetic choices not being really choices at all but mostly a product of one’s education, history and heritage but I’m sleepy and need to make a call before then so beam me up Scottie.
Polaroids from Hong Kong 
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