The slides into the past
I ripped some assorted Suzanne Vega
into my MP3 player. Suzanne is clearly my favourite female singer, and
for some reason I acquired this taste during the high school. Suzanne
Vega's music at least once seemed to be popular among angstian young
women, so if you add this fact to my taste for musicals (which I
acquired later, after I had got married), the result perhaps casts some
doubts on my heterosexuality. But I am safe in my masculinity. I can
now actually remember this one time when I was listening to what must
have been "Days of Open Hand" on my little Walkman (it was tapes for me
those days), and one bully came along and took the headphones from me,
tried them on, listened for maybe two seconds, gave them back and just
walked back to where he'd come from, laughing in a mocking fashion. I
can't help but wonder where that guy is today. Hopefully unemployed
living in a small crappy tenement apartment with a fat wife and a few
screaming brats.
Unlike the screeching noise from the slums that passes for music these days, Suzanne's lyrics are intelligent and catchy at the same time, while her melodies are quite beautiful and easy to enjoy and even hum along. The synthesizer that got more prominent in each successive record usually does not interfere too badly with the voice and the guitar. It's too bad that pretty much the only songs that I remember ever got any airplay are "Tom's Diner", "Marlene" and "Luka", since if I thought about it a little, I am sure that I could list a dozen songs of hers that are better than those two put together.
I have another course starting tonight, and I just picked up the class list and the location, along with the free food that they give us the first day. This course is for continuing education, so it is a small class that consists mostly of adults who have voluntarily paid good money to take the course. As it should be. I could think of many worse jobs than teaching under such conditions, and as usual, I intend to give them full value for their dollar. However, since this particular lecture is one that I have given almost twenty times already, I haven't really spent much time writing down the things that I intend to talk about, trusting that my motor memory alone is sufficient for the task. I'll improvise as I get along, if need be.
Today I also remembered to pack something that I usually forget to take with me for the first lecture: a small towel that I wet before the class and then use to clean my hands after each time I clear the blackboard. I am hoping that the room that I am supposed to be teaching in has a whiteboard (I think that during the summer, they have been putting those in several classrooms in the old building) so that I would avoid this hassle, since the thing with old-fashioned blackboards is that when you use a dry eraser to clear them, your hands get covered with chalk dust.
Back in Finland, I took it for granted that you always wet a sponge and use that to clear the blackboard, as I had always seen it done from kindergarten up to university. However, when I first mentioned this to my wife, she looked at me like I was crazy, and told me that you should always use a dry eraser to clear the blackboard. This might even be an important cultural difference on the opposite sides of the Atlantic, since I remember as a kid reading some Charlie Brown comic strips in which he was given the task to clean the dry erasers, which always resulted in him being covered with dust. Over here in Canada, it always seems to be dry erasers, which for me necessitate having such a wet towel nearby. Either that or eventually accidentally chalk up the area of your pants around your pockets, which just looks stupid.
If my readers have further insights on the whole wet sponge vs. dry eraser controversy, please feel free to share them in the comments section. Of course, the era of PowerPoint and whiteboards are quickly making this a thing of the past, and good riddance.
Unlike the screeching noise from the slums that passes for music these days, Suzanne's lyrics are intelligent and catchy at the same time, while her melodies are quite beautiful and easy to enjoy and even hum along. The synthesizer that got more prominent in each successive record usually does not interfere too badly with the voice and the guitar. It's too bad that pretty much the only songs that I remember ever got any airplay are "Tom's Diner", "Marlene" and "Luka", since if I thought about it a little, I am sure that I could list a dozen songs of hers that are better than those two put together.
I have another course starting tonight, and I just picked up the class list and the location, along with the free food that they give us the first day. This course is for continuing education, so it is a small class that consists mostly of adults who have voluntarily paid good money to take the course. As it should be. I could think of many worse jobs than teaching under such conditions, and as usual, I intend to give them full value for their dollar. However, since this particular lecture is one that I have given almost twenty times already, I haven't really spent much time writing down the things that I intend to talk about, trusting that my motor memory alone is sufficient for the task. I'll improvise as I get along, if need be.
Today I also remembered to pack something that I usually forget to take with me for the first lecture: a small towel that I wet before the class and then use to clean my hands after each time I clear the blackboard. I am hoping that the room that I am supposed to be teaching in has a whiteboard (I think that during the summer, they have been putting those in several classrooms in the old building) so that I would avoid this hassle, since the thing with old-fashioned blackboards is that when you use a dry eraser to clear them, your hands get covered with chalk dust.
Back in Finland, I took it for granted that you always wet a sponge and use that to clear the blackboard, as I had always seen it done from kindergarten up to university. However, when I first mentioned this to my wife, she looked at me like I was crazy, and told me that you should always use a dry eraser to clear the blackboard. This might even be an important cultural difference on the opposite sides of the Atlantic, since I remember as a kid reading some Charlie Brown comic strips in which he was given the task to clean the dry erasers, which always resulted in him being covered with dust. Over here in Canada, it always seems to be dry erasers, which for me necessitate having such a wet towel nearby. Either that or eventually accidentally chalk up the area of your pants around your pockets, which just looks stupid.
If my readers have further insights on the whole wet sponge vs. dry eraser controversy, please feel free to share them in the comments section. Of course, the era of PowerPoint and whiteboards are quickly making this a thing of the past, and good riddance.
When I was growing up in a distant part of Canada, dry erasers were used until a certain amount of chalk dust had accumulated on the blackboard, at which point a dampened "shammy" (which I later learned is spelled "chamois") was produced and used to clean the dust-film from the board. At this point it became obvious why the "wet" cleaning method was used only rarely -- chalk wouldn't adhere properly to the wet blackboard. Conceivably the Finns had solved that problem but for us Canadians lessons would grind to a halt after the chamois had made its appearance.
The dry brushes, by the way, were cleaned on a special vacuuming machine, a job that was routinely assigned to the "teacher's pet" of the class who in the comics may have been Charlie Brown but in my case was usually me. The machine was loud and sent up clouds of dust in a manner that I'm sure today would be a prosecutable environmental crime.
Posted by andy | 7:43 PM
Until each child has his own wireless interactive video chat station, we will have to rely on this barbaric chalkboard nonsense.
Posted by Udolpho | 12:25 AM
By far the best method is to use the wet sponge first and then dry the blackboard with a squeegee. Like the cleaning staff does when the uninitiated are not watching.
Probably it is too complicated for the teaching personnel.
Posted by tommi | 3:29 AM
My high school German teacher used to use a wet rag to wipe down the chalkboard, probably because that's what "the Germans do." The only thing she succeeded in doing is ruining the chalkboard, which led me to conclude there are different kinds of chalkboards on this side of the Atlantic.
I know that the boards here have to be cleaned or polished periodically, which might explain why it didn't work so well.
In anycase, it's a moot point: everyone uses white boards nowadays.
Posted by Rochelle | 9:24 AM
The blackboards must have been of different kind. It was actually a greenboard and it dried up almost instantaneously. The first side was dry when you were still finishing the last. A text written to a wet surface became visible in seconds too.
Posted by Catilina | 2:17 PM