How societies advance and yet remain conservative

Conservative and progressive attitudes seem to be at odds with one another and when they spill over to other topics, it's easy to relate one another.

I don't know if this is a fallacious statement but progressive attitudes in a society seems to be linked to advances in technology that eventually become modern societies. I don't know if which leads to which, but they do appear linked. I mean with a progressive attitude, you'd be more inclined to know more about the world, find out, and make discoveries, which is how technology comes about.

But my question is how conservative societies become "modern" (like Singapore and Japan) and yet remain conservative. I know there are a lot of loaded words to untangle and I don't really have time for that so I'm going to just post it like this.

And like I said, maybe the initial assumption is wrong in the first place. Who knows?

Conversation trees

Every so often in life, we will encounter moments when we realize something is amiss. It can be a big dramatic revelation that changes your life entirely, or a small little thing you picked up on.

Since becoming a teacher, people like to ask me either what has teaching been like, or how are the students. Most of the time I don't have a short answer because it's too big of an experience to squeeze into 2 lines. So, I sort of say the first thing that comes to mind.

When people ask me how my students are, I don't have much of a judgement on them because they are neither good kids nor bad. So I say the one thing that as a class, they seem to have moreso than other classes or even batches. Which is that they have overwhelmingly good handwriting.

And this is the part when you realize people aren't really listening. So far, at least 2 people have said "Oh, (start leading into another topic)" I mean talking about their handwriting is definitely something people don't expect to hear. Maybe that they are naughty or nice or muggers or whatever. People who are generally interested in what your are talking about will maybe extend the conversation like saying that's unexpected, or try to guess reasons for nice handwriting (are they mostly girls?) or maybe even change direction to something that they were kind of expecting (but what about their attitude, or but are they a clever bunch of kids).

When people ask you something and they don't seem to react to that news, you know they are not interested in you (or your students) but more of a polite acknowledgement before moving on to what they really want to talk about.

It's always funny to find out that people are really listening, because they think they are putting on a good show of pretending to be interested, but the speaker can totally see through it.

Micro vs Macro: What that means as a teacher

Before I had my own classes to teach, any time I thought about my "hypothetical class" and how I would "educate" them, it was usually the norm to think of big-scale events or long-term structures to put in place. Things like term-long debates, "ideology wars" or a completely revamped grading/reward system were all on the table. It was always very fun to think of how to make lessons like these interesting and it was fun for a very simple reason, there was freedom from expectations. Think about that for a second. If there was an expectation or lesson objective to meet, trying to come up with or even apply such interesting lessons is very difficult.

Something that a colleague told me before I even met my class was that the teacher must always learn to prioritize. At that time, it was easy to file that advice under useful words that I may think about in the future. How naive of me. 

It only took 4 weeks of lessons for me to understand the true value of those words. It's easy to forget about his words because from my perspective at that time, the amount of work and responsibilities that they have is easily 3 times as much as ours, so it felt like something a NIE beginning teacher would struggle with because when they come in, they will take on 2-3 classes, most likely 1 CCA and also perhaps 1 or 2 School Committees, which is an insane workload if you step back and really think about it.

By comparison, I currently (as a relief teacher) only have 1 class and a teacher-project type of thing. Already, I find it hard to think in the long-term when it comes to lesson planning. It's hard to break out of the mentality of "living day by day" every time I want to plan lessons. After every lesson, there is something that they found difficulty with, if you are lucky, it would be a mistake that they have never encountered before, because that would mean that they are learning and thinking about new things. Then, there are the things you have already missed, because it didn't seem appropriate to teach at the time, or that a particularly important learning point is currently being discussed and we don't want that learning point to drift away from their minds if we don't recap or reinforce that point soon. Sometimes, the project will come in the way and screw up whatever you may have already planned. So it's quite hard to break out of that "day by day" mentality.

Of course the moral of the story here is to avoid what I'm doing. Currently, on the last few days of week 1 in this new term, I'm trying to broaden my attitude towards lesson plans, go back to how it was before. Maybe then there'll be some fun. Or better yet, some actual learning. 

Perhaps this will act as a cautionary tale.

Idea: picture

2 picture ideas.

1) Person flips a table. Table is in mid-air. Debris falling around like test papers or just random things. OR MAHJONG TILES. The person can have any facial expression and it will still be funny.

2) Skydiving. A person whips out his phone and takes a self-shot with the sky as his background. He will be wearing his skydiving suit and gear. Obvious limitation, his friend must be holding on to a giant piece of glass. but we can take a photo of him too.

Idea: Live show

Using the lighting effects from this show, you can create "clone", "slow motion" and "teleport" effects on a live stage show.




Instead of a dance show, make a fight show similar to this:






And matrix style live shows can be done.

A story from reddit: How Chefs treat assholes

GuruPrimo 667 points 10 hours ago*  

Never, never, never did I screw with someone's food on purpose. 12 years as a Chef. Anyone who did shit like that was getting thrown the fuck out of my kitchen. Anyone who does shit like that is human garbage.

That being said I have done the opposite: We had a regular customer who would come in on every Saturday nights at the peak of business; while we were in the weeds. He called himself the Ronster. We hated him; I had built a menu that was delightful and had really great options but he could not be bothered to even try one of them. He was such a loyal regular customer that when one kitchen manager refused his order on a Saturday night the Ronster called the owner and forced the Kitchen manager to apologize to him on the dining room floor. His diva status was legendary, and for him it was a symbol of status to bring his friends out and show them that he could make an entire restaurant dance around him.

I played along fully, even though I never had mise en place for his orders because it varied so much each week. I finally went all out and cooked him a meal that he loved enough to order again and again. A very simple alfredo pasta with a truffled veal buerre rouge. Not the lightest meal. Alfredo is easy as pie, as is sauteed veal buerre rouge. So I was delighted he wasn't requesting anything complex anymore (he once demanded Beef Wellington in the middle of us having 20+ tickets in a 125 cover restaurant). He still came in every Saturday and still ignored our seasonal, local and genuinely delicious offerings.

I began pushing his meal to the extremes of flavor and fat content, making it more and more delicious, his pasta had a full stick of butter and 2 cups of heavy cream. The buerre rouge was more butter and the veal was sauteed in ghee. He couldn't get enough. I ate the meal once just out of curiosity and it was soooo heavy, afterward I could barely even keep my eyes open. Major calories

For years he would come and eat my meal, he loved it. Praised me and would bring in all his friends, essentially no one but him would order outside of the menu and the Ronster and I had an ongoing junkie/pusher relationship.

He doesn't come in for a few months. and when he does return the owner calls me out and the Ronster looks terrible; he had a triple bypass after a series of heart attacks. I could tell he wanted his veal, his thunderbomb of fat and salt. Ronster asked what I could make him with no fat at all, no red meat, as low calorie as possible. He dined on poached salmon and steamed spinach with unflavored wild rice. I never saw him smile again.

tl/dr: Customer was a major dick, I spent years addicting him to my fattiest meal and he eventually had severe heart attacks.

edit: just did a quick rough calculation and his calorie count was right around 4,000

- I felt sad for the victim. and a little heartburn.

Moral of the story: Don't piss off people who handle your food.

pool video cam

Going to bring a video cam for pool next time.