Music, Mugs, and Digital Meetings

Once again, I find myself in front of the keyboard at the end of the week. It’s time to look at the week with the kind of introspection some people like to subject themselves to–and others run away from with the intensity of a Hollywood disaster movie.

The road between my house and the bus stop is lined with a lovey park on one side and a group of shops that occupy an unusual series of buildings on the other. What I mean is that they look more like a small villa than a shopping centre–that is until you reach the Asian store located across the parking lot–that is unmistakably a supermarket. Many of these stores have an upscale image and must survive on a well heeled clientele–some of the stores are far too niche to survive otherwise. There are a few restaurants, some designer boutiques, a comic book shop, a Dutch bakery, and a children’s book store. There are also a number of other stores, but I don’t do much shopping there.

As I got off the bus on Thursday, I noticed a number of tents set up in the small parking lot. I was curious, but I was also pretty tired from teaching. I couldn’t make anything out, but since I had never seen tents in that parking lot….well, my curiosity got the better of me. As I got closer, I could see that someone was on the microphone and playing a rather large instrument. I didn’t get very close, but I got close enough that the person who turned out to be the singer invited us over. I generally don’t like being picked out of crowd like that…but I guess since there were only two of us that isn’t really a crowd. We approached.

As I took up position near the events, a person approached us to explain that this was a performance put on by the Aurora Cultural Centre–which has been somewhat homeless since the Aurora Library and library square started renovations. The performer was Sophie Lukacs and in addition to singing also plays the 21 stringed Kora. Her voice was quite good and the instrument was unique. She was singing a kind of folk music on an instrument I had never heard or seen before. I really enjoyed it. We spent a bit of time listening, but weariness overtook us and we headed home. For the short time we were there, it was great to enjoy the music.

On Friday, a student presented me with a fabulous gift. It was a large coffee mug emblazoned with “the best Teacher ever.” What I need to explain about this person and this mug is that while she has been at the school, she wasn’t actually my student. During some part of the pandemic, she joined my online class from Brazil. I had other online students, but at the time, she was one of the very few that weren’t actually in Canada, or more specifically in Toronto. She had internet issues and eventually paused her studies.

Some time ago, she decided to do her last two weeks in person. She toured around the country first. I knew this because I follow her on Instagram. When she showed up at the school, she knocked on the teacher’s door to introduce herself. Because I had been following her, and because she is pretty memorable, I was able to say her name before she introduced herself. She was relieved, or happy. or some emotion like that. So that’s how I earned my mug and title without actual teaching.

Today, in the midst of writing this post, my two best friends and I got together for a video chat. I am so grateful for technology. It was good to hear what both of them had been up to. These are the same people I met up with recently in my post One More for the Road. It is with pride that I say I have had the same friends for more than 30 years. We’ve all got our adventures and I am glad to see we are all living an interesting life.

I hope everyone reading this has a Monday that is somewhat better than your average Monday.

If you found this post interesting, please visit the ongoing site where this post originated from. It can be found at todaysperfectmoment.wordpress.com

Face to Face

I taught a face to face class for the first time in ten months yesterday….and it was exhausting. It wasn’t the teaching, but all the other stuff that goes along with it.

We have been allowed to have face to face classes for the past couple of months, but I was teaching an exclusively online program for a while, and then I was on vacation. Monday (as well as Wednesday and Thursday) are going to be days when I have to get back to the classroom.

Last year we taught face to face classes until about October and then had to shut down for a while. It seems likely with high rates of vaccination (even amongst the students) that things will continue this way despite increasing case numbers.

The neighbourhood around my school is embroiled in a huge construction project. They are building something called the Crosstown LRT. As I understand it (and there are parts that I don’t’–including the rationale) they are building an underground bus lane (rather than an actual subway that could take people to the airport). I had expected it to be finished by now, or at least look like we were close to a finish. Sadly, this is not the case at all. The neighbourhood looks worse than a house on one of those hoarding shows. For all the underground construction, there is a lot of stuff going on aboveground.

What with the commute, walking around the classroom at a distance to the students, and catching up with a couple of coworkers, it was a rather tiring day. Today, I am teaching from home–which also means I have time to write this post.

From Students to Shaving

I was working on phrasal verbs with my students today and one of the words in phrasal verbs in question was “tire me out”. After seeing the phrasal verb, along with some others we were looking at in context, I set them a discussion task involving questions using the phrasal verbs. The question I asked them was which tired them out more, online classes or face to face classes.

The answer surprised me a little. They said that online classes tired them out more. I was a bit confused, but since they have been trained to give more information when answering questions, I soon got to hear their interesting logic behind the answer. One of them explained, and was quickly backed up by the others in the class, that with online classes they wake up only 5 minutes before class and stumble over to their computers without much thought. When they take face to face classes, they have to get up earlier, shower, eat breakfast, and make the commute. They then explained that this “woke them up.”

I had to consider that they confused “being tired” with “something tired them out”. I could certainly see their logic. However, due to a large age gap, maybe they hadn’t really confused it. Maybe lying around all day waiting for classes to start online really did tire them out. They live in a world where everything (except English classes) is provided “on demand”.

They went off on a tangent about not needing to get ready for class and I thought of myself getting up early, taking a shower, shaving, and eating breakfast before teaching the first online class of the day. I am thick skinned, but they were making me out to be a chump.

I should relate this to my weekend. I didn’t shave from Friday morning to Monday morning. I had a decent amount of growth going. My girlfriend regards my stubble as “daggers’ but by the third day, I could imagine it was starting to get softer. I briefly toyed with the idea of growing my first “pandemic beard” but so many other people had beat me to it.

I relish the oppourtunity not to shave. It is always good to give your face a vacation. However, and my girlfriend is going to love me admitting this, shaving off those three days of stubble also felt pretty good. Which one is the Perfect Moment? It doesn’t really matter. I enjoyed both of them.