Happy Birthday Bruce Lee

Bruce Lee would have been 70 years old today if he had lived.

I often wonder about the iconic people who die young, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, John, Robert and John Jr. of the Kennedy family. Bruce Lee, Brandon Lee. How would their lives have turned out if they had lived? Greater accomplishments or disgrace? Or maybe after the flame of youth and/or power flickered out they finished their lives much as the rest of us live them. Of course there is no knowing.

I think, especially in Bruce's case, we just need to be happy he lived for as long he did and was able to make an impact in such a short period of time. Long live the memory of Bruce Lee.

That Time of Year

This is the time of year where I justify my existence at my job by submitting my professional portfolio. Every year I find this portfolio harder to do on an emotional level. I know I am not doing everything that is desired to get tenure so I feel somewhat inadequate when I am updating the "research agenda" prong. However, my work and service areas I think are quite satisfactory. I am running out of time, I have two years before I have to submit that last final portfolio. But here is where the emotional part comes in, I don't want to do the research agenda. I have long thought, even before I became a librarian, the tenure track resulted in a lot of crap articles written by folks for the sole purpose of putting in their portfolio, to get those "golden handcuffs." So there is a part of me that feels like a hypocrite being a part of this process. When I was applying for jobs (except for this place, where I was already working) I didn't apply to any institution that had the tenure system.

If you don't submit a portfolio, you are effectively resigning and in this economy who dares to do that without something already lined up? This job has its downsides but the benefits are excellent. I have been able to travel more these past couple of years as well as finally have some savings. That is hard to let go of, even if there is something one thinks would be more fulfilling in other ways. If I didn't submit a portfolio, I would be out of a job as of August 31st 2011, submitting my portfolio (assuming its approval) buys me another year.

But this portfolio has other benefits for me. It reminds me time is passing and if I do want to make a change in my life, I had better start making some decisions and working towards them. In some ways I have been doing that, in others not. One thing is that in this past year I have been learning more about myself as a teacher. I teach college students about the library databases at work and I am teaching Chinese immigrants English. Every time I teach it is a learning opportunity for me but the most telling thing is that even though there is always "performance anxiety" I really enjoy it.

I will continue doing my job and I will continue the research agenda I have set up for myself but it is time to stop fantasizing about the future and start doing something about it. It is time to start planning the future-switching to a teaching career, preferably in Hong Kong.

Teaching & Learning

Last night was the third week of my adventures in teaching ESL in Chinatown. The students go to class on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. There are six teachers, 3 for each evening and we rotate as lead teacher. I teach on Wednesdays. I taught the class last week. I wouldn't say I did a great job, I floundered most when it came to getting them to participate, they may have known the answers but hesitated to respond. Not a unique problem for teachers in general from what I understand.

I try to be a good assistant teacher when I am not teaching, making sure the students are on the right page, checking their answers in their workbooks, I don't just sit in the back of the room until it is time for group work. My Cantonese has helped a little, last night M. spoke too softly for them and I understood them when they said they couldn't hear her, later they were saying that she was going too fast. It was M.'s first teaching experience and I thought she took the criticisms well and adapted. Afterward she was asking me about this and that, I reassured her the best that I could. I have found that even experienced teachers question themselves after a class, it seems to be endemic to the profession.

I am teaching the Beginner class but they know a certain amount of English already, they can read along in the book, most of the time their pronunciation is understandable and they seem to know much of the grammar and a fair amount of vocabulary. As soon as the teaching strays from the book however, they are lost it seems. They struggle holding a simple conversation. When we read a passage from the book and the teacher asks why did this person do this or how could he have handled that situation differently they either don't understand or can't articulate the answer in English.

I can seriously relate to my students because I too am learning a foreign language. I know a lot of Cantonese but struggle with expressing myself in the language. Even if I know all the words and know the proper syntax backwards and forwards, I have difficulty conversing casually. It is something I am working on more lately. My tutor and I are working on conversation, if I don't know a word in Cantonese I say it in English but then go right back to Cantonese. Later she teaches me the word I didn't know. She says I am doing well, I still think I speak too much in English but I do feel that I am progressing.

Another thing I am doing is drilling vocabulary and example sentences via the Anki flashcard system. I had heard about it on Sheik's forum but I didn't really understand how it worked until another Cantonese student shared his flashcard deck with me. Since then I have created two decks of my own, one is exclusive to what I have learned from my tutor and the other is a mix of things I have learned from various resources. I try to review each deck for 10 minutes a day, not necessarily all at once. Right now I am adding materials so I am spending even more time on this, depending on how much time I have. I am trying not to add just words but phrases and sentences that will reinforce grammar or syntax. However, there is no hurry to add more to my decks, the deck that was shared with me has almost 2500 cards, it will take me awhile to get through that.

Back to teaching-I do teach at my job as well. It isn't the main part of my job, but because we are continuously short staffed at my job I teach some of the bibliographic instruction classes. This is my 3rd semester doing this and I am finally feeling more confident in this role. I have gotten some nice compliments from the teaching faculty I have been working with and even had one of my colleagues ask to adapt one of my handouts for her class. She is a more experienced teacher and a very good one so that made my day. Then she told the head of the department about it and he commented about it to me, telling me to make sure I put it in my professional portfolio. That made my week.

Major Changes

Tuesday was a day of announcements that could really affect the quality of my life in the near future. First was the announcement of a new dean at my job. There has been much stress revolving this issue for months, it is quite a long and even a bit sordid of a story, but next week it will just another anecdote thankfully. I liked this candidate the best when we met the 3 candidates for dean last spring and was disappointed when she got passed over the first time around. But now she is coming and I am excited. We desperately need new leadership. How she will like me and what I am doing and what I am not doing (publishing) remains to be seen. She sounds like a real go-getter so she may not relate well to someone like me who is significantly less ambitious. Time will tell.

I have had a chronic leak in my bathroom for years, often little fixes are made and it stops it or slows it for awhile but I have rarely had a leak free ceiling. In fact the ceiling fell down several years ago. The water comes down in more than one place and at times it is like it is raining in there. The amount of water coming down has filled a bucket on some days lately so the time for excuses and delays is over. But the landlord and management company have been stalling, I pay one of the cheaper rents here and so does my upstairs neighbor so we tend to get 2nd citizen treatment.

So while doing laundry that evening I approached my Super again about this leak. He told me that the landlord had successfully sold our building after it being on the market for 3 years or so. This explains the most recent stalling by the landlord, he was on his way out. Again, how does this affect me? Well, rumor is that the new landlords are very good at building maintenance. And even "good" would be great right now. I live in a fairly nice area, but to look at my building out of this context, you'd think I lived in a ghetto.

One thing my Super said was that one of the first things the new landlord mentioned was that they are planning to install security cameras, at the front door, in the elevator. We had two burglaries during the daytime just a couple of weeks ago so this is very exciting news. This has given me a positive impression of the new landlord, that he isn't just going to sit back and collect the rent like the previous one.

It is interesting to be on this end of change. I have done nothing and yet I expect big changes to happen both at work and at home. I feel like I have less battles to wage in the near future. I wonder how long that feeling will last?

Ah, better not to ask that question but to enjoy it while it lasts.

Volunteering

Last year after finishing years of being in and out of school (2 masters degrees in 7 years) and losing my dog I found myself in need of doing something more meaningful than my first inclination of sitting home in front of the dvd player. A friend of mine suggested volunteering via NY Cares. I did a few projects last year, the main ones being Early Morning Reading (with grade school kids before their school day started) and English Conversation (with adults in the evenings). Both had their good points and bad points but they also left me wanting more structure, consistency and more of a connection. I wasn't so clear last year on what I wanted so it was easier to choose projects.

I have spent the past almost two months trying to decide what to do for my volunteering. Late August is when the longer term projects start organizing, more reading or maybe math with kids this time? Tutoring high school students for their SATs? I have signed up for projects, gone for the training or gone for the first day and decided it wasn't for me. The SAT project was appealing but I realized that I would be spending too much time trying to reconnect myself with math that I never learned well in the first place--how could I help someone else master it if it was still foreign for me?

Finally I went to another website that connects volunteers with organizations with needs, Idealist. There I found what I clearly had in the back of my mind but hadn't clearly articulated yet even to myself--a small organization in Chinatown that teaches English. I went for the interview/information session last week and start next week. I have great hopes for this, this organization has been teaching English for awhile, you teach in a team of 3 so there is good support for new teachers. There is prep work to do, but everyone takes turns so it shouldn't be too much of a time commitment--always a concern for me.

Actually I tried signing up with this group before, last winter in fact. But their semester ended too late, I would miss the last 3 weeks or so because of my summer trip to Hong Kong so it was bad timing. This clearly was meant to be because the last class of the semester is Dec. 15. I leave for my next trip to Hong Kong the very next day. :)

As for how satisfying an experience it is, time will tell I guess.

A West Village Institution

Club Groove, the corner of MacDougal St. and West 3rd, heart of the Village in Manhattan. It has always been one of those reassuring landmarks for me. I don't know how long that mural has been there, but it has to be at least 30 years.

I was passing it recently and having my camera in my bag, got nostalgic, thinking wow, it is so great this place still exists. I remember being 18 years old and seeing this mural and marveling at it. I walked past it for years because I went to college then worked in that area, for almost two decades this sight was a part of my daily life. Ironically I have never been the club in all the years I have lived in NYC.

It is true that I am not really up on the local music scene and never really was, but at one time I had friends that were and I would follow them to various places. But I don't think we ever went here. I think I am going to have to create an "opportunity" sometime soon. Even if it isn't what I consider to be "my type" of music, I bet it will be fun, and even if it isn't I will have a story to tell.

Has anyone been there? Sometimes people come to NYC as tourists and see more than some of us locals (or in my case long-term transplant) do.

Renn Faire & the Battle of the Sexes

Clearly I am not a natural blogger, it has been quite some time since my last post. Being a journal keeper (diarist?) I already write quite a bit, but most of it is too personal or too boring for public consumption. But it does seem unfair that I read so many blogs and don't respond in kind.

Instead of going to the 1st annual Chinese Film Festival in NYC (because despite being on every film list in town I didn't know about it) I went to the Renaissance Faire in Tuxedo, NY with friends. I guess the film festival was only promoted in the Chinese language press, which didn't just leave me out, left out many Chinese Americans who cannot read Chinese. But let's hope it was still a great success and there will be a 2nd annual festival next year.

I did have a good time but re-enacting the Renaissance isn't really my thing so going two years in a row wasn't a good idea in retrospect. On second thought it gave me a totally different perspective this time because instead of going to every little booth, one particular friend and I concentrated on getting good seats for the shows, last year we could barely hear or see because we arrived too late to each event.

What I found interesting about the Renn Faire how obviously they have updated the era to be more politically correct, more inclusive almost to the extreme, at least in terms of gender. Women take on just as much leadership, dancing and fighting roles as men do--and they win. Clearly more fun to watch than the reality of the time so it is understandable I guess. The comedy duo, The Washing Wenches, get a lot of laughs targeting the men in the audience. During the live Chess match, when Will Scarlett and Robin Hood are supposed to fight, Maid Marion takes Robin's place because she couldn't bear for her husband-to-be and brother to fight. Actually this was the most fun and funny fight to watch, because she used every weapon in a sister's arsenal which had nothing to do with swordplay but she also had some decent sword moves. And the final event of the day, the Joust, was to determine whether the challenger to the throne, a male, would usurp the Queen. And you can guess who won.



Every event starts with a dance



Maid Marion kicking her brother's butt




Washing Wenches and one of their "volunteers"