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It was hot today.  Real hot.  So  hot the sun was a menace to society.  So hot I feel sunburned and I was not  at the beach.  So hot the bus was  like  a sauna, as the sun came focused through  the window.  So hot people were congregating  wherever there was  shade.  So  hot I  dawdled  in a  shop, just because they had AC.  I didn’t  see anybody trying to fry an egg on  the sidewalk, but I’ll  bet you could  have.  So hot it’s still kind  of hot  now, and its midnight.  So hot the teachers on the playground set up lawnchairs under a tree and let the kids do whatever the hell  they wanted.

I suppose it was due.  It IS summer, after  all.   And that’s all I’ve got to say about that.  It was my  last day for the summer with all of my Thursday classes.  At the gymnasium I tried something I  haven’t done before, in all my years of  teaching, but maybe I should have.  In  two of  my classes (the ones  that had more than 6 people  present) I asked  them to write  down on a  piece  of paper – unsigned, I specified unsigned  but one girl  ignored that, plus the girl who write in over sized letter in  pink  marker, I know who  that  was, all right – what they thought  I could  do differently next  year.  I was surprised.  I got some really good, serious suggestions.  Some questions they don’t  like.  Some things they think  I do too often.  Some games – not just that they suggested we play more games, but some  of  them suggested  quite specific games.

So, now I’m committed.  If  I  don’t  try at least some of their suggestions next semester, I’ll look like  an asshole.  And  I  wouldn’t want that.

I am currently watching Ghosts of Mars, with Ice Cube.  Basically, it is a bad movie, a guilty pleasure, a bald faced excuse for lots of scary costumes, fighting, gunplay, explosions and such but, outside of the guns and the zombies it’s not an entirely unreasonable view of what Mars might look like a few decades into the colonization process, with the heavy metal trains linking the central  colony with the outlying mines.

It’s not like The Martian, or anything like that, but it’s not much worse than Total Recall, as far as believability.  Of course, there’s still  a few minutes to go and they could still blow that, because Total Recall, imho, is definitely in my top 5 movies in the category of “pretty good until they totally blew it with a totally ridiculous final scene.”

Mars movies.  Eventually there will be more of them than there are Westerns even, because they will continue to make them.  As colonization gets closer, there will be many serious ones, that try to look at the scientific problems and difficulties realistically, but there’s a limited market for that kind of that, so Hollywood will continue to crank out the  adventures.  Then, after the colonization begins, there will be documentaries, and personal dramas, and maybe even the occasional rom-com set on Mars, and they will  keep pace with the actual development, sometimes preceding  it and predicting  new technology , as Star Trek has done.

Some day, a film set on Mars will be no more unusual than a film set in New York  City.

(O.K., it’s over.  Not bad at all.  As long as you’re not fastidious about your film choices, and enjoy  lots of death and zombies and shit, it’s worth watching.)

It was my last day today teaching at the elementary  school near Haje, and two of the classes didn’t  go  badly.  Last day before the summer break, that is, and I do hope I get  asked back next year.

But, the first of the 3  classes  did not go well.  They are 2nd graders, 7 years old, so it is always a struggle.  Not so much  teaching them English, although that is certainly a struggle.  They keep asking me stuff in Czech and I answer as best I can, for a few minutes, before reminding them that it’s an English class.  That’s the thing.   They don’t get that it’s a class at all.  The idea of a time period where they’re actually expected to sit in a chair and learn something is foreign to them, and I kind of feel that if I can teach  them that, I will have accomplished something, although it’s really not part of my job description.  I don’t think.  There really is no job description.

Anyway, there were the 3 girls on the left, who always ignore me, and the kids in the middle, clamoring for attention, and N. and A. over on the right.  Normally, they like me just fine, but N. felt she was being ignored because other kids were shouting out the answers and winning all the cards, so she got out of her chair and sat on the floor under the table.  I tried getting down to her level, giving her first shot at the questions, putting the flashcards right in her face, and she ignored me.  Then A., in solidarity, joined her.

After that game, I decided it  was story time (Curious George, one of my favorites), and asked all the  kids to sit in the front of the room.  Some sat on the floor, some hauled  up the bean  bag chairs from the back of the room, and N. and A. decided it would be funny to hijack the teacher’s chair, as I wasn’t sitting in it anyway.  I wouldn’t mind, but if they do it, everybody wants to do it.

So, I picked up N. bodily and put her down on the floor.    (A. was not the problem.  She took the hint.  Then N. got back up and started drawing on  the blackboard  while I was reading.  I sat her down again and by this time I was ticked off, so I held on to her wrist to keep  her in place while I read the book.  Maybe a little too hard, because after that she was rubbing her wrist for the rest of the class, and A. was massaging her with a little fluff toy and they were both giving me really dirty looks for the rest of the class.

I felt justified, but she is a tiny girl, and I  didn’t mean to hurt her, and I  probably could be a bit more positive  and  creative (a bit more Miss Honey  and a bit less Miss Trunchbull), but the year is over and this  day is chalked  up to experience.

jj

Sometimes things are exactly what you expect  them to be.

There were two videos making the  rounds on Facebook today  which confirmed this for  me.  The first was just laugh out loud funny.  Literally.  LOL.  I did.  The headline was funny enough: “Anarchist Meeting Descends Into Chaos”

And it did, but in a college anarchist, everybody chanting sort of way.  Not in a fun, uninhibited, chair throwing, table overturning, trouser dropping sort of way.  I guess the person scheduled to speak had at some point said something that offended victims of the patriarchy (patriarchy = men, who are all rapists) and everybody was shouting stuff at her, like “We will not be silenced by your  violence,” and “Fuck you, Pig!”

Eventually, police were called, but they were campus police, and the meeting was ended, I think, but there were still people milling about, accusing each other of having called the police.

In the end, though, it was an Anarchist Meeting, so the fact  that it ended in chaos can be viewed as sort of a victory.

The other was Trump’s cabinet meeting, where each of the new department heads got to speak.  As they went around the table, each one said just 3 or 4 sentences, most of which were along the lines of “I’m so proud to work for this valiant administration which is fulfilling all of it’s promises and making American great again.”

It was kind of bizarre and North Korean.  In other words, exactly what you would expect from a Trump led cabinet meeting.

The end of the weekend, again, the time between Friday afternoon  and Monday morning seems to get briefer with each cycle.  Which is totally explainable by science, in this case psychology.  It’s because as  you get older each day, each week, each year represents a smaller percentage of your whole life than it did before, because your life gets longer and longer.  Logic.

If we lived to be a million years old, the weekends and the weeks would be alternating with such speed that it would be like a spinning wheel and we’d see it all as a blur.  I’d be O.K. with that, I think, just for the privilege of staying alive.

Saw a film the other day on TV, well, maybe missed the first half hour, which is one of the problems with doing your film viewing on TV, and it was not a very good movie.  It was called Bicentennial Man, and it had Robin Williams playing a robot who wanted to be human.  The whole thing is he wanted to be human and more or less achieved it, fell  in love with a woman and all but then, when she got old and was ready to die (even though they could have dramatically extended her life with the advanced technology of about 200 years from now, she rejected that as unnatural and talked about  how humans are only supposed to be on this Earth for a temporary period) he decided that he would die, too, if that’s what it meant to be human, and I just thought that was ridiculous.

If you get a chance at immortality, you take it.  You can always change your mind a couple of thousand years down the road.  Not even wanting to see what’s going to happen in the next 2 or 300 strikes me as an abysmal lack of curiosity.