Eazy's gear

2007-07-10T12:19:00.000-07:00

Ok, I just moved my blog to this site and i'm resolved to publish something at least once a week, to get something useful out of the whole exercise.
This week: end of classes. kids can sometimes be nice, and make you forget all those times you wanted to throw up your arms in desperation:

Last classes get emotional when you realize you'll never see these kids again. some of them i've been working with on a bi-weekly basis for two years. if they know anything in English, it's because of yours truly. i spoke with a colleague about the attachment you can feel and he pointed out that it's too easy to idealize the job of teaching kids. you need to approach it like any job and not get overly sentimental. that being said, i know i'll miss those big smiles i would get every day showing up for work. adults just don't get worked up like that. it's like a drug. anyway, the last week was without too much stress, as we watched part of a movie- Monsters and Co., played review games, and reviewed songs. i have to admit i felt kind of proud and sad saying goodbye to them.

On surfing- June 20

2007-07-10T11:46:00.001-07:00

Why be so obsessed about surfing? Cuz it's a way of life, man. What else would compel me to get up at 6 am on my day off? My roommate and i left the house at seven, we were in the water at about 8.30. Technically not a dawn patrol, as I think that constitutes seeing the sunrise from the beach, but it's in the right direction. We went to a surf spot called le truc vert (the green thingy). It's about an hour drive from Bordeaux, some of which can be in frustratingly slow traffic on the ring road, but ends blissfully on a bumpy road through pine trees and dunes. At first we surfed a smallish wave which was doubled up, meaning the swell was not evenly spaced, so you get two waves where you should have one, and it lacks the power to push you. A few were pretty fun, but it was a bit frustrating. After an hour we got out of the water and saw that the sand bar further down the beach had gotten shallow enough to cause breakers. The waves were forming larger and much cleaner. The wind turned directly offshore, which keeps the waves glassy and rideable. For a few hours, all the elements came together. i took out hans' board, a 7'6", and rode six or seven of the best waves i've ever had. One even started to tube as i was going down the line. The lip hit me and i fell, but i was still ecstatic. It was closer to a tube than i've ever been in my life. The feeling of a wave starting to turn on itself with you in the eye of it is something i can't describe. Using a longer board than my 6'3" made it a lot easier to get up- i could start early and go down fast, bottom turn, hold the line. When we first got there it was cloudy and dark, but we could see the blue sky to the south. Bit by bit it worked its way towards us, eventually heading north and resulting in blue from one horizon to the other. It was like a line in the sky, the dark heavy clouds on one side and the high, light puffy ones on the other, split down the middle as though with a knife.
Why be so obsessed about surfing? We come to this spot a couple times a week, and usually at least one of the necessary elements to a good day of surfing is working against us. The wind might be coming from the ocean rather than the land, which makes the waves break quicker and messier. Or from the side, which makes little waves that interfere with the ones you're trying to catch. The tide might be too high so that the waves don't have enough power to push you. The swell might be too small, or mixed up with wind swell, or just doubled, or even too big, all making it difficult. The sandbar underneath the wave might be too straight, so that the waves break all at once, closing out. But to have one day where you get to your spot and everything has come together: the tide, the wind, the swell, the sandbar, the sun, the lack of people, it's a day you experience a couple times a year. The spot that looked like this on other days:

Finally looks like this:

You probably can't tell from this tiny picture, but that's a 5-6 foot swell, an 8 second period, 10 knot offshore wind at two hours after high tide. Long, peeling, glassy left-handers. You obsess for days like that.

On squandering- March 20

2007-07-10T11:43:00.000-07:00

since i've squandered away the better part of the day perusing the internet somewhat aimlessly, i think posting a note here might make me feel that my time has not been spent completely in vain. i began the day with the best intentions of working on some stuff for university, but things went downhill quickly. i discovered the forums at wordreference.com and before i knew it found myself posting responses to questions on english grammar and french and spanish translation. it's fun, but, really, is that worth sitting in front of my computer in the middle of the day for? anyway, the fascinating thing about the site is that it's so fast. there might be 4000 people online at once just in the spanish section. post a question and ten minutes later five responses appear simultaneously. i was also sidelined by my current project of self-inflicted spanish immersion. i'd like to be able to speak decent spanish before i leave europe, so i'm reading el pais, listening to podcasts, watching spanish cartoons on youtube, posting in a spanish forum. this is binge internet consumption. actually, i'll justify it this way: i have plenty of friends who work in offices and i know for a fact that they spend loads of time dicking around on the net when they could be working. it's natural. since i have never had an office job, i've missed out on all that time wasting. it's about time i caught up. i'm going to start clocking in when i sit down to my computer to do nothing in particular. yeah, it's a labor of love.
yesterday i had a meeting for my internship, taught in the afternoon, met with my professor to discuss my project, and went rock climbing with hans, my charming german roommate. classes were good, but one thing is really frustrating me. there's one group of kids that strictly refuse to behave when i'm alone with them. if the teacher shows up late, or leaves for a while, they just all of a sudden look as though they're in the playground. throwing erasers at each other, knocking stuff off of desks, making fart noises, cracking each other up. but here's the kicker: one kid asked me "is the teacher coming?" I say yeah, she'll be here in a minute. And i asked them if they prefer when she's there. they're all yeah, yeah. so i asked why and one of them said, "because then we behave better." so the fucked up thing is they want to be calm, but apparently when i'm there alone they're just incapable. maybe i dont project enough authority to make them shut up. another theory is that it really is a lot easier to get angry in your own language. if i try to bitch these kids out in french i need to have zero hesitation and zero flaws in what i say. the second i mess up a gender or say something non-idiomatically, they'll stop thinking it's serious. the other thing is continuity. the teacher is with them all day and can assure that if one kid is particularly annoying he'll stay in at recess or whatever. at the end of english, i disappear as far as the kids are concerned, and so do any threats i've made to discipline them. another conclusion is that i spend way too much time even considering this question and hope i never have to teach ten year olds again. i'm sure if i try teaching high school in the states it'll be a real cakewalk. hah.
i dont read a lot of blogs so i'm not really sure about the protocol. i feel as though i just keep talking about myself, but in any case, there it is. it's gotten cold again in bordeaux. thoughts of going surfing have been relegated to a dark recess of the mind.

To begin with- March 13

2007-07-10T11:38:00.000-07:00

i was lying in bed last night for some reason having a hard time falling asleep, which has always been a problem of mine- i like the night time. around midnight my brain just starts firing. it's really not that great when u also have to get up in the morning. i was lying in bed and a few thoughts were bothering me. i used to keep a lot of journals. i've got a bunch of old spiral-bound notebooks at home just lying there, from various different times- high school, college, post-college. i dont do it anymore. and i was missing the act of writing those entries. not that i'll ever go back and read them again, but somehow at the time it seemed clarifying, helped me understand something about what happened during the day that i didnt grasp the first time around (call it la pensée de l'escalier, it's my specialty). and rather than start another paper journal, fuck it, i'll put it online. isnt that what this century, our generation, our day and age is supposed to be about? putting yourself out for the world to see.

anyway, it doesnt matter if one or two of my friends read this or no-one does, i'm doing it so one day i'll remember what the hell i was doing back in my little low-budget apartment in bordeaux in the first decade of the twenty first century. what am i doing? it's 11.40am on tuesday. i'm dicking around on the internet. one thing i do have now is the luxury of time. i work, but if i compare with my friends at home it seems like nothing. i have to go teach this afternoon, so my time limit on this post is about twenty more minutes.

i'm teaching english to kids in elementary school. the kids are awesome, i really love the contact with them. they're so smart but at the same time so undeveloped mentally. they're seeing all this shit for the first time and most of them have their eyes wide open and are curious about everything. their energy seems limitless. at the same time that's part of the difficulty of this job. i feel as though i've been given a nearly impossible task. i'm supposed to engage these kids in learning english, primarily orally, in a way that keeps them active, motivated and at the same time challenged, maximizing their contact with the spoken language. i'm supposed to do that with groups of eight to eleven year olds ranging in class size from fifteen students to twenty eight students. i have eight classes that i see twice a week. i counted, it's something like 180 students. now if you want to try to get 28 nine-year olds to play a game in which you tell them they should only speak english and expect things to go down smoothly, well, i dont know how best to disillusion you, but suffice it to say: it's not gonna go down smoothly. therein lies my challenge, and some days it works great, other days abominably. actually in some classes it works perfectly. but in others i occasionally have to just give up the pedagogical idealism and give them stuff to write and do boring shit. actually, we write something every class. it's neceassary to have la trace écrite. but i must admit, and of this i am not proud, that i have given lines to copy. it's like the simpsons- i will listen to the teacher in english class- twenty times. i felt ridiculous giving that as punishment, but it's how the system operates here in france. somewhere principal skinner is smiling on france. so here is my dilemma. maybe i'll be able to work something out in this exercise of blog-writing. so, as the youtubers say, here goes nothing, and as i say, fuck it, this is my blog, beeotches.