I’ve marched in!

After more than 4 years working for a school that has been through major changes, has laid me off and rehired me twice, has seen a complete change in the methodology and has chosen to disregard its employees as invaluable assets, I happily announce that tomorrow, 9 December, is my fucking last day!!!

The decision of leaving the school was made much earlier this year, but “the fear” always prevented me from doing so. The questions about how I would make it through the month and pay my bills inevitably kept me sitting in that office for a longer time. Also, we teachers tend to think in terms of, well, terms, meaning that we wouldn’t leave a place in the middle of the semester, so we always make plans like: ‘I’ll quit after July’ or ‘I’ll wait until the end of the semester’. The end of the semester has come and I saw no more excuses to postpone it.

It’s been sad seeing the organisation that once was respected end up the way it has. You know when you can see the rock bottom from afar? That’s what happened and I honestly don’t want to be part of it when they hit the ground. I guess the whole decision process started after seeing the following TED Talk over and over again (I’d been showing this presentation in one of my classes I teach) and sharing my frustration with two of my (then) co-workers, now my two partners in our enterprise.

So, we basically got tired of giving the owners of the school all of our time, knowledge, life and money and decided to eliminate the middle man and do everything on our own. From now on, no more reporting to anybody, just making collaborative decisions, enjoying what we do and, hopefully, making a difference.

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After many weeks of being Fox News-free, I had a relapse this morning and watched  Fox & Friends as I was preparing to go to work. I watched this piece on shortage of prescription drugs and people who need the medication being affected by it, some people have even died. At some point, Steve Doocy makes the case of why the government isn’t stepping in as the companies claim they might have problems with production or whatever. I was SHOCKED! Government stepping in? On Fox & Friends? Doocy??? Of course government should step in, but doesn’t this argument go completely against everything these guys have worked for every morning since Obama took office?

So, government stepping in and regulating what goes in what people eat and what is thrown into the air they breathe is outrageous. But if the same people need medication for diseases that may well be caused by what they eat and breathe, that’s ok???

The World Peace Game

Everyday more I thank my great co-worker for introducing TED to me. I’ve been translating TED Talks for almost two years now and am happy to be #3 translator in number of translated talks in Brazil. I don’t how long I’ll remain there, but it’s definitely cool!

I’ve said before that I’m particularly interested in talks about the environment or science. Incredibly, these are the easiest talks to translate, and obviously you learn things that you would never imagine, or you get to see things way before they are known worldwide. Anyway, one of the latest talks I’ve translated was given by John Hunter, a 4th grade teacher that started the World Peace Game. Students are organised in groups and they have to decide who’ll be president, PM, organise the cabinet, and deal with a list of problems that, just like in real life, are connected to other problems, so they need to think about the decisions they make because they will affect everything else. The kids even solved the problem of climate change! More than once!

It’s an inspiring talk that I was glad to translate into Portuguese. The review was done by Belucio Haibara.

https://ted.com/talks/view/id/1127

Wheels keep turning

I took the time this afternoon to study and start finalising some of the papers for college and decided to go to PUC’s library and consult some Art and Education books. I was shocked by the changes in that library! I was intimidated by it, I felt like a person from last century that by accident ended up in that place. Well, I think technically the last time I went there was actually in last century!

But the wheels kept turning, and everything was renovated. I still had that image of old shelves, with a number of tables next to them, old (and very limited number of!) computers. Well, maybe back then they weren’t so old, but surely slow. Now, the picture is different. Really comfortable armchairs, a lounge-like feeling and computers everywhere, without having to wait in line to search for books! I liked the environment, and was able to get a lot done in a few hours.

As for work… clinging on what’s left of strength to keep going… Wheels keep turning, don’t they? And I’m getting some wheels in motion myself! Along with my peers, obviously.

Postponing the inevitable

So, one more day at work… The time for the shooting of the second part of video classes is approaching – I think we’re shooting on 5 June – and the scripts have to be written. I’ve managed to finish five scripts, which is a good number for a 10-day period. Well, maybe not for a professional writer, but considering the conditions and that I’m not a professional writer, I think it’s a reasonable time. The first time took me two months! But after making a good start, I’m at a point that I really don’t know what to write about; writer’s block, if I may. I mean, I know the topics, but I need to figure out how they will be presented in a 12-minute video divided in two parts. So I can’t simply abruptly finish one topic and pick it up on the other side. Sometimes it takes me an hour to think of something, but then it will be too much content, so I’m back to “editing”.

So, to avoid dealing with that pain-in-the-ass situation, I end up clinging on whatever distraction is presented to me. And that distraction leads to another, and another, and another… One of those distractions was learning that my email account would change. The changing of the accounts started a couple of months ago with the managers, and now all the teachers and people without a specific function — meaning me — will have a new email address. However, I really need to find a way to keep the messages that I’ve sent and received so far, they can’t simply be deleted or disappear for good because I find myself time and time again having to go back several months and check if I received a specific message. So, I decided to access the new page (it’s web-based), changed the language, set a new password, explored it a little bit and eventually found out that I could transfer messages from other accounts to this new one (I’m not tech savvy, so to me it’s like I’ve struck gold…). I then followed all the steps and when I hit the button to finally transfer everything, an “error occurred”. Don’t you just hate these two words? “Error occurred”? I tried again, all the steps, clicking all the options, and… “error occurred”. Third time is a charm, right? Wrong… “error occurred”. I think altogether I spent one hour on the new account thing. I obviously did not solve the problem, but I didn’t want to ask the IT guys for help. One of the guys is all right. He’s nice, he does the job quickly and explains things in a way that anyone understands. But the other guy… obnoxious would be a proper word to describe him. He’s so unbearable, he makes these really unfortunate remarks, not to mention that he’s creepy-looking, you know, the classic movie character that snaps and takes a machine gun from under the desk and kills the entire office. Whenever I call them I hope that the other guy picks up the phone. If not, it inevitably reminds me of one Seinfeld episode where Elaine is trying to talk to a friend, but the friend’s boyfriend answers the phone and never stops talking, wants to chit-chat. She unsuccessfully tries to make the conversation short, and in the end she just hangs up the phone every time he picks it up.

But I’ll have to contact them sooner or later. And I’ll have to go back to writing. And I’ll have to resume Email English corrections. And I’ll have to think of material for next Immersion. NOOOOOOOOOOOO……..

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Didn’t you just love the Secret Service’s rogue tweet, or “mistweet”, about Fox News? Check it here. Simply “h-i-l-a-r-i-o-u-s!”

Costumes, booze and two puking staffers

I wouldn’t say that I’m a keen student, never have been. But last Saturday I really got a lot of college things done, and not only that, it was actually interesting. We’re taking now this class on research on education and I got to read some fascinating stuff. However, at some point I had to interrupt everything because I needed to get ready for the school’s Oscar-like costume party where awards would be handed to the best, brightest, hardest-working people who work there. In a bizarro world, I would have been delighted to attend such a great and exciting affair.

I was actually forced to go to the party; I literally had been cornered by one of the directors last Wednesday saying that I needed to go because they would show part of the video classes to the staff, so I had to be there to see the work being presented. The product had turned out to be so great that everybody else should know about it. Okay. I had no choice.

Well, not only did they devote an insignificant amount of time to the video, they also completely ignored who was involved in the production, and that really pissed me off. The video was basically introduced like this: “We’d like to present our newest product, the video classes, developed to our corporate clients.” And that was it!!! What about the hours I spent in front of the computer, trying to come up with ideas and different ways to write the explanations, and edit everything to a 12-minute class? What about the production assistant, that edited the demo class, researched pictures and controlled the teleprompter on the day of the shooting? And the presenter? Don’t you think it was extremely exhausting for her to stand in front of those lights for 10 hours, doing all the speaking and worried about getting it right on the first attempt because, well, there wouldn’t be a second attempt? It was a shame, it was disrespectful not mentioning our efforts to make the whole thing happen.

Needles to say that after this incident I just wanted to leave the place right away. They handed the awards to schools with best results, as well as the people who had enrolled more students. When my fed-up-o-metre was on the highest level, out came the champagne. And that was the only alcoholic option. And I loved it! The good thing about the party, apart from the never-empty glasses, was being able to talk projects with my co-pals — we’re even entertaining the idea of a podcast! (Or “padcost”, after two bottles of booze that’s the way it came out!)

The bad thing was being there long enough to see a couple of people getting sick. What the hell is wrong with these people? The first was this guy from Marketing and I honestly expected someone from that department to do such a thing. But the other person, one of the school managers, just unexpected… And I was the unlucky one that went to the bathroom (after not being able to hold it in any longer) and found her there, looking awful, as the stench punched me in the face. I couldn’t stay in, but didn’t want to just leave her there. So, I got her some water and when I was trying to find a way out of that pickle, another unlucky soul decided to go to the bathroom, saw the scene and said, ‘Oh, is she OK?’ I said, ‘Not really… I’ll be right back….’ Never to return, obviously.

Marigate

After months and months of negotiations, video classes are happening. In fact, we’re shooting the first eight lessons next Sunday. The whole idea of doing this is just crazy to me. I’ve seen myself writing scripts for the last two months, and I’m still in process of writing the last one, and it’s gotta be finished by tomorrow. I think that’s the reason why I didn’t write anything here in two months, all the energy went to these bloody scripts.

My colleagues and I produced this demo class to show the company what the lesson would look like. We did it with absolutely no school resources; the only thing we used was the premisses. The camera, teleprompter, the editing; all us. The company really liked the final result, so did the school’s owners.

Last week, Mari and I took the Friday afternoon to work on the scripts and the presentation. She will be the teacher on screen and needed to know the material, so we did a little rehearsal. After reading six scripts in a row, she was absolutely exhausted, and we started thinking about the actual shooting. She’ll be the presenter, so it’s all on her. As she has groups on Monday all day, I suggested she asked for the morning off, because this job will definitely be brutal. This was Saturday and I wouldn’t be back to work until Wednesday. She talked to the school’s OP about it, and he proceeded to ask our boss about it. Well, at this point things took a turn for the worse weird.

I was in Recife, extremely tired from a long flight, and after going for a brief walk, I decided to check my emails just in case. I see my mailbox with this long thread of emails saying that Mari shouldn’t be part of the project anymore, that she had no consideration for her groups, that if she insisted on having the day off, she would be out of the video class project and I would be the one presenting it! Yeah, right…

I honestly did not see this one coming… I would never have thought that her ASKING for the morning off would escalate to Marigate!!! And being away just made the whole situation worse. So, I had to step in and say that I was the one to blame, that apparently my suggestion had not been the smartest one and it wasn’t her fault at all!

What’s really strange, though, is the reaction we got from the bosses. Why so angry? If it’s not possible, just say so; but creating a storm in a teacup is not exactly the response we were expecting. Things are weird at the school now. People are acting weird. And I don’t like it one bit…

Turning point?

So, it’s no surprise that I’ve been fed up with how things are going at work. I know that everybody has good and bad days at work; no job is perfect and we need to try to address the problems the best way we can. However, the good days are rare now and the bad days are really bad, really really bad.

I really feel sorry for all the students that come to the school and enroll in a course that is poorly devised and won’t help them at all. The material is awful, it isn’t cheap, has no quality, treats the student like a dumbass, it’s disrespectful. I’m glad that I’m not part of this department anymore, and I’m glad that I still get to work with my students using material that make them think. But things change fast where I work, and if I don’t do something soon, I might either need to start selling the lie that those courses are or get laid off.

Last week I had a long conversation with one of my colleagues and we seem to agree on many things that we should be doing right now, things that we should start doing. We bust our asses for nothing, the pay we make is ridiculous and the owners think we should be thankful. It’s a complete waste of time and talent, we’re constantly tired and we simply can’t move forward. I’m tired of making other people rich while I struggle to pay the bills and get to the end of the month.

So, today two colleagues and I had a lunch meeting and we’re really willing to make the move. A lot of people say that in order for you to make the jump you need “the fear”, but in our case we’re way beyond fear, we’re desperate. So, this year we’ll do a lot of planning and research, because we truly believe that there’s more to language learning than what we’ve been seeing for the last few years. I refuse to believe that people are looking for what most of the schools offer, including the school I work for, and we’re willing to make the change! We’re gonna do something about it! And we’re taking our country back!!! (just kidding, couldn’t resist…)

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The protests in Egypt really are taking a turn for the worse. Now journalists can’t report what’s going on because of the attacks in the last two days. Even though correspondents from all over the world were attacked, hospitalized, threatened and arrested, no doubt that Anderson Cooper was the most talked about, so much so that even Stewart had to step up and say “hands off Anderson Cooper!” But I could have done without tonight’s cation on Pierzzzz Morgan, with AC360 talking on phone about the latest developments: “Secret Broadcast from Anderson Cooper”. Really? Come on, guys…

What comes in threes?

You have to agree that only bad things, fears, accidents, buses you don’t need, problems and many other annoyances come in threes. Why not lottery prizes, bonuses, good news, gifts, days off?

When I thought that things were starting to look good again, something happened. Something really bad happened at work.

A few weeks ago we hired someone to help me out with my work, something more than needed since basically the day I started organising the Immersion Programme. The person was perfect for the job: experience abroad, experience preparing lessons with authentic materials, experience teaching… She started helping me organise the schedule and send the lessons to the teachers. The students really liked her and I was glad that I could count on her for whatever necessary. Until last Wednesday.

I was checking my emails after lunch when she stormed into the office saying, ‘please, don’t freak out.’ I just stared. For two or three seconds, trying to be as optimistic as possible, I thought she would say that something had come up and she wouldn’t be able to teach the afternoon class, right after lunch. She sat down across the desk and said she’d been offered a job and that she was leaving. OMG… I think she talked for ten minutes and I just sat there, petrified, looking at the schedule on the wall and thinking mostly about the immersion in Santa Cruz, because she was going to travel with me and now I had nobody else for Santa Cruz classes. Worst case scenario, my boss will come with me, but honestly I don’t want to spend 9 hours a day for one week teaching with my boss. I just believe that that’s long enough for her to start looking for flaws, and even though I think I’m doing a good job, you know, as Seinfeld once put it: ‘Keep looking…’

So, after the bombshell I just desperately needed to have some booze. After having a considerable amount of it, I wanted to have a glass of water. I opened the tap and… where’s the liquid??? Once again the building had run out of water, but what a wonderful moment to find that out: at midnight, drunk as a skunk and having to wake up early to teach a 9am class.

I got up at 7am, put my clothes on and went to the school to basically wash my face, brush my teeth and drink some water. I explained the situation to my students and apologised in advance for, you know, stinking. They were very nice: ‘don’t worry teacher, you don’t stink.’ Short before lunch, when I was finishing what I thought was the last class of the day and finally go home and shower, I got a message from another school saying that I had to fill in for a teacher that was having back problems. Damn it!!!

Such perfect couple of days: teacher quitting, no water, teacher getting sick.

I still haven’t thought about the upcoming classes and the trip to Santa Cruz. And the video classes project is still on… but completely stalled… I really don’t want to think about it until Wednesday.

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One more from the series Disney characters meet Glenn Beck. Now there is this Mickey Mouse video put together with Beck commenting on the Donald Duck video. Both funny, but obviously the video is an “attack” funded by government against him. Give me a break…

It keeps on giving. And I’m so glad… right?

Not sure…

August was a pretty slow month blog-wise, but at work it was the month of hell. Lots of work… Lots, lots of work… I guess Murphy chose me as the perfect example. You know when something goes wrong and then it’s kind of a domino effect? You see one piece falling after the other and there’s nothing you can do about it.

We had a guy for a 3-day immersion because he would go to the US as a translator for the group of farmers. His English is pretty good but he wanted a refresher anyway. I prepared the schedule and pretty much relied on new teachers to teach the classes. I was a little concerned because they had no experience teaching these kind of classes, but I basically had no choice. Well, when I finally came to terms and hoped for the best, the problems started.

One teacher that had been schedule to teach two 8-o’clock classes became suddenly unavailable, for my disgrace. I inevitably had to jump in, two and a half hours of teaching something that I had barely prepared. Then, in the afternoon, after having an hour of conversation class, the teacher that was supposed to follow didn’t show up but at this time I had nothing, NOTHING. I would sit in the classroom and stare for one entire hour. So I brokedown.

I called the teacher’s boss (she’s from another school) and called my boss and told them I was about to lose it. I had thought about pulling a Steven Slater and I couldn’t have asked for a better moment. However, I managed to keep it together and suggested that he had two hours of class on Friday morning, since he wouldn’t travel until late afternoon that day. Best decision ever.

What made me almost snap is the amount of work that has accumulated and deadlines approaching and I have absolutely nobody to help me out. The monthly paid teachers haven’t got time to even use the bathroom. Teachers paid by the hour are never at the school, they just teach in the evenings and Saturday mornings — almost all of them are still in college so they study during the day. At some point during that week I started feeling chest pains. Great. That would be understandable if I were a millionaire, with my own business and all that, but risking to have a heart attack for this??? I don’t think so, buddy… I was so happy when the week was over that I just slept through the whole weekend, slept and watched movies, and slept some more. That was it. No news, no booze, just zero.

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It’s been a while since I mentioned some TEDTalks around here. I reviewed many great talks and I’d like to share the links. Starting with Seth Berkley’s talk given earlier this year about the studies and development of vaccines that in the future could kill flu and HIV viruses. Very interesting talk, translated by Nadja Nathan and available here.

Filmed in 2007, Franco Sacchi talks about the Nigerian film industry, known as “Nollywood.” This talk was translated by Rafael Eufrasio and it’s available here.

Another fascinating piece is this presentation by Marcus du Sautoy about symmetry. Great images in this talk translated by Marcos de Almeida Santos Jr and available here.

And finally one translation of my own! A great talk by Ellen Gustafson about two problems related to food. One billion people suffer without food whereas one billion people are overweight. Are these two problems, hunger and obesity, interrelated? Fascinating stuff, reviewed by Belucio Haibara and available here.

Check your facts

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the name Shirley Sherrod in the last 48 hours. I think what happened to her just shows it’s all become a free-for-all, people spitting out whatever bullshit they want because they have internet connection. Myself included, the only difference is that nobody reads what I write and the things I write about cannot cause anybody to get fired. Perhaps only myself.

Look, I’m not in news and don’t intend to be, but  isn’t checking your facts the first thing you should be doing before getting something on the air? What this guy Breitbart did to support his talking points was deceiving, but what the other guys did was stupid because they reported the video as “news” and even more stupid was rushing into conclusions and firing the woman. If I read War of the Worlds again on the radio, will people believe the Earth is being invaded?

At the same time many people still believe that the so-called news organisations do their job and report evidence and not talking points, that they check their facts before making allegations against somebody or doing something media isn’t supposed to do which is accusing/judging/condemning. But unfortunately reporting facts is the last thing people do in the media nowadays, and being hammered every day, every hour with political agenda, some doing it more subtly, some doing it blatantly, can really mess up with your mind and we should “refudiate” that. What’s the most effective way to get people to hum tunes of annoying songs? Play them 50 times throughout the course of the day… I know my limit when Fox News starts sounding plausible…

I guess nowadays it is just hard to find trustworthy news sources, at least sources that are widely available to the public.

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It’s been a long week of hard work and different from the other weeks this one won’t finish tomorrow. I stupidly volunteered to teach this workshop on Podcasts, meant to be worked with adults, but now I have two teenagers attending the class. I guess the person who came up with the idea of Saturday workshops during vacation knows as much about adult students of English as Beck knows about journalism.

Well, I can live with that, especially because another teacher is supposed to help me out, so the pressure won’t be on me entirely. What pissed me off, though, is that I only found out about the teenagers because I decided to ask how many people would turn up. “Oh, by the way, they’re teenagers…” Excellent, not only did I have to throw away everything I had prepared, I also had to research possible subjects for the programme and reorganise everything.

And, oh, the distance classes project! I honestly haven’t slept well in the last few days thinking about it and as the time approaches I get more nervous and certain that this one I’ll screw up big time!

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TEDTalks with one more Portuguese translation available. This talk shows investment banker Euvin Naidoo on forgetting about we constantly hear about Africa and investing in the continent. Translation by Leandro Cianconi and reviewed by me! Available here.