The Diary Of John

Friday, October 29, 2004

Strange..

You know its a little wierd how things work in Brasil. they have some really good things here like free universities (although they have a vestibular that is meant to keep them rich and white only), Finally getting some social stuff sorted out such as help with reading and writing etc. Then you see them building roads here and not even bothering to put harcore down first or drainage so that the first shower of rain has cars aquaplaning all over the place. Maybe Tarmac should come here and demonstrate how it should be done. There was a small river outside the school earlier on lol. It doesnt help wash the roads clean as all the garbage people throw in the streets gets washed all over the place resulting in pollution and a terrible mouldy-like smell. C'mon guys get some infor from the internet on how to handle big road construction projects lol

I'm waiting for the boss to come pay me so i can get onthe bus and go home to spend the rest of the day with Roberta. This evening i think we'll just get some dvds and relax and then tomorrow is a day at the farm. I wanna try to take some photos from the farm for my folks back in the UK. There is a small troop of monkeys that has moved in there now, sort of like a zoo i guess but now without the fences lol. I like to go there just to relax, mostly falling asleep all of the afternoon :-). Then Wednesday its back to the grindstone again.

I left Roberta making some posters for me to use in the other schools, i just got a message from her saying that she has finished one of them but that she doesnt like the look of it. I'm sure i'll find a use for it somewhere though so not to worry. They are mostly just to give new vocabulary etc, i want around four of them so I can use them in all of the schools but it depends how much time Roberta has as to how quickly I can use them. Later if we stay awake we can try to get another one completed.

One of my students has a digital camera so i hope he will bring it to the class next lesson and we can take a few photos to put on this site. We are going to have ice-cream and coca cola and other goodies in the class as it is really starting to get hot in the afternoons now. Plus any excuse to have ice-cream is a good excuse, right? I think its nice just to chill and relax once in a while and ice-cream is always good for this :-) Hopefully it wont be too hot though or the ice-cream will have melted before we even get to eat it hehehe!

Okay i guess i better go print off some stuff here and wait for the boss to arrive..

posted at 6:55 PM by john |

Asshole..

You know whereever you are there is always an asshole, right? I paid for my bus ticket and they gave me a piece of paper to fill out. So i told the guy i didnt have an id number as its easier than trying to explain in portugues that i was robbed and the guy got real shirty. In the end i just got on the bus and ignored him. What a prick! My god, if i had to repeat once more i was a foreign person i would have throttled the guy. In the end though i got home so thats all that matters.

My conversation class today was just 2 people as most students have tests tomorrow so we watched a film with Robert Redford called The castle, well i think its called this. The title was in portugues hahaha! I left my girls watching it so i could get the bus home but its actually quite a good film. I've seen it before though and liked it alot. I'll find out what the students thought of it next week in class :-)

I'm just reading online that Bin Ladin has released another tape. It strikes me as a little strange that although i keep reading that this guy is hiding out in caves and stuff that he actually looks in good shape and not as i read in some articles that he was in bad health etc. take a look at the picture below to see what i mean.

I wonder if this speech was in English or Arabic? It doesnt seem to say in the news that i'm reading here at the moment. There are no links either to watch the video or listen to it. I guess i'll have to hit kazaa and see if its floating around there later on.

I wanna make some video segments to use with alot of my classes. I will ask the tec guy in Goias to give me a hand to create some on a cdrom so i can use it in the classroom. Maybe he can create for me to i can pass in a dvd player as that would be really handy. I want to use more for conversation practice than anything else. It will be a bit hard i guess though as they dont seem to have any high powered pc here that i can use but im sure the teccy guy will think of something. I think it'd be alot of fun to be able to do some video segmenting in the class. Its not really part of the CCAA methodology but then quite a few things i do with my students arent either, i just do them to enhance the lessons a little more. I picked up some really good book this afternoon to have a look through with some good ideas for explaining and testing the students grammar etc. I think it'll come in handy for my intermediate groups as it has many activities and suggestions as well as some photocopiable pages for the students to experiment with. I think they will come in handy. also today I put up a poster tha Roberta and I created with a game matching vocabulary. I'll find out how many they got right when i go next week to class :-)

Oh we got invited to some presentation thingy too. I have four tickets to go but dont know whether we will go or not. It will depend mainly on the weather i think as its starting to rain alot here now and the roads and bus services are not really all that good at the best of times so you can imagine what they will be like with a few inches of rain everywhere cant you? Man the bus driver couldnt even get my ticket organized properly and that was just a piece of paper, imagine what he is like behind the wheel on a stormy drive between cities hehehe!

Man i need some coffee here, let me go see if there is any in the kitchen here..

Hmm, well there wasnt so i had to put the machine on lol. With an hour to go before the school closes i am quietly confident that i can drink all of it before then lol. shame i didnt go to the bakers as i could have has some choc biscuits. Maybe Roberta has some at her house, will have to see later :-)

They are all watching some video here they downloaded from the net. Apparently its a guy playing the piano with his penis. Hmmmm, strange in'it?? hahaha!!! I have a cdrom full of these comedy clips that i pass with my MEC students, they are great for having some fun and releasing some stress ;-)

Okay im off to see what there is to eat here as im starving..

posted at 5:56 PM by john |

Thursday, October 28, 2004

Internet..

Man, the internet here is terrible since they changed the service. We had a business dsl setup but they wanted to pay cheaper and managed to get it changed to an home account as it was R$20 cheaper but even though they said its a faster connection i cant see that its any better. In fact, i would say its worse. Before when we watched streaming video from the net it was perfect, no buffering all the time and clear picture but not now. It stops, stutters and all other stuff that never used to happen before. And this for R$80 a month? Man someone is making a real packet here.

I have to prepare some stuff for my conversation class tomorrow. I wanna do a game with them called The two-headed fortune teller. It always good for a laugh and a nice way to end the lesson too. Two students have to predict the future of another student and these two students have to give the prediction by saying only one word on a sentence and a time and then alternating back and forth. its always crazy and good for a laugh. The main activity i didnt decide on yet. Probably some ranking type game i guess, maybe the NASA survival game or similar. I have a poster yet to finish for them too, some acitivity involving Brit slang that should be good for a laugh. Roberta should be here this afternoon go give me a hand to finish it off so i can take it tomorrow and slap it on the wall. I got some Brit type graphics to stick on it and stuff, just for fun. The serious stuff is the matching of the words to their definitions. I tried it with smaller ones in the other school but in conversation class i just use only one room so everything needs to be all in one big poster. Shame there isnt a digital camera i can get access to easily as it'd be fun to take some pics of the stuff i do with the students to put on here.

Well i'm hoping that i'll get a few photos of my younger brother in the UK along with his g/f. I found out the other day i am going to be an uncle and havent met by brother mikes g/f as they started dating after i moved to Brasil. My brother is thinking of moving to Spain where is g/f family all live so i hope that they decide to have the baby in the Uk so i can at least get to see some photos before they leave. If i get i'll put here, they didnt even give me the EDC yet though lol

Time to go to the bakery and then to the paperstore to get some card and stuff and then get my creative head on and make a start on finishing this stuff..

posted at 9:53 AM by john |

Crazy..

Man u know somtimes i an sure i live with many crazy people. As you can probably tell im not all that keen on the Catholic religion for nay obvious reasons but now i am seeing a new light with regards to some of the other religions here, one of them in particular called Evangelists. According to what i read in the paper last night these people are having some sort of war with other religions here, something about idols and religious statues. What is it with religious people, theyre never happy unless they are arguing with someone about their god being better than someone elses? God-damned crazy if you ask me. I'll have to be careful around these people here, soon they will be sacrificing people in the name of their gods. After all the thing that kills more people than anything else in the world is religion. Some quotes from the newspaper..

Everything Evangelists say is pure fantasy

Evangelists are radicals, fanatics and ignorant

When are these people going to wake up and smell the coffee? Its no wonder that fastest growing religion in the world is Islam. I think people are becoming seriously disillusioned with religion in general. Thats why the UK hasnt really been a religious country for more than 100 years. And to be honest i thinks its been good for the UK to be this way as it gives our country more scope to accept religions other than a Christian one. Maybe someday other countries will be this way, but i think it'll be a long, long time, don't u?

posted at 9:34 AM by john |

Wednesday, October 27, 2004

Dog-rough..

For the last few weeks there have been these ridiculous adverts on the Tv for a new program and it went something like this:

Shes blond
Shes beautiful
Shes intelligent
Shes got simpathy

you get the idea right? Well finally they decided to show pictures of this so called beautiful Tv presenter and her name is Adriane Galisteu.

As you can see from her pic here she looks like someone who has spent most of her life drinking hooch, man this is past the bottom of the barrel here. In England we have an expression Dog-rough hahaha! Talk about being messed up worse than a dogs dinner! I had to suffer a few minutes of this show as the students wanted to see what it was like, trust me there are not words to describe how bad this show is lol. I am sure they think people will watch just to see her over-exposed breasts slapped in front of the camera every 5 minutes. Sad to say another failure for Brasilian Tv :-( Maybe people need to try actually planning some real entertainment here for the people, after all they have access to both US and UK sat channels so they can see the sort of good programming we need to see here. A whole day filled with crappy soap operas and lame talk shows isnt really good viewing. I guess though there must be someone who wants to watch this as there are people paying to be in the audience right? or do they pay the people to go there? Hmmmmm, good question.

posted at 10:24 AM by john |

Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Crap..

Ive never understood why people still wanna go fox hunting in my country. What is so satisfying about watching a bunch of dogs ripping apart a live animal and then rubbing the blood on your face? I would like to see it the other way around with a person from a hunt being chased by maybe 50 rottweillers and see how they like being ripped apart while they are still alive. Yeah, now that would be interesting wouldnt it? As for it costing thousands of jobs to ban this so called sport, that has to be the biggest pile of crap i have ever read. Maybe they should start looking for a new job now, after all in 2006 its going to be banned whether they like it or not. and for those who say they will continue whether its banned or not, lets just flog them! After all once they break the law they are criminals and as such can be treated like the crude barbarians they are. Once they have been into the prision system a few times and had the crap kicked out of them by prisioners and raped a few times in the showers maybe they will look at the life the universe creates with a little more respect. Maybe we could even have a hunt the fox-hunters day, now that really would be worth seeing. I wonder how many people would wanna take part in that?

posted at 6:01 PM by john |

Monday, October 25, 2004

Wet..

I think that its going to rain here this evening, i hope that it holds off until i get back home though as i dont fancy getting wet through and having to give class like that :-)

My weekend was really busy, Sat we saw Dodgeball. Man, its crazy but alot of fun. Ben Stiller is really funny and we liked this film alot. Sun was a party to celebrate a sort of engagement / birthday and my favorite bbq was cooked up lol. I love to have bbq!

Now though Roberta is back at the farm until thrus or fri to study for her upcoming exams, then I can get her to give me a hand to make some posters for my groups. I`ve made a couple of these smallish posters and stuck them up in a couple of my classrooms just for fun to see if the students can solve the puzzles on them. They are sort of vocabulary match with both Brit and US slang on them. I didnt leave you any clues here either guys so no good checking my site hahaha! Well okay maybe just one answer then, To score is to make love / have sexual intercourse okay? As for the rest of them you hve to work out yourselves.

I wanna make a bigger type one but i dont have all the stuff i need to create it yet and also i will wait for Roberta as she can draw alot better than i can lol. Although saying that if i wanted to draw something that looked like a spider dipped in ink walking over a sheet of paper i wold probably win hands down hehehe.

I got a good slang book this week to hav a flick through, most of the Brit stuff i already knew but it has some really interesting US stuff in it. I`ll make some games or activities with this just for some fun later next week. not exactly sure what game yet but I`ll think of something. All students love learning new expressions or phrases etc, I love perking up a class sometimes to just spring some on my groups. Mind you it requires being ahead of schedule first before it can be done.

I had better go and see where my student has got to, we are already over thirty mins late now. Maybe she wont be able to come today. So long as i get paid ;-)

posted at 3:31 PM by john |