The one requirement in the proof of brain community is to have a brain. A few months ago just having a heart beat was enough. There was so much activity going on and much of Hive was splashing in POB honey.
Even now I am getting more interaction on POB than anywhere else on the internet. I think POB views may one day even pass my youtube views. But the challenging thing is consistency. At the end of the day I just don't have the brain power that I used to have.
Each day of the Autumn of Korea it gets darker and colder. There is more stress in the classroom around this time of year than any other time. Partly because the national test for college entrance is coming up in November. This is the only college entrance test students take the whole year and every high school graduate in the country takes the test. It is expected that almost all students in the nation enter college. Some pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for private tutoring just for this test.
The result is most students fail and have to take the test again the next year. This somehow puts stress on the whole nation. The effect of the test ripples to even the elementary school. The whole school system and government office of education is on edge around this time of year. Not to mention my contract is up for the renewal process at the end of each year. In just about two months we are finished with 2021.
A lot of students are competitive even among the third grade students I taught this week. They all want to be first and give the right answers and be chosen. Any kind of a prize makes the kids even more wild. It's been hard to get anything done because kids tease each other in Korean.
There are 9 classes I taught in the past two days, but one really surprised me. In Korea all levels of students are gathered together in one classroom regardless of academic background. Some have been privately tutored and some just barely make it to school. This class I taught yesterday had one student who was very special. He has a hard time to communicate in Korean or English. It is hard for him to read or write or to understand anything that is going on. If I leave him alone to teach the class he will start some trouble to get attention by taking someone's pencil or running around the room or climbing up the window ledge.
Today I gave him a project to stick some print outs on the board with magnets for a grab game. He did it really well but he was putting them too high. I asked him to put them lower and he tried to hit me. Then an interesting thing happened. Two nice little ten year old girls came up to him and consoled him. He listened to them. The said something like, "Be nice now friend. Everything is OK." Then he became peaceful.
I began to realize about how this class worked. The boy did not see things the way you or I see them. To him the world was a violent array of colors and voices. I don't know anything about his background but I know when these friends spoke to him he calmed down. It was a big thing for him to see a foreign teacher in the classroom and he got excited. My first thought was that he was disturbing the class, but when it came down to it he was the real learning target. The students in that class learned more about society and anger management and conflict resolution than they ever could in a text book. No ethics class could teach these kids what was going on in that classroom. They were blessed kids to be exposed to a boy like this at an early age and learn to get along.
I had a very quick talk with the homeroom teacher and she really had this class under control. The students in the class don't tease this boy or make fun of him. They know how to deal with him even better than I do. I'd like to talk with this teacher more and find out some of her methods and also empathize with her.
So many students go to school all day without using their brain but that class the kids brains are on 120% because of their special friend. That classroom is a microcosm of what the world can become. We are all different and each at his or her own level has a place in this world.
At my level I am working on very simple computer programing. I take a free Kotlin language course from Jetbrains at https://hyperskill.org. The computer is very much like Amelia Bedelia. She doesn't know what to do unless you give her exact instructions without missing one.
I'm still working with values and variables and found this code in my course:
What is the value of "f" ?
Is it "d" or is it "c" or is it "4" or is it all of them?
Remember:
It is also possible to declare and initialize a variable with the value of another variable:
So I've been working on simple problems like this brushing up on my programming theory. My goal is to make a simple computer game using Kotlin language. At first I was really despaired that after hours I got just 1% through the course but now I am 5% into the course and completed some basic programming concepts.
I didn't even know that Regexps existed, but after playing with some I was impressed at the power of a dot and a question mark.
I have a lot to grow in teaching and in programming and in parenting but I'm sure POB is the place to share my progress. After blogging here a while I learned that it's important to show not only the good days but also the difficult and dull days. Sometimes the process of writing becomes a healing process. Like this blog entry I began brain dead but while writing my brain became alive. Now I the endorphins are charged and I'm ready to write the pob-wotw.
One of the best solutions I have found for writer's block is to just write something whether your brain is working or not.
Luckily POB supports all kinds of writing ;)
I wouldn't be writing this without the Proof of Brain's community support.
Amelia Bedelia Cover Picture is from me.me