Lazy Sunday.....I Don't Think So

I have been up since 7:30am on a Sunday, and I can hardly believe it. I fear that I might slowly be transforming into a morning person, or some other weird kind of mutant. This day has been filled with getting a lot done that needed to be done, but I don't see this becoming a habit. I need to sleep in for one more hour at least on principle. Aiya!

So today I ran around from yoga to my office, to my apartment, to dinner and beyond! I feel like I haven't sat down all day, but that's not necessarily a bad thing if I'm getting a lot of things accomplished. I've got my workshop all set up for this coming week, my outlines marked and ready to return to the students, and managed to give myself a good head start for the week ahead, because this week, I face a tutor's feared challenge: first-year journals! Don't get me wrong, I adore my students, but reading 25 journals in row is almost as bad as taking a stats class over again. My students have a tendency to all write about the same issues along the same timeline. In the first semester the pattern is usually:

• Getting used to university life
• Missing their families, even though most of them are just a 45 minute bus ride away
• Mid-Autumn Festival
• English Society activities

I could time my watch by the pattern in which my students write their journals about. I'm sure that all these new experiences are exciting and relevant to them, but around journal number 7 or 8, they all start to run together, the lines on the page start to blur, and my students stop becoming individuals- instead, they all form together as one homogeneous blob that needs to learn how to be more introspective and when to use shifts in verb tense! With some poking and prodding, they usually spin off into other topics by the second semester, but there is still a strong pattern among the students. Maybe they get together at secret meetings and plan out what they all are going to write about just to mess with me?



In other news, I am also extremely proud of my group of third-years who just got to the finals of the Shakespeare competition! It's amazing how far they have come since we started rehearsing last semester, and I know that they will do well in the competition, and hopefully win, or at least beat Chinese U. The video that you can see here is about 30 seconds of a rehearsal back in November, with my space heater as a fantastic set piece. Since this filming they have come leaps and bounds. We filmed a 20 minute video in January, and I hope to get my hands on a copy of that so I can share it with all you lovely people. I am so very proud of them. We are also putting on a production at the school as an expansion of what we did with the extract from "Two Gentlmen of Verona" with a bigger cast. All the students involved are extremely talented and I am very excited to see how this will all turn out. Of course, as with the competition, I have had my first try at directing, and I quite like it so far.

This week will be quite hectic, between my workshop, reading a new batch of journals, practice reading tests, and marking outlines. There are some great things coming as well, like the lecture by Margaret Atwood, one of my favorite authors, at HKUST that I have a space reserved for, and the next episode of Lost, to name a few. I still have no idea what is going on with that island!