Archive for the ‘Class Stuff’ Category

How do you eat an elephant?

Thursday, June 15th, 2017

And why?!!! 😉

This week we are really digging in to preparing for a final exam essay and I thought it was a good time to remind students that it is too big of a task to sit down and try to finish all at once.

So, I put this drawing (yes, I call it a drawing!) on the board.

 

I of course told them that you grab the elephant by the trunk and try to suck it down like noodles. They laughed. I think that was either from my pantomiming the action or well, look at that drawing…I eventually told them that you should do it one bite at a time.

 

(I do this sometimes, often, too often, where I just think, “Oh, I’ll draw a/an somethingerother” without having done it either ever before or at the least in a long, long time. That’s how I ended up with this drawing a week or so ago:

To the left were bad ovals, supposed to be eggs… it did the trick though.

I need to practice drawing more!

 

Who is your favorite singer or group?

Thursday, April 27th, 2017

For me it is really not easy to pick just one singer, or one group that is my favorite.

It really depends on the time, my mood even.

If you were told you could only listen to one singer, or group, for the rest of your life, who would that be?

I would probably choose The Eagles. I can’t imagine not ever being able to hear their music again. I could live with just about any of their Greatest Hits albums. I’m particulary fond of Greatest Hits 71-75, but later collections were also pretty solid. So many good songs to choose from!

Please comment below and tell me who your favorite singer or group is and what song or album of theirs is your favorite, too.

Time for another Super Hero question!

Thursday, April 27th, 2017

I am a big fan of super hero movies. Soon there will be a new Wonder Woman movie, which I’m looking forward to seeing, and several others, especially those from Marvel.

I think we all need heros, even if they’re not super heros.

How about you?

In the comments below, please tell me who your favorite super hero is and why.

Security is important!

Thursday, April 20th, 2017

You may know this expression that goes “you can never be too safe”.

You don’t want to make your life crazy by using so much security you can’t get in to your email or website or your mobile phone.

A few things to keep in mind though are that you need good, solid passwords, different passwords for different sites, and a good way to recover your information if something happens to it.

Here’s one of my favorite types for creating a good password.

Make a sentence that you can remember.

Perhaps something like: Professor Williams is the greatest professor in the world

Now, just use the first letters from each word to create “PWitgpitw” Not too bad

To make this even better try replacing a letter or two with a number that looks similar to the letter. So, how about replacing that “i” with a “1”? Then you could have “PW1tgp1tw”

This is pretty strong, but you could make it stronger by adding a symbol or a number at either end.

So perhaps you could use a question mark (?) at the end (but I don’t think this should be a question!!)

But you could have a password that looks like this”PW1tgp1tw?” or add a number to the end, or beginning for “99PW1tgp1tw” or “PW1tgp1tw17”

For my turtle, I don’t need a lot of high tech solutions though. I just keep the rocks a little below where he can reach the top. It doesn’t stop him from trying though!

It’s not snow!

Thursday, April 13th, 2017

Here we go with another semester of Web English. It’s a good thing for me, but also a little sad as I know this class is going to be dropped from the school’s curriculum soon.

I think this is still a very useful and necessary class, besides the fact I enjoy teaching it so much, so it is difficult for me to see it go away.

Anyway, it’s almost spring and the cherry blossoms are already fading. Yesterday while I was walking there were children trying to catch the falling petals like flakes of snow. The petals do look like snow when they really start to fall. They can cover the streets or the ground. Here’s a shot of the start of the falling petals.