Labor Day

Topic(s): me
2004-09-07 00:10:42 PDT

I hope everyone had a fantastic Labor Day weekend. Mine was typical of Labor Day weekends past. Where I have plans to do so many things, then do almost none of them.

I wanted to wash my car. Which for most people takes about one hour but for me takes considerably longer. I take that back. Most people take their car to a car wash and have it done for them in five minutes. For me, I have yet to find an establishment that matches my expectations of a clean car. I see the automatic car washes at Texaco (or whatever your gas station) and I can't believe people use them. These must be the same people that don't use dental floss.

I wanted to print my Europe pictures and send them to my friends in Europe. I wanted to print my D.C. pictures and send them to my family.

I wanted to study the first couple chapters in my Vietnamese language book.

On that topic, my first Vietnamese class was last Wednesday. Three things are obvious to me.

1. Most of the people in the class know atleast a bit of the language. As such, I'm already behind by a large amount.
2. Most of the people in the class are taking the class because they have to. The class (or a foreign language class of some sort) is a degree requirement for them. So that when the professor said the class would be cut short by a few minutes, most of the students noted their satisfaction with agreeable fist pumps and verbal "yesss!"s. But I was like, "What? I paid money or this class. I expect you to teach until the clock chimes." I suppose that's the difference between being in a class because you're required to and being in a class because you want to.
3. The professor isn't very good. Let me rephrase that. Based on one session of class, I would say the professor's style of teaching doesn't agree well with my style of learning. My main problem is that the first thing he taught was a collection of sounds. The sounds were not explained, nor broken into words, nor written on the board. He wanted us to learn without any context of what we were learning or why. Seems to me the best way to teach a language class would be to start with the atoms of the language - in Vietnamese the atoms are the letters.

One thing I did manage to do this weekend was watch the Texas football game. The game was on pay-per-view only, which meant I could either pay $30 or drive up to San Francisco and watch the game with the local San Francisco Texas Exes chapter. I decided on the latter. The game went well. Texas stomped North Texas 60-something to zero. I met the south bay social chair and convinced her to host future football parties in Mountain View. That day's "it's a small world moment" arrived when we discovered her friend is starting at NetApp next monday.

name:
email:
url:
response: