February 05, 2005
Chinese New Year and the Brave Lecturer
Preparations for Chinese New Year (Lunar new year) are gearing up and it is a much more serious thing than Christmas or westerners' New Year. Now just checked the calendar, there's no relation to Uzgavenes (Laskiainen).. If celebrated properly, it includes family reunion, distributing a lot of "hong bao", red packets containing money, sharing mandarines, tossing raw fish salad up to the ceiling, gambling, playing majong, cards, setting off firecrackers, etc... Everything just to make the coming year prosperous and good. People don't seem to have reservations about desiring material goods: prosperous = successful = happy. Most of the supersticious stuff is meant to scare the evil spirits away, for me it sounds a bit horrible - living in the world full off demons, ghosts.. I chatted with my colleague who converted to Catholicism few years ago, she said that the world and you prospects in another world are very grim according to Taoism religion.. There's just hell, no salvation, you suffer for your sins and thats about it. So she found the ideas of "another life", "god", "love" very refreshing and inspiring..
Anyway, people are shopping like crazy again, Takashumaya shopping mall transformed itself once again... During the actual New Year 9-10 February almost all the businesses are closed and there's not much to do if you don't have a huge family to visit, so we're going to Bali.. For a week.. Again.. I'm really looking forward to that. Monsoon is getting over here, it hasn't been raining for couple of weeks, the weather is really hot, the grass already turned burned brown and leaves are falling off the trees.. Will be nice to get out of the city.. We're leaving on next Tuesday.
Andrea asked me why I'm not writing anything about my work to the blog, in fact, yes, why am I not wrriting? Partially maybe because of the same old "self-censoring", but there's not much bad to say about my job, so, really, why not...
Well, its been 2 months now and I feel that I know the place much better. I don't have much teaching hours this semester, only 6. I have 2 classes of Multimedia Fundamentals (students learn to do simple webpages in this class, very simple indeed) once a week, so the rest of the time I am "developing myself" or working on some "projects". The biggest surprise for me was the attitude of the students - many of them are quite young, still living with their parents and sent to the design school by parents too. So we spent quite a bit of time "shaping their attitudes" and "developing the character" (hehe...), meaning, making a serious show and "talking to" about people being late or not showing up in classes.. This was very new for me, because both in Arts Academy in Lithuania and in Taik many of the people tried to enter the school many times before they finally succeeded. So by the time they start studying, they're really quite sure about their "call" and "artistic talent" and they really know what they want. It is completely different here. If your parents pay the fees, you don't have problems entering SOME design school. As far as I know, in TP (our school) , the competition is still quite tight - 3 people to 1 place or so.. But this is also the place where people finally get out of school uniforms, sense the freedom, hormones are raging.. So yes, we have a lot of "attitude problems"..
I'm still very humane, other lecturers say that "just don't bother", "give them a lesson" and it may be true that teaching some discipline could be useful for them in the future. But I still think about them as my "flower bed" that I need to nurture and take care of. I'm sure some are taking advantage of that. However, when I think about my best teachers and best experiences of somebody's "mentoring", it is always this terribly humane person who treats us like adults and respects us. So I try that, if it doesn't work, I'll turn into a monster with a whip..
This is Botero in Leijonakaupunki, not OUR Botero, another one.. What are you thinking?! OUR Botero seems to have dropped quite a few kilos off, this one has slightly too much.. :) Anyway, this is not even Andrea's uncle Botero (although her uncle is also a sculptor), just a famous Colombian artist having his exhibition.. This reminds me that I have couple of Finnish exchange students from Laurea in my class and they're gradually turning to be of this color. Every week I see them, they're slightly more brown and I have to tell, it takes any desire to get a suntan away from me.. Suntan makes people look old and wrinkly.. I'm trying to preserve my natural pale looks (so I blend in with the crowd better.. Chinese people are very pale here)
These 2 Finnish girls made my life difficult up till last week. I was really suprised, when I first came to Finland i was shocked to find out how STRONG a woman was supposed to be in there. All the women that I met there were extremely capable, strong and self-sufficient. So I learned that when you have a problem, you don't go to ask for help right away, but you try all the possible things to sort it out yourself. Then when you finally ask for help, you may say that "I tried this and this and that.. nothing works". But these girls seemed to be completely helpless. They were explaining (in very LOUD voices), how they "don't understand anything" (imagine this pitch of voice), they "don't see any point in doing that" and that "they don't know where they are at and what they're trying to achieve, but they're just doing-doing something". This was really driving me mad and bringing bad vibes to the class, so last Thursday I started urging them (one was quite ok, but another was really helpless) "be more adventurous, try to do something, don't just assume that you can't", then sat down with one of them for 15min and it seemed to be enough to get her on track. So right now I'm quite proud about myself handling class dynamics and "breaking" bad students' attitudes.. hehe.. However, I'm surprised to encounter that type of Finnish female species.. Never saw those in Finland..
Apart from teaching, I'm also involved in several "projects", but maybe I'll write about that another time. However, it seems that I'm already (unwittingly) involved in "office politics" and just backstabbed (without an intention, believe me!) one of my colleagues who's on long medical leave.. Melrose place to be continued.. Come later for more..
Posted by gkligyte at February 5, 2005 08:33 PM