...Electronically that is.

Recently, Posterous was acquired by Twitter, and by the looks of it, that means Posterous won't be around for much longer. Instead of waiting to be prompted to pack up and move, I'm doing it on my own, so in the coming weeks I'll be moving all of my my past posts to my new URL,

After that, this site will be shut down permanently. I want to thank Posterous for being my travel blog over the last 20 months, and hope for the best from WordPress!

Did you rest well? Today, thousands of men, women, and children from all over the country and beyond will be asking each other this question when they greet each one another. It's an important question asked of you, stretching back months as you're called to reflect on the preparations leading up to this day, the first day of Tsagaan Sar.

For many weeks now, families all over the country have been preparing by making buuz, khoshuur, settling debts, apologizing to friends and family, and cleaning their properties. They're making right, literally and figuratively cleaning house, so that the upcoming year will be as prosperous as possible. Families have been known to spend upwards of three months of their annual pay on this one holiday alone. It's that important. Unlike a modern, westernized Christmas, though, gifts aren't bought to outdo one another, and there isn't as much of an emphasis on the cost associated with the gift. It's more important to have a lot of smaller gifts, so that anyone coming to your house or ger can receive one. Tsagaan Sar, translated as White Month, or White Moon, is the Mongolian new year, and it's filled with many absolutely beautiful traditions that each year are taken very seriously.

Yesterday was Bituun, similar to New Years Eve but without all the lights, fake glitz and glamour, false hopes and Dick Clark skeletal remains hoisted up on the ABC cameras. Bituun is a day where all of the above preparations come to a culminating end. The house needs to be absolutely spotless for the next year in order to start fresh and with a clean slate. It's a small celebration, with only immediate or very close family involved. Everyone gathers around the table, and tradition begs them to eat. And eat. And eat until they cannot eat any more. There is always plenty. Most families spend weeks in advance making hundreds of buuz --meat dumplings -- for the occasion. Milk and dairy products are eaten, as are fried sweet-breads, cheeses, milk tea, candies, vodka, and of course, airag. "White food" is really important, and it doesn't refer to a McDonald's cheeseburger or a double-tall Starbucks latte. The colour is white, because Mongolians most closely associate white with happiness. Around the table, stories are shared from long ago and and aspirations for the future are paired with the warmth of family members as much as they are with loosened belts and groans of satisfaction. The eating continues all night, but after a while games are picked up and played, be they traditional ankle bone games or zombie-slaughtered X Box ones, until everyone has had as much food and as much family as they could stand. Bituun is now over, and the first day of Tsagaan Sar can begin.

Families traditionally wake up early. They dress in their most colourful and new deels and head directly outside. They raise their hands in the air and greet the first sun of the year, giving thanks for being there to experience it. Then they walk, in all different directions, the one that's associated with their Buddhist astrological birth year. I was born in the year of the Tiger, my compass direction is North East, and my element is wood. Even though I was supposed to walk first thing in the morning, I'm praying that any negativity gained by not doing this first will be off-set by my reasoning, that is, I want to share these traditions with my readers. Once this post is done, I will take my walk, and it won't be for nothing. The direction that you move in is associated with the direction that will lead you to the most happiness. As you walk, either alone with another, you're expected to recite mantras, burn and rip papers and bury objects, such as stones or sculpted, symbolic animals. I don't plan to do this to the letter. I will, however, carry a stone. I've always been a collector and an admirer of the fact that in times when all things are changing so quickly, stones can remind us legacy, where they've been, what they've seen, and the lives that have grazed them. With me I'll bring a stone that I picked up last year from the Gobi desert, and I'll use it to remind myself what the last two years have led me to experience.

The beauty, for me, is in the simple act of reflection, the hypnotic act of moving one foot in front of the other, slowly, with purpose, thinking of the changes that I've been through, the not-yet changed, the hopes and dreams of the coming year, all while purposely moving in a positive direction. This first ritual of Tsagaan Sar is the most special to me for all the reasons above, to say nothing of the fact that it reminds me of holding hands with my mom, grandmother, and aunt, as we went on our long walks on Thanksgiving and Christmas day every single year growing up. Every time my foot crunches snow here in UB, I will be there, as well.

The next step in the Tsagaan Sar tradition is visiting extended family, especially your elders, and giving thanks. The younger generation are to go to the older, bringing gifts, celebrating them and thanking them for their contributions to their lives. Gifts are small and can be monetary, but don't have to be. (If they are, though, they need to be new, crisp bills. To present someone with old, tattered money is highly disrespectful.) Gifts can be nearly anything, though traditionally, bright blue pieces of fabric called hadags are given. These are the same pieces of cloth that you see all over the city and countryside, on ovoos, in temples, tied around trees, and in the back of cars. (Look to older posts with some pictures to see examples.) When you greet your elder, they will most likely as the question that began this post:  Амар байна уу?, Amar baina oo? Did you rest well? You're to grasp each other at the elbows in a very traditional embrace, and kiss on the cheeks. Meticulously, the elder should guide which cheek is to be kissed first. The act of kissing is so similar to what you expect to see from the posh in Québec and Paris that you wonder if Mongolians have passed this along to the rest of the world hundreds of generations ago along with so many other tidbits of culture that you wouldn't expect. Again, you're expected to eat, and eat you will -- at least 10 buuz per house you visit. (One of the reasons why so many hundreds of them are prepared in the first place.)

In most houses you will find a very traditional centrepiece, a heveenbov, which is a circular structure made out of many pieces of bread. The pieces are arranged in circles, and the circles are stacked on top of each other in an odd number of layers. This is very important. The layers represent the happiness and sorrow of life, and they alternate, starting from a bottom, or foundational layer of happiness. Having an even number of layers would suggest that sorrow supersedes a life of happiness and so you will never see this on anyone's heveenbov. Most are topped with white-coloured sweets to represent the happiness and purity of Tsagaan Sar. Visits typically last only a couple of hours since there are so many of them that need to happen over a couple of days, but each one is special, a celebration of individuals as well as culture. Time is spent with family and friends, some old, some never met, simple gifts and pleasantries are exchanged, and when all the thanking and gift-giving is over, you move on to the next house. This continues for days, until you've offered all the thanks, all the respect in the world, the buuz have all been eaten, and fullness is felt.

The beauty in this holiday is its steadfast celebration of tradition. As a westerner, perhaps one of the more popular traditions around holiday times is complaining about the commercialization of the holiday. Mongolia, among many others in the world, is very-much a developing country in the midst of westernizing, and commercialization is easily witnessed around the city of Ulaanbaatar. Perhaps surprising to read, though, is that it's a country that is westernizing faster than most any other in the world, after the discovery of so much mineral wealth in the countryside. In recent years, the act of gift-giving has caught up to that westernization, and some expectation has risen among certain classes of society about the types of gifts that are given during the greeting of friends and family. But unlike other complaining westerners, Mongolians have issued public outcry, denouncing the idea that gifts are the most important part of Tsagaan Sar. All over the country there is a public plea to the rich, who, some (including myself) would say have very little understanding about the responsibilities attached with sudden wealth, to return to the older way of offering smaller gifts and sums of money, and offering thanks above all else. This has been adopted by the government and the media as much as individual families, and is preached far and wide throughout the country.

If there is a lesson to be learned from Mongolia's example -- and there are many -- it is this: offer thanks above all else. Complaining is not proactive, it is always reactive. Instead of lamenting the fact that traditions are slowly fading, we need to hold true to the ones we have, and celebrate them highly, and not be afraid of publicly expressing the need to do so. A non-denominational society is one thing, but a non-cultural, a non-traditional society is quite another. Appreciate every opportunity, outwardly, when you have the chance. Reflect on the past. Reach to the future. Say a few prayers for your hopes and dreams once and a while, and make sure that you do rest well enough, if only to give you the strength to accomplish all that you wish to.

Credit to the following posts for information and inspiration:

http://www.mongoliatoday.com/issue/2/tsagaan_sar_1.html
http://ptinmongoub.blogspot.com/2012/02/tsagaan-sar-mongolian-lunar-new-year....
http://patrickinmongolia.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/tsagaan-sar-the-greatest-ho...
http://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/12-zodiac.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsagaan_sar

I submit for your approval (for the midnight society (any A.Y.A.O.F.D. fans?)) a great article on creative thinking. Here's the link, and here's a cut version of what the article gets across.

1. You are creative. The artist is not a special person, each one of us is a special kind of artist.

2. Creative thinking is work. You must have passion and the determination to immerse yourself in the process of creating new and different ideas.

3. You must go through the motions of being creative. When you are producing ideas, you are replenishing neurotransmitters linked to genes that are being turned on and off in response to what your brain is doing, which in turn is responding to challenges.

4.Your brain is not a computer. Your brain is a dynamic system that evolves its patterns of activity rather than computes them like a computer.

5.There is no one right answer. Reality is ambiguous. Aristotle said it is either A or not-A. It cannot be both. The sky is either blue or not blue

6.Never stop with your first good idea. Always strive to find a better one and continue until you have one that is still better.

7.Expect the experts to be negative. The more expert and specialized a person becomes,  the more their mindset becomes narrowed and the more fixated they  become on confirming what they believe to be absolute.

8.Trust your instincts. Don't allow yourself to get discouraged.

9.There is no such thing as failure. Whenever you try to do something and do not succeed, you do not fail. You have learned something that does not work.

10. You do not see things as they are; you see them as you are. Interpret your own experiences. All experiences are neutral.

11. Always approach a problem on its own terms. Do not trust your first perspective of a problem as it will be too biased toward your usual way of thinking.

12. Learn to think unconventionally. Creative geniuses do not think analytically and logically.

As a follow up to my last post about Apple revolutionizing textbooks, (and as a distraction from the fact that I haven't had time to write much lately) here's a very well-written piece the brings to light one of the current problems in the educational reform discussion, both nationally and internationally:

In the last year, the national education debate has been occupied by economists, billionaires, hedge-fund managers, corporate columnists and party-politicians –indeed, it seems like the further a person is from the classroom, the more weight his opinion carries.

Call it the Gates Paradox – the power of your voice in the “education reform” debate is proportional to the distance from the classroom, multiplied by the amount of money you earn.  Needless to say, public school teachers – especially veterans – score very low on this test.

Read the full article here. In it you'll find six word essays (a la Hemingway) about what real teachers are saying about current education reform efforts.

More thoughts on those two subjects soon, but here's a couple essential questions for today:

• Should Canada be following suit in the education reform controversy?
• Is there a need to?

Like the title suggests, the educational blogosphere is both in mid-reverie and mid-uproar about Apple's announcement to change the way schools use textbooks. Apple's goal is to bid adieu to bulky, old and smelly textbooks altogether, and replace them with its own version of e-textbooks, compatible (only, as we yet know) with the iPad. This would leave students with a simple, clean, tablet computer with moving-textbook-graphic awesomeness, and school-bookrooms lonely, their dust-piles singing He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother.

Is this a good idea? Sure, a backpack with one iPad in it weighs less than one with ten, five-pound textbooks, but like many critics are saying, a textbook doesn't shatter when it accidentally hits the floor.

More on this issue in a soon to come (hopefully) separate post, but for now, here's an Apple propaganda video (can you tell which side of the fence I'm on?) rife with assumptions and silly teacher statements. You can almost imagine an Apple exec standing behind each "teacher," waiting for their interview to be over so that they can receive their free, glowy shiny merchandise.

My favourite line: "Using outdated materials, such as textbooks, makes [teaching] difficult."

Also, if I hear another company using The Cinematic Orchestra's "To Build a Home" just one more time in order to motivate people to buy into--or just plain buy--something, I might murder a projector.

While I'm at it, is the Silicon Valley trying to make the Los Angeles public school sector its new philanthropist pet project?

We are all very much broken pieces, spending lifetimes searching for the other shards of a glass landscape.

Some live by the metaphor that life is a puzzle, making each one of us one of its pieces. Puzzle pieces, though, are intentionally shaped with soft, round, and usually large edges that fit easily into other soft, round and large edges. All cast from a die meant to make many copies.

No, we are more likely made of a sheet of glass, dropped on a marble floor. Sharp, fractured. Split without design. Facets, though, that will shine beautifully when held up to the light. We spend the rest of our lives attempting to make whole again, and in many cases never succeed. Simply put, there are pieces of us, pieces of others, so infinitesimally small that they often times get swept up and thrown out. After countless years of searching for those pieces, if we do manage to put ourselves mostly together--with others--we live with the cracks and missing pieces of the pane as if they were always there. We learn to think of the light shining through them as opportunity rather than missing pieces.

I understand now, more than ever, why it is common practice for overseas teachers to continue travelling their entire lives. It's not easy coming home. Hell, it's not easy calling some place home, after a time. You can spend years collecting a wealth of stories, experiences that no one person can contend with, beautiful people that you've met and befriended, sentimental riches that could last a lifetime, but when you expect to bring those back home with you, expecting to share them, you quickly realize that there are very few people that are truly interested in what you've seen. Why would they be? If they were really that interested, they would be making plans to visit those places themselves. Of course they still care about you, they simply care about the you that they've known for a while, that's been put through stasis while you've been away; the continuation of who they knew you to be, instead of a conscious decision to discover how you might have changed. When overseas, if you do not try to pull off an almost impossible feat of living two lives--the one where you're from and the one where you find yourself--former relationships suffer.

You put yourself on the line coming home. You're as vulnerable then as you were when you first arrived to the strange nothingness of your "new home." The comfort of being in a place that you used to be used to, so to speak, is uncomfortable after so much travelling. Going to the stores, the restaurants, the friends' houses that you used to spend countless hours, in like a worn-in pair of jeans, make you claustrophobic. You've spent too much time in another place trying to find comfort in uncomfortable places. Being comfortable, then, is eerie. In public, seeing groups of other people that look, act and talk like you, minding their own business, makes you nervous. This is what you get when the chaos of the other-side-of-the-world becomes familiar: the familiar becomes strange.

Leave your home country for a while and you become more critical of it when (and if) you come back. Chances are, you've visited places steeped with rich history and tradition. Presumably you've sought them out. Thousands of years old, culture passed down generation to generation to ensure that these stories, memories, life lessons and poetries are not forgotten. The question you're immediately faced with, then, is why don't we have that back home? We so often look down on underdeveloped countries, with pity, for not having what we do, that we completely disregard what's not in front of us. What we don't have, what we could have, takes second place to what's right in front of us. When you grow up hearing from your elders that you live in one of the best countries, the best cities in the world, being faced with contradictory evidence can be pretty destructive, especially when you return and expect to try and fit right back in. It's not as simple as that. In Canada, for example, we should have a vibrant First Nations (Native American) history, taught to the rest of the country the people who experienced it first, who cultivated it, who have had those stories passed down to them, instead of as a textbook footnote, written the ones who left their own land and nearly reduced another's to ash.

Meanwhile, while you're overseas, you're forced to reconcile a certain daily superficiality, knowing that your time in your new home will more than likely be temporary. Relationships that you need to create in order to fit in to some semblance of expat counter-culture never fully develop. You start to wonder who these new friends, these people would be, how they would change, had they met you in a different place. More to the point, you wonder how different you would be to them if you were in more familiar waters. And if they take a moment to think about all this, if these thoughts of superficiality unsettle the overseas teacher too much, if you wish to make your stay more meaningful, you then struggle with allowing yourself to be completely open to an influx of daily strangers without any guarantee of compatibility. For those who choose to travel as a form of escaping their former selves, this defeats the purpose of travelling altogether. If you want to embrace your new home completely to gain the most from the experience as possible, like it or not you'll need to put behind some of your former one. Cue forgetting to keep in touch, cue friends and family from back home being unfamiliar to you in some ways, cue more gaps and cracks in the pane of glass.

Over the course of this blog I've promoted travel, overseas teaching, and hopefully shown its seemingly never-ending rewards. This post isn't meant to discount them; they all still ring true. What I've tried to do here is prove that they're a darker side that exists, rarely talked about even between expats. What it comes down to, ultimately, is acceptance of what once was, what is now and a willingness to follow what you know to be right--wholeheartedly. Embracing that espouses wisdom, which surely is valuable no matter where you might find your footing. The gaps in a pane of glass reassembled will always allow the light to shine through when you hold them up high enough. A completed puzzle doesn't have that luxury.

In their writings, my students will often submit to me clichéd sentiments of love-everlonging, mangled pieces of wisdom  and the bent and twisted keys to happiness. Produced on clean white paper and computer ink, scraps found inside of the desk or grid paper ripped out of their notebooks, they're all subject to the scrutiny of my deeply recessed pen on their paper. I have indents in the wooden table from these moments of fiery correction. Clichés are not allowed in my class. Full stop. At some point last year, though, I started to pay more attention to work their work was coming in as much as the work itself.

Above and below are collections of common notebook covers that students buy and use here in Mongolia. You can be sure that they're available all over Asia since I know I've seen just as bad from Beijing, China to Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia. Go ahead, laugh all you want. (I did.) But then, take a moment to consider that these are published. In other words, someone got paid to put this filth on the cover of their books. Here I am busting my butt trying to teach kids simple grammar rules and the dangers of ending their stories with nauseating "and then I woke up and it was all just a dream..." and about how "life is a dream come trues" and some jerk is destroying the efforts of ESL teachers everywhere making money off this junk, proving to kids that what they learn in school isn't important.

That's it. I'm quitting education and opening up the Spell Poor and Graemmer Asian Quotation Company of Eloquent Justice.

Living in Ulaanbaatar during the time when all moisture is sucked out of the air automatically makes this site one of my favourites of all times.

http://www.rainymood.com/

You never know what you'll find in UB, nor when. I just came back from Mike's Books, a tiny hole-in-the-wall book shop that sports the "largest collection of English books" in the city. Their site claims that they stock over 7000. I'm not sure about that, but I am extremely grateful to be able to go used-book shopping every once in a while.

Every once in a while came today as I went out looking for what I knew was going to be easy to find, a copy of The Three Musketeers by Dumas. Ten bucks for a new copy. (Reasonable considering how little English reading material there is in the country.) Done in fifteen seconds. Easy. Too easy. Never one to shy away from must and eroded shelving units, and since it had been awhile since my last visit, I decided to take a look around.

There were the classic shelves for hardcovers, stacks of science fiction and fantasy titles (I confess I did countless double-takes over some David Eddings novels), a section for history, a handful of books on genetics that apparently warranted its own shelf label, classic literature (where I found my Dumas) and then, lo and behold, a "large paperback fiction" shelf. Smack dab in the middle of that was this book.

I know, a bibliophile's opinion is moot, here, but since the title was familiar, I picked it up. The bottom text reads: "Advance reading copy -- not for sale."  The front matter title page tells me it's a first edition.

Red Sky At Morning was and still is a pretty well-respected, coming-of-age tale. So much so that it was made into a movie a few years after it came out, and I'm holding a first edition in my hands with no price tag. I nabbed it right away. Now, I don't expect to get it appraised for millions -- or even appraised at all -- but the thought that it might be worth more than the $3 I stole it for is exciting.
...
It's exciting to me. Leave me alone.

Happy reading!

Sorry for the lack of posts, folks, but research beckons. I'm reading the Les Edgerton book, Finding your Voice: How to put Personality in your Writing (Writer's Digest Books, 2003). I came across -- okay, I read, in the sequential, chaptered order that reading a books takes place in -- an exercise to help get rid of the constant critics that live inside you while you write. Anyone who writes knows what I mean, English teachers or grammarians, especially. Without shame, Les Edgerton bashes English teachers for the everyday scandal of trying to convince students that there's one proper way to write. The King's English. Da rules, he calls it. You know what I'm talking about -- never use a run-on sentence, never end a sentence in a preposition, never start a sentence with a conjunction, try and use synonyms, essays should be five paragraphs with a thesis statement, three supporting statements and explications that reinforce them. All dem rules. As an English teacher, I didn't take offence. Okay, I actually lowered my head in shame for constantly enforcing them with my students. Yes, even me. But not all rules are bad!, he goes on to say, and not all humans aspire to be professional writers. Although everyone does need to communicate at some basic level, and thus some simple rules are necessary.

One of my favourite quotations was told to me by a past professor of mine. Douglas Bader, a pilot in the RAF, once wrote, "rules were made for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men." That advice applies to writing as much as it does crossing a road not at an intersection, or commandeering a plane during the Second Great War.

The activity, then. Edgerton proposes to write down a list of all the names that are critics in your life. From friends, family, authors you admire, even himself. Then he tells us to write a letter to the would be haters that are your critics, informing them that they are no longer welcome. For the fun of it -- and there was fun to be had -- I just penned my own. Here it is, in all its glory.

Dear Arseface, [Hey, it's not supposed to be pretty. You're trying to kick the old sheriff out of town. You're going to need some force.]

It's been way too long that you've been dragging me down. And to be damned honest, I'm sick of it. Ooh, how'd you like that? A sentence that started with a conjunction! Like running a dull blade across your gums, ain't it? (And I don't even use the word "ain't"!! Or double exclamation marks!)

The fact of the matter is, I don't need you. I wouldn't purchase your services from a dollar store if they were half price, and I'm sick of you wriggling around, draining my energy, feeding off me like a tapeworm. You are not fit expel by defecation. If the opportunity arose, I would pop open a bottle of Draino-for-bowels and vaporize you from the inside, regardless of the consequences on me.

You're garbage. Smelly filth. The sappy, sticky, putrid liquid that, like an out-house-scented candle, permeates the whole house for hours after you take the garbage bag out.

From this moment forward you aren't going to bother me. Perhaps that's too loose an expression. From this moment forward, your voice will be curb-stomped, your sarcastic wit sluiced through the nearest gutter drain, and your mental impressions pressure-washed off the concrete.

You're done. Beat it.

Sincerely,

And-I-Mean-It-This-Time,

Mr. L

Whoo boy, I feel better. Give it a shot! It's fun!

Any of you ever feel like the host?

 

I'm an avid reader and make no attempt to hide it. In fact, I often read while walking.
You're mad, man! How could you think of doing such a thing?
Valid question, but you wouldn't think twice about texting your shrink concerning your sudden feelings of isolation from the rest of the world while strolling down the boulevard on a Sunday afternoon, right? Let's just say that if we bumped into each other on said boulevard, I wouldn't be as upset if my book fell to the ground.

Be that as it may, today I learned a valuable lesson. I'm currently reading Maus I with my grade ten students, a brilliant graphic novel about one man's story of the holocaust survival, and the struggle that his cartoonist son (and author of the book), Art Spiegelman, deals with in a world where his father is ravaged by the torments of war.

Knowing that I would be teaching it this year, over the summer I bought and brought back the conclusion to the first graphic novel, Maus II. It was this book that I was reading on the street. Imagine my surprise when I started getting stared at from all sides. I thought it was the usual, "Look! A white man!" glare that I'm usually apt to put up with. It wasn't until I actually had someone stick their head out of their car window to give me the one-over that I realized that reading a book with a giant swastika on the cover, in a country where National Socialism still exists, sporting a shaven head, might not be the smartest idea.

Lesson learned.

The figures are in!

The World Health Organization announced this week its list of countries and cities most and least affected by air pollution. It advises that air pollution quality should never reach higher than 20 PM10 per cubic meter. PM10s are particle concentrations with a diameter of 10 micrograms or less, the size they need to be to barge in on your bloodstream like a drunk frat kid with a boombox, blaring Limp Bizkit's anthemic "Break Stuff". If they do, they then start doing some serious damage to your insides. (It's just one of those days.)

The world average is 71 PM10 per cubic meter. That's enough to put you at a reasonable risk at airborne diseases or auto-immune problems. Canada, bless its heart and lungs, has eight out of the top ten cities with the least air pollution concentration in the world. And that just makes sense when you remember that most of the country is deserted. So if you can call Whitehorse a city, then yeah, it deserves to be on that list. Montreal reclines at 19 with an attitude that says "we're too busy casually-smoking to care," whereas the environmentally-smug Toronto sits at 13. I've got to say, well-done Toronto. While Montreal probably has more industry, you'd expect that with the higher population, more drivers and more businesses, Toronto would be higher up.

Now guess where Mongolia sits? That's right! As a country, it's the most polluted in the world, with a ranking of 279 PM10 per cubic meter. And since they probably pulled stats from the only real, non-nomadic city in the country, Ulaanbaatar, is then ranked the same:

279PM10/m^3

That's not the highest city in the world, but it's very high up there. So when I tell you that I've been sick for three weeks spitting up green moss-covered phlegm and the doctors say they can't do anything? That I leave my window open at night to relieve some of the stuffiness and subsequently wake up with a sore throat? That's because I take in over twenty times the amount of pollution than you do with every single breath.

Put that in your pipe and smo-- you know what? Don't.

(Attached are the stats that the WHO released and a map showing different cities and how clean their air is. Hint: Green is good.)

Sain bain oo from Ulaanbaatar!

An amazing five weeks has passed way too quickly with friends and family in Montreal. Before I continue, I want to thank each and every one of you who made this summer special. I was quite possibly one of the most memorable summers I've had, and couldn't have been better. I don't know what I would do without each of you. Thanks for continuing to support me through my vaga-bonding with the world at large.

This past week marked the first day back at school for students, and before I become completely overwhelmed again I thought I would take a few minutes to assemble some pictures.

First are a couple of contrasting pictures from the plane ride back to U.B., one scene of beauty and one of disfigurement. First, an aerial view of the Rockies. I haven't been to B.C. (it's high on the list) but the draw is immense. I've been talking about going there for years, just having found an opportunity there yet. What I can say is that not many views from the cramped, dry, impersonal space of an airplane seat can make you forget where you are and force you to let out a "wow" of surrealism. The view of the Rockies was one of them.

 

Granted a smart phone's camera doesn't capture this well, but work with me. It was inspiring.

The next picture is the one of disfigurement and disgrace. Seriously, Air Canada, you need to change your catering company. I haven't flown with as many airlines as I know many of my friends have, but you contend for some of the worst food that I've ever been served on a plane. The cold-cut and potato salad meal on the 1.5 hour Mongolian Airlines flight from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar does it better than you do. Thai Air provides metal cutlery and real wine glasses whenever you ask for them for each and every economy class seat. (And yeah, I would ask for cutlery and glassware other than when being served food, if only for the freaking novelty of it.) Air Canada, you stretch toredefine what "economy" truly means. And flight attendants? You can't just describe the dinner options with the embarrassingly simple question, "pasta or chicken noodles?" First of all, pasta almost always consists of noodles. So that's just annoying word choice right there. Secondly, what the hell is "chicken noodles"? From that description I'd be keen to think that I'd be getting some molecular gastronomy-perfected dish of chicken infused noodle. Or, more hilariously, thick tubes of dough with chickens lodged in the middle, not unlike little Sally getting eaten by the class Anaconda. But no, what you meant to say what that I would be getting "chicken and noodles," and unidentifiable partially-digested vegetables, all served with a brown shame glaze. The side-dish, my last small piece of melon for 10 months was soggy and crying. Or at least I think it was. It could have been the Chinese man next to me, so upset at the honour his family had to suffer and personal integrity they had to relinquish during their favourite time of eating.

Enough of that.

The next set of pictures are from Terelj National Park, about an hour outside of U.B. The school staff were taken there over the weekend, and unless you've been there, you've never seen anything like it. In a now very common to me Soviet-eva van that fits 10 people comfortably (25 people and their herd of sheep, on any other normal occasion), you're brought down into the valley of a large, grass-land bowl, with beautiful rock cliffs all around. My flatmate described it best by saying it resembled a scene out of Jurassic Park. It's probably the closest you're going to get to the real thing, anyway. We stayed at a ger camp with a view straight out of a postcard, rode horses the next morning (roughly $5 for an hour) and then drove back to the city. I can honestly say that while I didn't want to go, at first, because of all the work that still needed to be done before the start of school, the short breath of pollution-free relaxation was worth its weight in gold.

More updates to come. Glad to be writing again :)

 

 

Below are a few videos that cover the SOS (Save Our Schools) Rally and March that happened in Washington, D.C. yesterday. The organization is completely grassroots, and its function is to bring to light the distress and the disarray of the U.S. public school system. Its generals are people like Diane Ravitch, who speak openly against standardized testing in schools as a means to increase funding, as well as No Child Left Behind, the Gates Foundation model of improving education, and anyone who dare claims that teachers don't work hard, are overpaid, or should be fired because of low student performance.

Mainstream media chose to ignore the march and its cause, apart from mentions by CNN and the Huffington Post. Thus it falls on the shoulders of the public to speak up and inform. Clearly I don't hold a large stake in what is happening to U.S. public schools right now. However, I can empathize with any teacher who wants to do their job but struggles because of others who think they know better, and don't think it is any stretch of the imagination that copycat crimes of similar education "reform" could occur here in Quebec or elsewhere in Canada. The fact of the matter is, public schools are in trouble in any part of the world where education is put low on the political priority list, and where strategies like wage increase for high standardized test performance, Race To The Top, No Child Left Behind, or having corporate or political pundits who have never taught a day in their life and who have never stepped foot in a public school suddenly in charge of them, are proposed as thoughtless solutions. (As I finished that sentence, a half-decade of English teachers are yelling in my head about the dangers of run-on sentences.)

I don't teach in a public school. In fact, I teach in one where the words "shareholders" and "students" can be found on the same page. However, that doesn't mean I don't come from public education, and it certainly doesn't mean that I don't still believe in it. That said, where and who I am now is directly connected with the public school educators that made me, and I'll do what I can as an individual with a voice to keep the system in the right hands. Here are a few videos and articles that bring some of what happened at yesterday's march to the forefront. Share them with others that might need to know about SOS and the fight for public education.

Jon Stewart sends his appreciation for the cause.


In her address, Diane Ravitch stands up for the values that should make up The American Dream. She knows how to empower her constituents, none other than anyone who has ever been touched by public education, and perhaps more importantly, anyone who has never been touched by public education.

Matt Damon's address. (Introduced by his mother, a teacher.)


In this video, Reason TV doesn't get to the heart of the issue, which sets them up for many attacks in the YouTube comments section by people who call them communists and socialists and delusional liberal extremists. Fact is, it's a poorly put-together video, and the reporter is either deliberately asking the wrong questions to antagonize, or just simply doesn't know any better. Two things that are interesting here: 1) Matt Damon's passion for the cause, demonstrated by right answers to the wrong questions, and 2) the fact that even though the interviewees might have been chosen haphazardly, they demonstrate that SOS is a grassroots cause that has empowered a public outcry, across citizen classes, by anyone who actually understands what's happening to public education.

Some Huffington Post Articles - www.huffingtonpost.com/education

Root Causes and the Save Our Schools March, by Chris Lehmann

If we want students to believe that learning is, indeed, life-long, then students must see that teaching is life-long as well ... and that learning and teaching are forever linked, necessary and beautiful.

And that's not going to happen with the current trends in educational policy. In fact, the current movement will engender less empathy, not more.

Save Our Schools Rally Kicks Off In D.C., Teachers Invited To Meet With Arne Duncan

"We're protesting the thrust of any kind of policymaking that is top down and punitive in nature," said Sabrina Stevens Shupe, a former Denver teacher and march organizer, The Huffington Post reported earlier this month. "There are elements of this in Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind, but mostly we're fighting for fair funding of schools, for curricular development, things that support students." 

There is nothing more welcoming than a McDonalds breakfast. I installed myself at a table in front of the resto around 5am, just to prepare myself for what was to come. Then I dozed off for about 20 minutes -- sleeping with one eye open and on my precious, precious cart -- and then spent 30 minutes in the bathroom trying to open them again. No joke. I just couldn't open my eyes. No amount of prying or staring awkwardly at the bathroom attendant could do it.

Then, around 6:30 a.m., it was time. Sausage and egg McMuffin with a coffee and two hash browns.

McDonalds is always a bad idea. Always. It's always disappointing. Just, it's disappointing in such a beautiful way that you can't help but nurture it. Like that failure of a child that you're raising. You know they suck, but you can't just leave them on the street. Someone's got to encourage him, if only so that you can tell your friends that you did.
So I ate my breakfast, the coffee kicked in and now, 20 minutes later, has worked its way through me.

The airport is buzzing with more activity.
My eyes are twitching.
The sky is a beautiful shade of haze. (I'm sure I've seen the colour "Beijing Ew" at a Home Hardware someplace.)
Seven more hours til check-in.

It's nearly 5am. The sun's coming up. I've made it through the long, cold darkness known as the airport night.

Between 2 and 3 I had a great conversation with some guy from California... in a bathroom. He was talking about the state of the world and his depressing life having his flights cancelled and luggage lost and the whole shebang. I could probably go into what we talked about but frankly I don't have the energy. I'm hoping to get a rest in an hourly lounge around 8 or 9 for a couple hours. Hopefully.

Since that conversation I've been bumping around the airport looking for comfortable places to stay awake. It's becoming more difficult. Only 11 hours left. I've relocated myself in front of the McDonalds, anticipating a good morning McBreakfast, followed by a good morning McBowel movement.

I think this is the closest I've come to being homeless. Seriously, there are parallels that can be drawn. First, I... don't have a home. So there's that. Next, I have a cart that I guard with my life, that I drag around whenever I go, even when I'm in the bathroom. This thing has my life on it. I've also been staking out places with prime real estate.  Scouted them out, and guarded my territory with much anger and trepidation.  I've also rummaged through garbage bags for chicken bones. ...Okay, I haven't gone that far.

Thinking clearly is becoming increasingly more difficult, so writing with good descriptors is too. I'll be impressive if I manage to write even more. Until next.

I wonder how many pancakes and bendy straws it would take to patch a good quilt.

I forgot to mention, I turned down a hotel room around 2:30. It would have been cheap enough, too. I thought that if I was going to do something, I was going to do it right. Now I'm living among the squalor of meals past and long ago digested. I made a decision and I'm sticking with it. No I'm not editing this. Too bad. I'm putting my head down. Bah.

This was one of my grade two students that I taught computer students. For the sake of privacy, let's call him Nyamdorj.

If you were to utter Nyamdorj's name in school, anyone within earshot would understand exactly who you were talking about. He's the kid that doesn't like clicking the computer mouse, he prefers to punch little Gan-Erdene sitting next to him. Oh, but he can be creative -- sometimes he likes to hit Gan-Erdene with a keyboard instead. While working, he's the kid in the class that will be babbling things like "BEEEEAAAAWWWWW BOOO BI BI BRRRRRRRAAAAAA" and then break into repeated, "MR.LACHANCE-CANIGOTOTHEBATHROOM MR.LACHANCE-CANIGOTOTHEBATHROOM MR.LACHANCE-CANIGOTOTHEBATHROOM" Not because he has to go or anything, he doesn't look at you, he goes on staring at his computer screen while he's yelling. He just likes how that particular combination of English words tickles his tongue, while the rest of the students are trying desperately to type the word "June" in less than 45 seconds. (You think I'm kidding, but no.) You can be standing next to him, pointing to the YouTube video he's not supposed to be watching, ask for him to close it, closing it yourself after repeated attempts, and then watch as he re-opens the same damn link, with enough gaul to do it right in front of you the moment he clicks on the mouse. "Hey! Buddy! I'm still right here! Close the damn video!" Then he punches a classmate in frustration. He's that kid. There's no discipline at home, that's the problem, and after many parent meetings, nothing continues to be done.

Needless to say I love him to death. He's such a little shit, but he's a cute little shit, and damned if he doesn't keep you on your toes.

So during our carnival games today, I took great pleasure in seeing him get a face and mouth full of flour. Showing this pic to every teacher who's ever had the pleasure of teaching him and watching for their reaction to Nyamdorj's just desserts was equally priceless.

Until next year, little guy.

P.S. I wonder what Kenny Rogers Roasters tastes like at 1a.m.

It's midnight. The witching hour.

I'm trying very hard to raise one eyebrow. I've managed to secure myself a plug, but unfortunately it's on the floor with no seats around it. I'm sitting very by myself. But lo! The bathroom is directly in front of me on the other side of the room. If only it were a slip-n-slide. Now that would be fun, wouldn't it? I could push myself against the railing I'm leaning on, and then coast my way across the floor, glimpsing back at an Indonesian woman rifling through my bags until I get to the bathroom's entrance and my cheeks down to my feet get smeared with urine stains.

The floor-buffer-zamboni lady is teasing me. There's something going on here between us, I can feel it. She keeps swooping in, a seductive buzz always preceding her, looking at me with the reckless abandon of a mid-40s, weather-beaten, minimum-wage, slave of communism, middle of the night zamboni driver -- you know, that look -- one that's really saying "Mhm, oh yeah." But then she's gone, a lemony-perfume and a 180-degree turn, leaving me to wonder whether it was meant to be. Before I even have the chance to ask the strange Chinese woman that just sidled up next to me looking for a plug for her cell phone, ah, she returns. Same look in her eye, like, "hey, what's a handsome man like you doing on a floor like this?"

I bet she can help me with my slip-and-slide ambition. And by that I mean nothing more than the wax from her zamboni could make for a frictionless floor, right to the bathroom.

And by that I mean I need to pee. Like, now.

This thing we call courtship, it's all Chinese to me.

I'm sitting somewhere where there's good wifi reception, and within minutes I'm in the middle of a conversation with some Chinese guy. I tell him I'm from Quebec.

He knows Quebec, he says. He knows that it's the only French province in Canada, he says.  He also knows that the word "Pepsi" is offensive, and as a swear word to insult French people. But, so he tells me, saying the word is insulting, so people from Quebec don't say it.

Of all the things to know about Quebec, that's what he knows. Where did he pick up that tidbit of 1960s Anglo-slang? Is that what High School World Geography is like in China?

COOL!

Oh he also says Mongolia is poor, and depends on China for everything, and is proud that his country once owned Mongolia. Yeah...