At my limit

Not what you might
call a breakdown
Accurate as could be
A trial, a test, a final showdown
Flawless despondency

My head started falling out
And I couldn't
Even retrieve it

These walls
have been
crumbling
(I stumble)
down
down
down
down
down

I've been alright.
How 'bout you?
This is nothing.
Nothing new.
We'll make it out.
We'll make it through.
Want something done
then you should
do it now.

Out of control
spinning
spinning madly
Dear God,
Who'd call this house a home?

More like a flesh/blood cage.

My hands
started
crawling 'round
and I couldn't
keep it together.

These walls are
a prison
spiraling
down
down
down
down
down

You were there
right when it happened
Savor the moment
forever knowing

You just
keep it now
locked at home
in the prettiest box
you could hope
to afford.

They'll come find it soon.

My legs have walked the fuck off
and they won't
be coming back again, will they?

These walls are rebelling
the pieces fall
down
down
down
down
down

Not what you might
call a breakdown
Accurate as could be
A trial, a test, the final showdown
Flawless despondency

LoopEyesNoseMouthBeretBananaGrandmother

Applying for Jobs

The following is what I wrote to apply for a job in luxurious Saudi Arabia:

I am interested in this position because I would like to see more of the world. From a young age, I have wanted to be a man of the world. I mean I have wanted to know and understand the way people live in other parts of the world. I started out my cross-cultural experiences and learning with Japan. I traveled to Japan four times between 2001 and 2007 thanks to the aid of my stepmother who is Japanese herself. I spent a month living with another family with a homestay program and came back a much less pickier eater (my father was very grateful). In 2007, I actually studied for three weeks at one of the leading universities in Japan. My college was a liberal arts college designed to expose its students to each type of learning and to encourage combining different types of learning (Math&Science with Language arts, Social Sciences with Physical Sciences, etc.) so that graduates so that I majored in Political Science but was still able to study the Japanese language and its culture and spent a semester studying Chinese as well. Now, for over two years, I've lived and worked in Thailand. The adjustments I've had to make to live here (giving up some of the comforts I enjoyed in the United States, changing food habits, becoming fluent in a foreign language) have made me a stronger, more well-adjusted person.

In my TESOL course in London, we were told to reduce the teacher's time speaking as much as possible. The ideal ratio was about 30% of class time being a teacher to student interaction and the other time spent on activities that had student to student interaction. As J. Marvin Brown (creator of one of the best Thai language learning programs) described it: language learning is about acquiring habits more than acquiring knowledge. The students in the class need to learn to be good listeners and speakers of English and need practice playing each role, so the teacher's job in any classroom is to create situations where that student-student interaction can happen. In the same way that a pilot learns on a flight simulator and then flies a real plane or a dance student practices Samba with an instructor and then uses Samba moves in a dance club, teaching English needs to be about modeling real-life situations which the learner could encounter so that the student has experience in these situations and can then use his or her English skills when he or she encounters the modeled situation in an everyday context.

I've been struggling with my University students to teach what one would think is a basic thing: how to construct a sentence. I originally wanted to teach students how to form questions and answers, but all my students seem to get from the lesson was how to distinguish a subject, verb, and object so I expanded on that and tried to teach words that look similar and have the same meaning but are different parts of speech. Students really struggled with that concept and how to identify the part of speech of any word in the sentence so I became convinced that what the students needed was more work on how to construct sentences. I made a diagram to show how to construct sentences with intransitive verbs and intransitive verbs because basic sentences differ in form depending on whether the verb of the sentence is transitive or intransitive, but before I could teach the diagram I recently taught a lesson on the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs.

In conducting the lesson, I followed the basic pattern taught to me by my TESOL course. I defined transitive and intransitive verbs, got plenty of examples up on the board, and then had to explain that many transitive verbs can also be intransitive verbs. Then I gave what I thought was a simple rule for distinguishing between a transitive verb sentence and an intransitive verb sentence: A transitive verb sentence has an object. An intransitive verb sentence does not.

We then worked as a class with example sentences to discern whether the sentence had a transitive or intransitive verb with OKI've been struggling with my University students to teach what one would think is a basic thing: how to construct a sentence. I originally wanted to teach students how to form questions and answers, but all my students seem to get from the lesson was how to distinguish a subject, verb, and object so I expanded on that and tried to teach words that look similar and have the same meaning but are different parts of speech. Students really struggled with that concept and how to identify the part of speech of any word in the sentence so I became convinced that what the students needed was more work on how to construct sentences. I made a diagram to show how to construct sentences with intransitive verbs and intransitive verbs because basic sentences differ in form depending on whether the verb of the sentence is transitive or intransitive, but before I could teach the diagram I recently taught a lesson on the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs.

In conducting the lesson, I followed the basic pattern taught to me by my TESOL course. I defined transitive and intransitive verbs, got plenty of examples up on the board, and then had to explain that many transitive verbs can also be intransitive verbs. Then I gave what I thought was a simple rule for distinguishing between a transitive verb sentence and an intransitive verb sentence: A transitive verb sentence has an object. An intransitive verb sentence does not.

We then worked as a class with example sentences to discern whether the sentence had a transitive or intransitive verb with OK results. By OK results, I mean that the same people who normally answer questions in that class were answering all the questions as usual and judging by the faces of the other students they seemed to be grasping the concept instead of looking overwhelmed or furrowing their brows in confusion.

Next, we worked as a class to determine the formula of sentences like "A dog bites bones" would produce a formula like [article] -> [singular subject] -> [transitive verb] -> [plural object] would produce a sentence like or "Silly girls go to the Linkin Park Concert" would produce a formula like [adjective] -> [Plural subject] -> [intransitive verb] -> [preposition phrase]. Then I gave students a worksheet with formulas and asked them to create sentences from the formulas.

From here, my job as a teacher became a guide or support. I walked around the classroom checking that students were working and helping them with their answers. Many came to consult me at the same time and I wished our class sizes were half the size. That class, in particular, has over fifty-five students that come regularly whereas the class list says there should be seventy-seven.

I've given students an hour to complete the task, but many of them will not finish or complain that they are hungry and those students I will let go. There are many other students who stay late with me, make a queue, and we work together to understand the material and the difficulties the student is having with the material. results. By OK results, I mean that the same people who normally answer questions in that class were answering all the questions as usual and judging by the faces of the other students they seemed to be grasping the concept instead of looking overwhelmed or furrowing their brows in confusion.

Next, we worked as a class to determine the formula of sentences like "A dog bites bones" would produce a formula like [article] -> [singular subject] -> [transitive verb] -> [plural object] would produce a sentence like or "Silly girls go to the Linkin Park Concert" would produce a formula like [adjective] -> [Plural subject] -> [intransitive verb] -> [preposition phrase]. Then I gave students a worksheet with formulas and asked them to create sentences from the formulas.

From here, my job as a teacher became a guide or support. I walked around the classroom checking that students were working and helping them with their answers. Many came to consult me at the same time and I wished our class sizes were half the size. That class, in particular, has over fifty-five students that come regularly whereas the class list says there should be seventy-seven.

I've given students an hour to complete the task, but many of them will not finish or complain that they are hungry and those students I will let go. There are many other students who stay late with me, make a queue, and we work together to understand the material and the difficulties the student is having with the material.