I Teach

We started today by tying up some loose ends from class on Tuesday. Basically just lectury type things. I actually had to explain globalization in 5 minutes. What a task. I was surprised that none of them knew really anything about it. Bizzarre. I suppose for them, though, it must be like trying to explain what oxygen is. They've never really known a world without it. Then we watched a movie about minimum wage and used an article from the student newspaper here to discuss wage strucuture in the U.S. The article basically said that the only ways to pay for a wage increase were to cut services, fire people, or charge higher tuition. After thinking about it for precisely 4 seconds even my class was able to offer that another way was to reduce faculty and administration salaries. I don't necessarily think this is the solution (I told them), but rather my point was to get them to think about why we never discuss that end of the solution. How come (I asked) when we talk about wages in this country we always approach it from a bottom up solution? How come we never think about the people at the top? I think the answer lies partially in what I realized from Tuesdays class. The lesson on Tuesday, for me, was that the people who make too much money are all the people who make more than you do. At least that's true for these kids. I think they all have a way of justifying how much money they want/expect to make, but those other bastards who are hoarding their $300,000 annual salaries are just greedy jerks for not being able to live off of the $250,000 they make. Talking about things in relative terms with these kids is bizzarre because their highs are so high and their lows are so high.

Also, I don't think I've blogged yet about the crowning achievment of my teaching so far. Here it is, my favorite moment.

At one point while we were all discussing some point (crucial, no doubt), a kid's
cell phone went off.  Of course the ringer was a song, and as I glanced over at 
him he had a sheepish grin on his face and I said "If you're going to have your 
phone go off in class, at least get it to play a better song."  The class laughed, 
he laughed, but everyone got the point (I think).  Ah, the power of embarrassment.
I'm sure it won't stop it from happening again, but it might make them think twice
and at least cut down on the number of occurrences.  

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