Early In The Third

 It was my birthday a few days ago. 55. I was supposed to be free by now. You know, freedom 55? Ever see those commercials? But I don't consider "freedom" to be not working. Not any more. I have had a bit of a revelation since Covid. I reckon I can work till I die now if it's online. I don't mind the online teaching gig. In fact I might even prefer it over the face to face teaching gig. One thing you got goin for ya is you don't have to wear a tie. The struggles I have had over my ESL career with ties!!! Especially in Japan. Wearing a tie to play with little kids. What a joke! My neck was a mess! Kids pulling my tie all the time. Shirts that were about 5 neck sizes too small but I still had to hold my breath and force that top button through the hole. Then partially hold my breath the rest of the day. GOD it's nice to not wear a tie! Pants are optional too. Gotch, I gotta wear.  Just in case I stand up for some reason. And a decent shirt. But no tie, never, never. 

If I wax philosophical on yo asses, I figure I'm early in the third period of my life. In philosophical hockey terminology as all those deep thinking hockey guys might say. So 27 1/2 being a third of my life, what was I doing when I was 27 1/2? I was just graduating university. That was the first third of my life neatly packaged all in Canada. Okay, I was 29 when I packed up and went to Korea so I was spinning my wheels in Canada for about a year and a half. But the next third of my life has been spent in other countries mostly. There were a couple stints of over-optimistic attempts to get myself a decent job back in Canada, but by and large, the second period has been all Asia. I'll be here at least a couple more years so it'll work out more evenly. 29 years for my education in Canada, 28 or 29 years of teaching ESL mostly overseas for mostly survival wages... and then what? 

More to the point, 29 years in Canada getting my BA and finding out it won't get me a good job. 28 or 29 years in Asia finding out that BA will get me a better job, but all the good places want master's degrees and all the bad places are the ones that'll take me. Yeah, 26 years or so to this point banging my head against the wall hoping to find a good job in Asia with just a BA. If it was possible, I didn't find it. Although, I had no choice since it'd cost at least 50 grand to get a master's and I have never had that much dough just lyin' around. So with the lack of money came the excess of hope. And that was crushed not long into every contract. 

But then came Covid. I learned, like so many, to work online. It was a steep learning curve, but I pulled it off with a lot of help from people who upload instructional videos on YouTube for guys like me who don't know how to record teaching vids, then upload them to the school LMS (learning management system) or use the school portal to upload grades, or navigate Zoom, use the breakout rooms, make different IP addresses for each of your classes, transfer tests from class to class etc., etc., etc.... It was a LOT of learning in a little time! But I powered through. I got lots of help from my work colleagues too, especially Mike. Thanks, Mike. 

During that time, I learned to teach online and I learned to like it. I had some savings from my time working at SK Hynix and I had given consideration to an online master's too. In fact, the above Mike and I had a couple chats about that. We were both master'sless and realizing that the pickins were slimmer and slimmer for fellas like us. Then another friend, who I've blogged about so often, you should know her by now, Heather turned me onto a university in California called the University of the People where they don't charge tuition. I didn't look much into it at the time, I just told Heather I would. I had signed on for another year of work at Gongju Dae even though it was the shittiest contract I'd ever had in all my years of teaching ESL in Korea. 

Well, then things started happening that made me pretty sure the people at Gongju Dae were going to make the contract suck even more than the already worst contract in Korea that it was. They were gonna reinstate the full 40-hour week with any non-teaching time spent pulling pud in an empty office. They were going to make horrendous schedules for me where I start early in the morning and finish late at night with long breaks in between I go home for. They were going to add Korean students to the already bogus international counselling I was responsible for for the international students. They were going to have the counselling, and probably the teaching, in person, in a new building where all the bosses are, possibly air conditioned, possibly not, while wearing a mask... for the lowest salary in Korea. AND, they'd find a way to fuck me out of my severance again too. I couldn't imagine anything I'd like to do less! I tried to negotiate, but it was useless. I looked more into the UoPeople and it seemed like the thing to do. I can't say I didn't enjoy fake negotiating with Gongju's representative like there was still a possibility of my staying. I even had her offering to remove all the bogus counselling. But I had already made up my mind by then, I was just enjoying watching her sweat. (Don't think I'm cruel, she totally deserved it! She was lying and cheating with every word she said to me) It was actually nice to have the money to not care. Hooray for money, eh?

So, with a little morsel of hope not yet hammered out of me, I have triumphantly embarked upon an adventure that may be rocky, it may be risky, but it may finally land me that job that will allow me "freedom AFTER 55." Or at least partial freedom. Incredibly, I have Covid to thank for this. Covid and the University of the People. See, I complained and whinged about having to spend my last 4 vacations in a row here in Korea, but the money I saved not going golfing in some other country, or sightseeing or kayaking into a mountain or hiking up a volcano, or drinking and "helping" the band at a live rock bar, or just relaxing at an outdoor pub with friends (sssiiiiiiggggghhhhh I really miss those things) is what's paying for the time off! I've been off since the end of Feb. but only 2 weeks into my course.

At the 2-week point, how am I doing? Well, let me just check to verify this... I am taking two courses, EDUC 5010: Education in Context, and EDUC 5210: Learning Theory. I've been graded on two papers, two significant comments, evaluations of 6 fellow students' comments and evaluations of 6 fellow students' papers, and two portfolio entries so far. There are a bunch of numbers posted and my profs are congratulating me, but I can't for the life of me figure out the grades I'm getting! They seem to be good??? That's all I can say for now. But I will update you when I can make sense of this whackadoo grading system they have. 

I have resigned myself to Tuesday and Wednesday as my weekend, and only if I get all my work done by Monday. So far so good two weeks in, BUT, week three we add yet another duty, the group project, which will be a pain in the ass since group members will be from all over the place and we'll all be sleeping at different times. I have settled into vampire mode. I find it easier to study all night long. Right now as I type, it's 7 in the morning and I've been up all night. Got a lot of reading and writing done too after waking up at 6 PM from my nap. It's a complicated schedule, but I think it'll be the best way to do this.

My first week was a little rough. I didn't have the tech I needed for this gig and I think I lost marks for not complying with APA citation regulations. You know like not writing "References" in the center of my page above the references. Not having one inch margins on all sides. Honestly! But Heather helped me out a great deal with that. I had a fake MS Office program called Libreoffice, which the UoPeople had suggested for students to get. I watched vids to learn the APA guidelines for citations and such, but it was all on MS Word and it was different. So Heather said she might have another guest spot on her MS Office online acct. She did, but I was unable to download it. It was bizarre! I got the exe file, I started it, it said, "Getting things ready..." for an insane amount of time, then it just stopped. No welcome to MS Office, let's get you started or anything. I had to search my computer to find it. Well it was there, but when I tried to start an MS Word document, it sent it to One Drive and I still couldn't open it. I tried for hours restarting, downloading again, and all the stuff you do, but it didn't work. There was a point when I could open documents on Notepad, but MS Word never arrived. I figured it was because of my slow internet. I'd try again at a coffee shop.

Heather suggested I do it with a VPN on. I had recently nuked my VPN for trying to renew my one-year subscription without asking me if I wanted it,  (don't use Nord), but I had downloaded a free one. Unfortunately THAT day my "free" one, Windscribe, had told me I was out of data and wouldn't get any more till next month. UNLESS I upgraded to a pay version. I kept the exe file for MS Office and just got rid of everything MS Office and Windscribe, then RE-downloaded Libreoffice so I could do my writing for the night. That's what I had to hand in for the first week.

But, I found a new VPN, tried again to download my gift MS Office from Heather and it worked. It was just Korean censorship that was the problem. Even when downloading the VPN I got a message that a "gomicrosoft" file was unable to download. They have always had a very weird relationship with Microsoft here in Korea, and it's nigh onto impossible to get a legitimate copy here. For years every computer you bought here had Windows on it, but not a legit copy of it. And I tried a few times to buy one, but failed. So, this is pretty much what happens to me every time I try to do anything tech. 

The upshot is, I now have MS Office and this week I did all my writing on MS Word using the APA guidelines I'd studied and written down. So I won't lose any points for that this week I hope. Heather also gave me a program to help with formatting or maybe APA stuff but I haven't figured it out yet. Perrla. Heather's been hard at her Master of Education from a different U.S. university for a while now. So she's given me lotsa good pointers and, if I ever get the time, I have a bunch of her A+ papers I can read and probably get some good stuff from. This week my study topics were education systems from 9 countries around the world including, Iran, Japan, Uzbekistan, India, China, Africa, Afghanistan, Vietnam, the Philippines and some others. I had to compare a "western" and "eastern" education system that was not where I work or where I am from. So I chose Africa and the U.S. I love the African "Ubuntu" pedagogy and used that as a central idea because it's being abandoned in favour of western ideas in Africa, and I think it is exactly what is missing in western ideas of education. It's a beautiful concept.

Answer me this: If you're at the grocery store and you go to the milk section cuz you need milk and you see one carton with an expiration date a week from now. Underneath it are a dozen more with expiration dates TWO weeks from now. You love milk and you KNOW you'll finish the carton in a few days. Do you a) take the carton that expires in a week or b) take a carton from underneath it? More interestingly, why? I think it's got a lot to do with how we're socialized, but also how we're educated. You can say it in positive sounding ways like student-centered education teaching students to be confident and self-sufficient, or you can say that we're taught to be competitive and think of ourselves before other people.

I sometimes wonder if the "Great" Depression or the stock market crash of 2008 would have happened if America hadn't systematically beaten down this Ubuntu kind of cooperative, communal thinking. It's considered indigenous silliness in Africa by a lot of "forward" thinking people. But I think capitalism has subdued any kind of thinking like this all over. Including indigenous people all over North America.

So anyway, that was just one course. The OTHER course I am making contingency contracts with students that contain "fixed interval" or variable ratio schedules of reinforcement... blah blah blah. This is the shyte I was worried most about. Fancy words applied to common sense tactics that almost anybody with half a brain will inevitably employ if emerged into the teaching profession. To give you an idea, a "fixed ratio" is a kind of agreement with students over an amount of responses and the reinforcement it will get them. To be even more childish secret code-like, an FR5 is if 5 people give correct responses, they will receive positive reinforcement. However, FI5, fixed interval 5 means if they don't give those 5 correct responses in a 5-minute interval, they receive negative reinforcement. There are many, many examples like this. Silly. I mean you can't survive as a teacher if you don't learn some of this stuff, or already know it. People have given it fancy sounding names and then claimed it as revolutionary thinking. Now, to be fair, most of these people claiming common sense as their own DID so a long-ass time ago. Before somebody else could do so. And generally, the ones who did so wrote a lot of other stuff, and a lot of that OTHER stuff is really good!

So I'm finding that if you get beyond the obvious stuff that made great educators like Dewey, MLK, Piaget, Horace Mann, and this week Gagne, famous, there is some interesting stuff to learn. I'm pleasantly surprised about that. I was prepared to deal with the Emperor's New Clothes, but I'm enjoying the underappreciated scraps of fabric that I hadn't heard about. It's hard to remain humble when the material for the week is stuff you've already done regularly for many years, just didn't know the name of it, and when the teacher asks you to write about how this "new learning" has "informed your pedagogy." But for two weeks, I've managed. It's really not as bad as that last sentence made it sound either. I AM learning lots of stuff. The nice thing about this course, or one of the nice things, is that we are in constant contact with other teachers. Teachers from all over the world. In communication. I have already learned a lot from them! Collaborative learning like this is something that is only possible online, so it makes these courses a thousand times better than studying with classes full of people who have almost the same educational experiences as you. For a guy who may end up continuing my career in some other countries, this is invaluable experience. And how much have I paid so far for this? Aside from my main expense - staying alive and keeping a roof over my head, I've only paid 60 bucks so far.

 Anyways, I feel SO much better than I would have if I were just getting a subsistence wage from this time! That's all I ever made from Gongju Dae. Instead, I'm losing money, but after each week of study, I feel better, MUCH better, than I would have after every week of teaching. I feel like, in the grand scheme of things, I'm still making money. I just have to postpone the payday for a while.

Not only that, but I'm bulkin' up brain-wise. Reading my weight every week (well, my weight as of last time I was a student) if it were paper pages and not online. Writing more than Stephen King and some is horror actually! The educational environments described by some of my co-students make me really grateful to be in Korea. I complain, but it's a safe, good place to be over here in Asia. You pay for that comfort, and suddenly you pay like 20% more, but it's where I want to do this. And even if I don't get hired on somewhere after the first 6 months of my course, I think I will be able to do another 6 months. So that's what's going on. I type this to inform you but at the same time to remind me of how this time was when I have landed my dream job because of my master's degree and am looking back at the struggle. 

This might be a sweet memory someday when I'm old ER and grey ER.

Pneumaticism

 Here are a couple of guys selling fresh, Canadian air for 20 bucks a can. They are making money! $230,000 a year! Granted, those are CANADIAN dollars, but still... 

Being a bit of a jaded, life-hardened, realist, I instantly thought, "Why don't those foolish, lavish, money-wasting people who are buying our air in cans, just buy some bags of Canadian Cheetos or Ruffles and get a few chips with their fresh air?" Here's a study of which bags of chips have the most air for your buck. Word of warning: the breath of air at the top of a bag of salt and vinegar chips might make you cough. 

Here in Korea, chip eaters are suffering too. Unfortunately, the air isn't comparable to that of Canada, so they use nitrogen. Luckily, I haven't breathed the gas at the top of the chip bags here in Korea. Now that I know it's nitrogen, I'll remember to hold the bag at arm's length when I open chips here. As a protest against chiseling chip makers, a couple of students made a raft using 160 bags of chips and paddled across the Han River in Seoul. Well done, lads! But I haven't noticed any improvement yet.

If you suffer through the Canadian Tire commercial at the beginning and the use of "less" instead of "fewer" when referring to the amount of chips in bags, (a common mistake I admit to making for most of my life that has now become an irritant in my grammatically pedantic older age) this isn't a bad report about how a LOT of products, or, rather, their manufacturers, are offering less for the same price or more. They call it "shrinkflation" and I think I started noticing this when I was a LOT younger in a product I haven't seen for probably over 20 years - Wagon Wheels. 

If I'm not mistaken, the ad had a slogan something like, "They're so huge, you have to grin to get them in." The statement put out by the manufacturers is that people think they've shrunk because we remember eating them when we had smaller hands and appetites, but manufacturers give us AIR in all sorts of ways. 

Hearken back to the previous video where the guy says, "Air is free," the term "shrinkflation," and you might also, if you're like me, hearken back to the usage of the word "pneumatic" by Aldus Huxley in "Brave, New World." In the novel, it was used to describe chairs (inflated with air pockets to make them more comfortable) and women. A lot of people think that Lenina's body was described as "pneumatic" because she was a buxom beauty, but I always took it as a reference to her intelligence, or attractive air-headedness as well.  

Let's be honest, an airhead is attractive to a man because she's gonna be easy. We can easily score with her. She'll be easier to persuade into doing what we want her to do. I think the guy who said, "Air is free," is a bit of an airhead himself. Not so much our quotester Habyarimana because he probably only said it satirically in his quote. However, consumers who are airheads are attractive to manufacturers for identical reasons as dumb girls are attractive to the ungentlemanly of us guys in the world. Airhead consumers are more easily manipulated and coerced into doing what the manufacturers want us to do: pay more money for less shit. "Shit," the object, not the act, being an uncountable noun, as opposed to "chips," being a countable noun, receives the quantifier, "less," rather than "fewer," which is the correct choice for "chips" for this reason. Anyway, we are, most of us, Leninas in this way, aren't we? Call it shrinkflation, call it pneumaticism, call it what you will, it's a fact. We pay more and more for less and less. We don't have to, we just do. Because we're airheads. 

Any airhead reading this now think air is free? I'm not going to quibble about the air in the tops of soda bottles or chip bags, we have all paid for THAT air even though the manufacturers didn't. How else do we pay for air? I guess I could talk about the two years I spent in China and how much that cost me in the currency of time on this planet, which becomes more valuable as one ages, but I've talked about that before. It comes off the end of life when I will sweat the expense a great deal less. 

What other sorts of air do we pay for? Through the bloody arse for, if you'll pardon my airy phraseology. You know how old radio shows used to have those lights when DJ's were broadcasting that lit up and said, "On The Air?" Think "Good Morning Vietnam" or "WKRP" if you're as old as I am. That air USED to be free. TV and Radio was once free. Radio has now become Itunes. How do you like THEM Apples? Absolutely nothing associated with Apple is free. And take a drive around any major Canadian city. Go to the downtown area where all the big buildings are. Which one or two is or are the biggest? There's gonna be a massive Roger's building, and you'll also find a gigantic Telus building. Shaw and Bell will be there too. This kind of air is certainly not free! In fact it's the most expensive thing going! Meaning the biggest rip-off. Not only do they charge exorbitant rates for some of the slowest internet speeds in the world, they also force ads onto us even though we are buying their service. More and more ads for higher and higher prices. And we keep pneumatically paying for it.

What's another type of air we pay for? If one considers the amount of "hot air" we are bombarded with from politicians, opinion makers, media and influencers on those "airwaves" we pay so much for on a daily basis, these may be the largest air purchases we make in our daily lives. But when was the last time you flew anywhere. In a sense, when you fly, you are purchasing the air, aren't you? And with a couple hundred billion in losses absorbed by the airlines during the pandemic, the cost of flying anywhere will be "taking off" soon and won't be "landing" until more than the 200 bill has been recovered. It's the way corporations work. Any losses are passed on to the customers... and THEN some. So if I have to do a visa run to renew my D-10 visa or change to a work visa in six months, I'll be taking the ferry to Osaka from Busan. 

In a more concrete example, if you are not convinced that flying is buying air, there is obvious proof that air can be and IS owned. Where? What do you think would happen if you boarded an airplane and flew over Russia right now? Russia's a huge country! And I guess the arbitrary residents and/or the representatives they may believe they have chosen, OWN all that air over their country. In reality it'll be the military that shoots your ass down. They are controlled by the government, which is not so much representing the people, (they wouldn't shoot your ass down) but are representing, and in large part, consist of, the richest people in Russia. 

Finally, the air we probably incur the highest amount of payment and debt from all around the world is the air from which the World Bank, IMF, and other such vulture capitalistic consolidations of paper-printing, nationless, imperialistic power/money, magically materialize the money that enslaves the nations they loan it to. Right now Ukraine is the best example of their handiwork. When the invasion began, the news that the IMF and World bank were negotiating money packages to aid in the Ukrainian defense of their nation was treated as GOOD news in the hot air the media was blowing. But that money was not GIVEN to Ukraine. In fact, during this illegal invasion, Ukraine has actually PAID the IMF and World Bank (which are basically the same assholes I think). This new "heroic" aid package will have massive strings attached to be sure. Like so many of the rulers of our world, who should be making things easier for us after suffering through the pandemic, the IMF and World Bank are seeing Ukraine in an even more disastrous position and they're rushing to them with contracts in one hand and pens in the other, weapons far worse than Putin's tanks and bombs, that will probably bring about the REAL conquest of Ukraine. They should be forgiving debt. The world should be treating the IMF and World Bank the way they're treating Russian billionaires. But how do you sanction an entity that just pulls money out of the air?

I could be way off with this, but the central bank systems that most countries have, whether they want them or not, are pretty much represented worldwide by the IMF and World Bank. They are the central banks of the planet. While most country's central banks have too much power, these two entities have WAY too much power. They're the ultimate in pneumaticism. 

I have heard that Thomas Edison was the hero and friend of Henry Ford and in the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan, there is a test tube that is said to contain Thomas Edison's last breath. It was sent to Ford by Edison's son, Charles. Okay, I think I have just corrected myself. THIS is the ultimate in pneumaticism surely! To believe that someone, possibly his own son, was beside Edison's death bed holding this tube under his nose and capping it after each breath then checking his pulse, uncapping it and placing it under his nose again, and repeat... well you'd have to be an airhead to believe this, wouldn't you? To add to the pure insanity of our world, I guaran-damn-tee there are people who'd probably pay millions for that test tube! Pneumaticism!

So if you've ever looked at the world and thought, "For fuck's sake! Soon they'll be charging us all for the air we breathe, and we'll be stupid enough to pay," well... here we are.

I still have hope though. Not much, but just a breath of airy hope for this world. We need to think of another, much more important kind of air that binds us all together: spirit. Or, as a dude even smarter than Edison might call it, the Aether.