January 28th, 2016

11:13 pm

First thing I should mention before I forget- I owe the manager here and apology, I guess. I came in Tuesday evening, and I was waiting to be let in to the elevator area, when, on an impulse, I pressed my finger to the bio-scanner... and it worked! What? I guess I'M the stupid one for giving up after three tries?

So now I've got a more welcoming atmosphere for myself. But I don't know how one gets in if the scanner gets broken. Also, where are the stairs? Do I have a buzzer code? And is there a garbage chute of some kind? And why are the showers so cold? Bug or feature? 

Wednesday I gave my English Corner on different movie types- save the word "genre" for another day. I showed the trailer to "Liar, Liar" for comedy (I was looking for something with the absolute minimum of near naked women to show my mostly female audience), the ending to "You've Got Mail" which I may have gushed over a bit too much for romantic-comedy, a clip from Commando which is a movie I've never actually seen, and straight action as demonstrated here isn't particularly interesting, but I immediately contrasted that with the 'sword to a gunfight' clip from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" for action-adventure.

I emphasized "character" both as a person in a movie and as a set of personality traits for a person in a movie, and "scene" - the when and where of action taking place over a set period of time, with any change in location or time indicating a new scene- as the first, most basic terminology for talking about movies/stories, the goal being to get them comfortable describing and talking about any kind of story they come across.

There was one guy that I kept looking to for approval, he didn't seem to be having a good time with the material, but maybe that's just how he looks.

Besides explaining the "fingers crossed" gesture to Stella- as well as the peace sign, and whatever the British call the peace sign faced the other way, I don't remember too much from the day. I had a beginner level class at the very end which I remember enjoying, we just talked about likes and dislikes. 

And I had a class that dealt with speculations and we came up with good and bad futures for ourselves. I said in my bad future (there was some protesting when I didn't participate for the good future section) that today I would get laughed at for saying something dumb in class, next week I would lose my job and be stranded in China, in a year I'd be wandering the border between Russia and China, and in 15 years I'd be working security in a Russian prison... or an inmate. That was just my work future- as far as the future of my city, Toronto has it rough- the collapse of the CN Tower and the city gets flooded. Sorry guys.

Amazingly, the student named Rain fought fate and went rogue with the instructions- in the section about family where she was supposed to write the bad future she basically kept repeating about how hard her family was working and it kept them distanced from each other- but then at the 15 year mark they would reap the rewards of all their hard work and be happy together! She was the last to contribute for that class, and that was a perfect, perfect button to what got fairly dark.

Fight the future, Rain! - 11:39 pm