Energy problems

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091125/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_brazil_blackouts

I’ve been reading the many reports of the energy failing in different parts of Brasil recently in Yahoo news. It happens a lot here and not only with energy but also water too. Rio is going to be fun once the Olympics start, dodging bullets, kidnappings and also lack of energy. Just the things you need when cheering on your athletes. Energy goes off here with no warning, even our small city suffers from this and it can take quite a long time for the energy to return. It requires making sure that any sensitive equipment, such as computers, TV’s, etc., are disconnected as power surges are very common. Although energy companies here in Brasil charge a lot of money, nothing ever seems to be done about this problem.

In our small city the water fails a lot, especially at this time of the year. The main reason for this is that people just don’t care and use water in a very wasteful fashion, even when they know that mains supplies are low. Its normal to see people washing the roads outside their houses, I don’t mean the sidewalk but the actual road itself. They’ll pour gallons of water there while standing talking to passers by in the street, knowing full well that the moment they stop the high temps will dry it in a couple of minutes and cars will drive on it making the road as dirty as it was before they started. I complained once to a cleaner who was doing this but she just looked at me as if to say – who cares, its only water. Mainly rich peoples home helps tend to do this a lot, I really think its not a lack of education or common sense but more of an ‘its someone elses problem’ type of attitude. Although it’s been raining here this morning I can see people still washing the street, it’s completely crazy

2012

After the book fair yesterday, we went to watch 2012. Some of my students had already seen it and told me it was great with excellent special effects. The story has quite a few holes in it but the effects were excellent, it has to be seen of the big screen to enjoy them. We went with our friends Tim and Laura, Tim told us his students didn’t like it but when the film finished everyone was cheering and clapping. It’ll be a film to get for sure on Dvd when it comes out, right along with Star Trek

Brasilia book fair

Roberta and I went to the book fair at Patio Brasil in Brasilia yesterday. I like going to the fair, it only happens once a year and normally its very good. This time they didn’t seem to have so much stuff, there seemed to be a few empty spaces where no stands were too. We will go again at the end of the week, maybe it’ll have more people selling by then. We managed to get a copy of the newest Dan Brown book, it’s been selling like hot cakes and we had problems getting a hold of a copy. They are only selling hard back versions of the book in English though, not really sure why this is. Every person we asked yesterday said they were only importing the hardback copies. Maybe it is cheaper to import? Usually we bring home three or four bags full of books but this time it was just a couple of books. There were quite a few bible selling stalls, for me this was a complete waste of space, they could have put some more book sellers in these spaces – someone like Cambridge or Oxford publications. A lot of the grammars books we already have copies of, I didn’t see any conversation material either, but then this didn’t matter so much as I already have a bookshelf full of this material. I think Roberta would have liked to see more stalls selling fiction books, we both love to read and usually load up on books at the fair. Next weekend, we will see if there are more things to look at and hopefully more deals as they start to wind the fair down.

Problems…

In July I took the first Cambridge TKT exam at Cultura Inglesa in the capital. It didn’t start off so well as they decided to deposit all my checks early so we incurred interest when my account was without any money in it. We had to spend more than an hour in our bank explaining that it wasn’t our problem and they decided to refund the extra R$30 interest we had to pay, so that worked out fine. I took the exam and then waited the four weeks they told me for the certificates to arrive for the people that had taken the exam. Since then Roberta has called this school five times and each time they have either blown her off, told her they would call her back and then when Roberta called to find out why three or four days had passed with no return call they said they couldn’t find the person she has spoken to or no one remembered her call. It’s quite annoying that we gave these guys R$158 of our money and they are still fobbing us off. Today Roberta will try calling them again and if they don’t resolve the problem she said we will call Procon and get them to look into it. It seems very strange that they never reply or have a straight answer, something is starting to smell fishy here It doesn’t help that we live a long way from the place so we can’t just go running there to complain, I think they know this and for this reason they just string us long, knowing that we are having to keep wasting our money to keep calling them and they are just going to sit there doing nothing

Roberta just sent me a message saying she is trying to call them again from the school. I think personally we should just call the newspaper, maybe a bit of bad publicity will get them moving. I think I’ll go look up the number of the newsdesk…

Update – They finally decided to tell Roberta that the stuff had been at their school for months, since September. No reason for why they kept fobbing her off or why they didn’t return her call yesterday

Hot

Today was hot, really hot. According to the thermometer in the school the temp was at one point 39’C. Even though its 10pm here now, it’s not really cooled off al that much. Sleeping tonight is going to be a nightmare, even with the ventilator running at max. I caught my neighbor trying to hit a small cat just before I started this post. I was told when we first moved into this house that she and her husband were miserable dregs of humanity, once apparently they asked someone to put poison on their house roof to kill all the local birds so they wouldn’t land on their house or garden. Sad pathetic individuals, they really need to get a life. When she realized that I was standing at the front gate she ran, – if you can call it running – up her driveway and stood in the shadows. Yeah, right as if no one could see her there, doesn’t she have anything better to do that this? At the weekend, I did some role play with my conversation group. I was going to do it last class but one of my students told me that she couldn’t have it and asked me to postpone it a week so she could take part. Turns out, she didn’t make it this class either and out of the whole group on two did. Not to worry though, it worked out fine. The class was about bad moods and after the main warm up and conversation I got my students to use some role play cards to create a small drama piece and after we rehearsed it a couple of times, also recorded as a small movie. It is still on my camera, I must remember to get it off and upload it to the web for the other students to see. It’s only around thirty seconds or so in length but they enjoyed the creative part and recording it too. I’ll try to upload it to both Facebook and Orkut when I have a bit of free time. I haven’t given much thought to what to do this weekends class yet. I’ll browse through the book and see what’s already been done and what topics are left for me to try out. I might look for something controversial again, the death conversation class went down well. Other interesting news was that the old director of the uni won again. Not surprising as she probably had the vote in her pocket before the voting even started. Apparently there was some juggling with the students votes, something along the lines of 17 students votes equaled 1 teachers vote, with most of the teachers employed by the director and being connected to her in some way. Thankfully Roberta only has one more year of uni left.

Ranking game -’Victims’

This week I was going to do  role play as part of the conversation class, but one of my students couldn’t make this class this week and asked me to do something else and put off the role play until next week. So this weeks class was about ‘Life and death’ and went down well. The CCAA conversation class books are okay to use but I always have to add a little extra onto the material to make it last the full 90 minutes of class. This weeks class was rounded off with a ranking game that I found in a teaching manual called ‘Victims.’ The main idea of the game is that the groups of students are members of a committee of city elders who have to vote which of five girls is going to be the last member of a group of young people who will be sacrificed to the Minotaur in order to keep the city safe for another year. This list of girls and descriptions given to the students is below:

Chloe – one of six brothers and sisters, family very influential, so children have so far escaped being sent. Chloe is very talented, has won several prizes for singing and music. Engaged to be married to rich businessman who threatens to withdraw financial support from the government is Chloe is sent.

Arete – Only child, mentally retarded but adored by parents. Occasionally violent, once attacked young child through jealously but parents have seen to it that this should not reoccur. Occupies herself with simple sewing jobs.

Charis – Orphan, rather a wild character, has lived on the streets, kept alive through charity and occasional thievery. Has recently come to live with a middle-class family, responding well to affection and teaching; shows signs of exceptional intellect.

Thalia – One of five children, but her brother was sent last year. Thalia was very close to him and wants to be sent, hoping he may still be alive, but her parents are violently opposed to her going. Very popular, an excellent athlete.

Euphro – Eldest if six brothers and sisters, Family is fairly well-off. Ugly, nobody likes her very much as she is intolerant and given to unkind gossip. Mother often ill, so Euphro spends much of her time looking after younger brothers and sisters.

There is no correct answer to this ranking game, only for the students to make their choice as a pair/group and then to justify why they chose that particular person. It’s a little grim but people can always do as the book suggested and tell the students that some Greek hero arrived and slaughtered the Minotaur to save the sacrifices from their deaths. If I get the time, I’ll do this with my MEC students as an extra activity, they love talking so this will be right up their street hahaha!!

More uni woes

The local uni in our city has never been very good, but the last three years under its previous director its sank to its knees. This coming Friday is the election for a new director and the director has been trying to encourage people to vote for her again, with about as much success as a chocolate fireguard functioning. She is rude, arrogant, ignorant and only cares about herself. I only met her once and that was one time too many. My wife and her classmates were questioning her during her one and only visit to their class about the many screwups that have happened and she simply shrugged them off as not being important – things such as hiring an English teacher with no knowledge of even basic English grammar, teachers not getting a salary, dismissing tests that students wanted to take so they could skip English classes to concentrate on something else instead as unimportant, hiring another English teacher who was fired three times from her previous jobs, this list could go on and on. I’m curious as to what the director meant by her extremely close relationship with the governor and new mayor of the city. The guy has been the mayor since the beginning of the year but she hasn’t asked him to change a single thing. He probably doesn’t even know who she is, probably thinks shes the tea lady or something hahahaha!! I’ll be watching this vote with curiosity to see if any of the students actually vote for her. I’ll be amazed if they do but then again, for 100 in a test you can get anything here. More news on this as it follows…

Time

I’ve been a little busy to post here the last few days, too many things to organize and also two private students that are going to start up classes with me needing my time to get things sorted out for next week. Also I had to change my conversation class subject for this afternoon after one of my students told me she couldn’t come and asked me to move this weeks subject (role play) to the following Saturday afternoon. This weekend our class was about life and death, including a ranking game that was a littler gory, where the students had to choose one of five young girls to be sacrificed to the minotaur to save the city. I’ll post about this later in the weekend when I have a little more free time

Halloween party

Saturday night was the school Halloween party and teachers and students weere asked to go in fancy dress. Roberta and I went as zombies and won first prize in the teacher catagory hahahaha!! All that make up might look as though it took a lot of scrubbing to get off, but in fact, it only took a few minutes. Students were lining up to get their photo taken with Roberta hahahaha!!

Bargain hunting conversation activity

I did this activity as part of my conversation class about food/cooking. My group really liked this activity a lot

The first thing to do is save as many food leaflets/ads from supermarkets as you can. They might give you some old ones if you ask them.

Put your students into groups/pairs and give them each copies of the ads (and a calculator if they want one). Tell your students they have R$25 (or whatever amount you choose) to feed either their group or a family of five (depending which is bigger) for an entire day. they must prepare at least three meals for the day, and that each meal must consist of at least four food items including beverages. If you like, you can ask the students to cut the pics out and paste them onto a sheet of paper along with the prices, etc.

When the students have finished, ask the students to present their meals and discuss what the families had to eat for their money. Did their families eat modestly or well, did they buy any luxury items, etc.