Justice

I had to attend a court hearing the other day here in my city. It’s a continuation of a three year long battle with my neighbor who thinks that all foreign people in Brasil are only here to be exploited for money. This started with us because we complained about the noise he made in his bar sometimes till 4am. Even though he was told many times to stop and not only by the police but also a judge he still carried on until he was given the ultimatum by the judge. After he finally decided to stop he next thing was to sue me for complaining about the noise. It took this case a year to go through the justice system here in Brasil, it is so slow. Finally we ended up in the court offices with the judge and the guy had taken three witnesses with him, two his long-time friends and a policeman who he had promised a cut of the cash he wanted to win to if he made up some lies about me. The judge saw though this straight away and even a halfwit could see the lies coming from the first two witnesses. my lawyer savaged them during questioning. We have to wait ten days to see what will happen next. What a total waste of my time, three hours I could have spent with my students instead of struggling to stay awake in the court room. The policeman was supposed to testify a pack of lies about how we secretly stand in the middle of the street (yeah he said this was secretly done hahahaha) taking photographs but backed out half ways through his first sentence when he realized that the judge knew he was lying. The other witness testified he was me running around naked with a sword and then a knife in my hands but couldn’t recognize me or describe me (even though I’m covered in tattoos) but he was sure about the sword. This didn’t impress the judge either and now we wait to see if I will get awarded any money for this slander and lies. It’s not the first time I’ve heard of this kind of behavior towards foreign people in Brasil, usually it is best to just ignore these people and they Will go away but this neighbor of mine is apparently convinced that when I came to Brasil I had with me a big suitcase full of money that I buried under a mango tree when I arrived here and he wants a piece of this hahahahaha!! I’m not kidding either, he honestly believes this :-S Hopefully it’ll all be dealt with soon and once it has we will move to another house, not because of the nieghbor but because we don’t have space to give large private classes in our backyard. Still, it’ll be nice to get some peace, now where did I leave my secret treasure map…..?? hehehehehe!!

My brothers wedding photo

1st day back

Today is the first day of the the new semester, well for the students, that is. I have been back since last week. I have two classes today, TN9 & EPG but only the TN group will go as the others are still traveling as part of their job. They work for Syngenta and are here one day and then I don’t see them for a while. Usually the first class half the class comes so today we might play a game instead of having class and start lessons only on Wednesday night. I have a Taboo game to play with them, advanced groups like this kind of stuff It’ll be my first time of giving these guys class, they were my wife’s group last semester though so I know them all quite well. I think it’ll be a lot of fun, the group is 99% girls. I gave oral tests to some of them and they speak well so we should get along fine.

I wanted to spend the weekend preparing some stuff online for my groups but the radio internet in our city wasn’t working and they only solved the problem this morning. A bit annoying but nothing could be done about it until today. Roberta has a lot of stuff already prepared from last semester so I’ll have a look see whats in her files before I start making any more. She has a knack for worksheets. She loves making them, I like to make them too but she just has the flair for them   I’d really like to try using Yacapaca with my TN6 group, I must try to find the time to get around to setting up some stuff on it. This semester I have more group and less free time at home, plus I’ll try to give some private classes too. I already have material for these classes, both methodology and conversation classes. I’ll try getting students for these at the local uni because a lot of students are taking English letras courses and can’t speak a word of English. It sounds wierd but it is true, they devide the course into people who speak and don’t speak English. They all get the same degree whether they speak or not too, it really is a strange thing :-S  A lot of my old students are studying there so I like going there to catch up with them. Hopefully, I’ll get a group or two from there..

Phonetics

Last night I spent the evening at UEG with my wife helping her to give a presentation about phonetics. Well, when I say I helped I was actually reading a poem in Portugues and then Roberta was analysing how I spoke the poem phonetically compared to a Native Portugues speaker. It was a lot of fun, I think it went well with people interested in it. The teacher took all her material and recordings to look over at home and to give the grade. Hopefully it’ll be a good one

While I was there I also managed to catch up with some of my old students who also study there. It’s nice to keep up with them as some of them were my students more than 8 years ago. They were youngsters when I first taught them and now they are dating – man, do i feel old!! Hahahaha!! I must try to get up there more often to chat with them. I spent some time talking with the 1st year students in the Letras course. they have a terrible teacher who has no idea what she is doing and every time I go there they pick my brains about what they should be doing to improve their language skills. My first suggestion really should be for them to ask for another teacher but that won’t happen. I have them some advice and my email address so they can email me if they need more stuff. It’s a shame the uni didn’t hire a proper teacher instead of someone who was fired from Wizard twice for being a piss-poor teacher. She got the job in the uni only because some family relative works there. My wife’s group will not have class with this person though, they all complained about her so much that the admin finally changed the teacher for one better suited to teaching in a uni. I’ll do what i can in the spare time I have to help out the 1st years but with no good teacher to support them I think they will struggle until the end of the year.

I’ve been spending some more time in Quizlet too, I noticed that I had neglected to add word lists for a section in the course called ‘Inside the English language’. Although this part of the course isn’t huge with a couplpe of pages per book lesson, it tends to have quite a few expressions in it so I added sets for my main groups and updated the student wikis as necessary

House hunting

I’m really struggling to find the time to post recently. We have been in a house hunting frenzy the last week or  so. I lost count of how many houses we’ve looked at in our city over the last few days. Most of them were without proper documentation though and we ended up asking a realtor to see what he could find for us. They came up with three or four nice big places with a lot of land for gardens, etc. The first couple were too far from the center of town to make them any good and there were two really nice ones that we checked out. One was quite far from our house but looked good and we tried this first but the docs weren’t all ready for it. The second one belonged to a dentist and it looks really good with loads of space and parking too. Tomorrow Roberta will go see about this and get her dad to come take a look at it too. It’s quite far from the center of the city but no so far and there are many buses that pass right past the place. At the weekend we’ll see what is to be said and if it has all the proper stuff, the4 realtor told us he has everything in order so fingers crossed

Failure

I’ve been a little slow posting recently, slower than usual hahaha!! I’ve been dealing with my loser neighbor and also Roberta was using the computer a lot as she volunteered to help organize a week long seminar that her uni organized. It started last Friday and up till now has more or less been a somewhat of a disaster because most things were ridden over rough shot by the bosses there. They didn’t even try getting any decent presenters to go there. Roberta had lined up a great guy from Brasilia to go there to talk about Esperanto and had made sure that there was going to be a slot for him and without telling her anything the director dropped him to put some boring four hour lecture about how to use a dictionary. Needless to say, no one put their name to see this. Altogether from what I’ve heard it hasn’t gone well at all, Roberta had asked me to think about going there but I’ve seen the mess that they usually put on and didn’t want the hassle. The director of the uni isn’t really all that clued up about languages, once I was there talking with the other English teachers and she ripped into me without even being invited to join the conversation, complaining about language teachers talking in the languages they’re teaching. When I calmly suggested that she should learn some manners she went off in a huff hahahaha!! All of the seminars were over two days too, I have no idea why the director wanted to do this. Most of the time the lectures there are so boring that most people leave after a few minutes so I can’t see anyone sticking it for 4 hours. Roberta is going to recommend that the next one they have (if there is a next one) has some people that are at least interesting so that people feel inclined to go. What a dismal failure

More trouble

After all the trouble we had with the sound from the bar in our street and spending ten months getting it into the court system here to finally get some peace and quiet, we thought it was all over and done with. Today months after it was finally dealt with in court the owners of the bar have decided to sue us for the loss of earnings from his illegal activities hahahaha!! This could only happen in Brasil   I won’t go into all the details of the previous case ands it’s quite boring. But this new one is actually a joke, in any other country it wouldn’t have even been allowed in the justice system. His new story is that I have lost my mind and gone crazy chasing his evening clients from his bar naked, it sounds completey stupid and of course it is. After all I work most nights in school giving class. All of this is really about one thing, getting me and my wife to move house so he can go back to making as much noise as possible because all the other neighbors are afraid of him doing the same to them as he did for more or less a year to us. Unluckily for him, British people tend to be very stubborn and I have no intentions of moving anywhere for this guy. I think that everyone in the court room to see this is going to be more or less pissing themselves with laughter. It must be costing this guy a fortune in legal fees as this is the third time we have had to go into a court room with him. I haven’t even bothered taking a lawyer with me in the last two occasions and this time I won’t either. I have better things to spend my money  on than this complete waste of time. The sad thing is that I’ll have to take a day off from work to go there and my student’s will have to go to see these missed classes at the weekend, which won’t go down very well. Oh well, once more into the breach

Playing

This afternoon I have been playing with Edmodo, I signed up for it the day it went live but I haven’t really had the time to look at til properly until today. At first I was a little lost with it, not getting into it but really what i could do with it as far as my English students were concerned. Everything became clearer as soon as I created a group   I have some ideas for using it with my groups and I’ll talk with them about it next week to see if they want to give it a try. I have already spoken with my TN9 students about microblogging and I think this might just be exactly what I’m looking for with them. They liked the idea of blogging online but didn’t like the idea of anyone else try into read their postings and Edmodo looks like it’ll solve this problem for them. I’ll chat with my MEC groups about it too as well as my EPG business English group to see if they want to try it out as well. Hopefully it’ll be a lot of fun

EPG

I spent most of my day today giving three-hour classes to my MEC students. These once a week three-hour classes are because my students study all day in their high schools instead of the usual half a day in Brasil and don’t have time for the normal two ninety minute classes.  The little time I had I spent looking for materials I could use with my business English students next week. Although they are beginners they have a small amount of vocabulary and I wanted to give them some worksheets, etc. for them to look over. A quick visit to Eslprintables soon gave me quite a pile of sheets full of vocabulary. I think these guys will really like them   I have also been trying to find some beginner stuff related to agronomy, I have some fruit and veg charts and wanted some others to go along with them. Over the weekend I’ll try to find some other stuff. There are only two of them in the class as their factory isn’t built yet and they are just here for Research and Development and Tech Sales but they are really enthusiastic about their course   They told me that they really like this studying with a native speaker hehehehe!! It’s nice when I get told this but for me if they do well in their exams and get good grades then I really feel satisfied.

Also over the weekend I’ll have a good look at Edmodo. I have registered but haven’t really had the time to have a good look and play with it. I’ve been trying to think about ways I could use it with my students. I’ll look in the forums to see what ideas others are having to see if it inspires me too. Most of my students have net at home and so the only real problem I have is getting them to stay out of sites like Orkut long enough to use the web for something more constructive hahaha!! I’ll see what I can come up with and maybe ask a few of my MEC students to see how they feel about trying it out as well as giving me some ideas as to how it can be used to help them with their courses.

Books

I love reading, it’s a shame that books are so expensive here in Brasil. What costs $5 costs R$45-50 or even more here   Good thing the bookfair was here to allow me to stock up a little. I read all kinds of books, not religious though being an athiest   My English students all love a variety of books and when time permits we chat about them. Harry Potter is the most popular with my students, they really like these books alot. I was telling them today how cheap the books here in the fair and they told me they were going to get their parents to pick up copies for them hahaha!! We don’t read any books as part of their English courses, there simply isn’t time. I try to include texts for us and the material has articles in it that we read and talk about as a group too. At the book fair they had some books for this but unfortunately they had left them at the stores and if I can find time next week I’ll go there and try to pick up copies. I love reading Clive Cussler books, Dirk Pitt is one of the best action heroes. I like Eddings a lot too and of course being a Brit Harry Potter   At the moment I’m reading Cussler’s ‘Sahara.’ Roberta loves to read too, at the moment though it tends to be books for uni but when she has time she loves to sink into a good book too. I have been trying to find a place to buy recorded books in the capital but haven1t been successful yet. I have been asked a few times about recording books for people but I just don’t have the time. I’d like to try recording texts that I had mentioned in my earlier posts but I just haven’t had the time, really annoying :-S  I have the software installed and a headset and stuff but just haven’t got the time to spend sat in front of the pc to get it started. I’ll try to find some time in the hols and see what can be done about this.