Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Just finished my run

I'm at camp now. I teach through the day and have the evenings off. this evening, I ran four kilometres and am embarrassed at how how proud I am at completing it. I could have gone further - and will soon, but 4k felt long.

I've managed to run every day while at camp and hope to get the distance up to around 7k per run in the last week. The big trick will be to continue running while at home.

Camp is going well. I am not teaching strict ESL here. My class is ecology and environmentalism and the content is a little beyond what my students have learned in school so part of the class is vocabulary but mostly, well....its gross stuff.

To make the classes interesting, three lectures were 'Trips to Uranus'. The first, actually imagining making a self-contained ecosystem inside a spaceship for a trip to the planet beyond Saturn, and the latter two about horrible, horrible parasites and those lectures were titled, "A trip to Uranus: the smelly place". About a quarter of the students understand the joke.

For me, the more frightening parasites, and also part of the curriculum, were the ones that change behavior.
The article linked to compares their actions to those of science fiction monsters.

2 comments:

skindleshanks said...

Considering the contents of your lectures, perhaps you might consider tacking an "s" to the end of your title. :)

kwandongbrian said...

That's a good one - or would be if I hadn't just gotten horribly sick yesterday.