kyrasantae | THE MORE YOU KNOW (Reply)

First, some pastry:

Sneak preview of what I'm making for Friday's party. Hey, I know. I put the fillings in upside-down. I'll fix that next time.

This week (13) in FAILCLASS:

Our teacher reveals that she's from Harbin, China, and shows us a bunch of photos of the Russian-/colonial-style buildings there, saying something about how much we can learn from other cultures. She used to teach at the Harbin University of Science and Technology and apparently her husband thinks that Sleemans Honey Brown is the closest in taste he's found to Harbin beer. Um, okay.
Fun Wikipedia fact: Harbin is a diplomatic sister city with both Edmonton and Rovaniemi, among other places. THE MORE YOU KNOW.
There were a couple of slides on things that "Confucius say..."
I don't remember the context, but somewhere in Thursday's lesson she said "relatively definite." That doesn't even make sense.
She wants us to tell her what kinds of questions we should have on the exam. I have no easy suggestions.
Tuesday was about "contemporary issues in education" but it turned into a discussion mostly on technology in classrooms.
Thursday there was no student presentation, so we had to endure another lecture on different ideologies of diversity education (argh.) -- the different levels of scale being the individual (diversity development), the classroom/group (multicultural education), and the institution (anti-racism education). Personally, I'm all about the individual. Anything more involves guilt-tripping reluctant individuals into "playing the game" and a huge risk of fostering superficial understandings of culture. I have nothing more to say to this but x_x.

Recently there's been a lot of... structural creaking sounds from upstairs, like a heavy table moving along a linoleum floor. It goes like GGGGGGGRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNH! or *squeak*RRRRRRRRRRRRGH! I don't think it's actually a table moving along a floor, but it's really annoying nonetheless.

I have said more about the Finnish Bully in other, private places, and I don't wish to repeat the details here. My feelings about him are a bit ... ambivalent. (And "complicated," as Jari said.)