Meetings and then more meetings

So you can probably guess how I spent most of my day today.  It's great to finally be getting so much information and help for all my classes, just rough that's it's happening all at once.  It made me realize, if nothing else, how much I don't know.  In addition to the meetings, all the members of the ELC helped proctor the TOEFL  (Test of English as a Foreign Language) today.  That took up most of the morning and made me realize more fully how hard non-native speakers have to work to get a good enough score on the TOEFL to allow them to study in the U.S.  It's really difficult!  I didn't look at the exam books, but just based on the listening section - the passages they read and the questions they had to answer - I'm sure there were questions that a lot of native speakers would get wrong.  So I was feeling very empathetic for them sitting there nervously listening. 

I was primarily there to keep them from cheating though, so walking around with that intention was an interesting contrast to the empathy.  To help with the paradox (and to help with the boredom) I practiced a little tonglen.  For those that aren't familiar with it, tonglen is a Tibetan Buddhist practice for "connecting with suffering —ours and that which is all around us— everywhere we go. It is a method for overcoming fear of suffering and for dissolving the tightness of our heart. Primarily it is a method for awakening the compassion that is inherent in all of us, no matter how cruel or cold we might seem to be."  This quote was taken from Pema Chodron's site below, check it out for more detail:

http://www.shambhala.org/teachers/pema/tonglen1.php

Like many Buddhist practices, this one is centered around breathing.  To put it simply, you breathe in whatever the source of the suffering is, and try to breathe out something to make it better.  So as I walked along I thought about breathing in their anxiety and doubt and breathing out clarity and self-confidence.  That's the basic practice.  I discovered it a couple of years ago and really like it.

When I wasn't doing tonglen, I was thinking about cheating.  Having been a goodie-goodie all my life, I hardly even know what to look for.  Peeking at another's answers?  Hiding a cheat sheet?  Working in a forbidden section?  The main cheating problem most ESL/EFL teachers have is plagiarism, because in many cultures they don't have the same copyright laws and they don't really understand how we see it as cheating.  So I guess I'll just have to learn by catching my students in the act.

When I got home I went to reheat my leftover pizza from yesterday and was disturbed to find that they had put each slice in a separate plastic box.  They love to put everything in plastic here and it drives me a little crazy, but there's not much I can do about it.  I try to remember to bring my own bags with me when I go out to buy something, or just tell them I don't need a bag, but sometimes it doesn't work.  And everything new is packaged in layers of it.  Given this observance, I had to laugh when I noticed this billboard near my apartment. 

On the upside, my little convection oven did a great job heating up my slices!  :)