Radical Eclecticity

I set up my mail client so that, when I open it, it shows my blog in the message window. My hope was that seeing it on a regular basis would encourage me to make time to write blogginess more frequently. That was about a month ago. In the final analysis, I suppose it worked. […]

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I went to see Hancock today with 小季 and his fiancé. I was actually kind of surprised to see it advertised outside the theatre because it just came out in the US, too. It was simultaneously released in both countries, which I knew happened, I just didn’t realize it was that common. The next movie […]

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Literally, the title means “long time, no see.” Ironically, this is a phrase that we adapted to our language from theirs and, somewhere along the way, lost track of where it came from. What’s even more ironic is this: Almost every time I leave somewhere and say, “再见,” the native speakers of Chinese will reply, […]

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So, in my first week with the kids I’m doing lessons on time and date. We start with things like the days of the week, how to say the date, how to say the time, talking about tomorrow and yesterday and things like that, and then we wrap up by talking about special days and […]

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So I had an interesting conversation with my principal the other day. He asked me in an email when I was coming back in a way that gave me the impression that he wanted to discuss something with me. When I told him that I wouldn’t be back until the day before pre-planning starts for […]

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The Changzhou Apartment
Originally uploaded by mattlavery
I live on the fifth floor. In Chinese, 我住在五层的公寓. In china, though, the ground floor is not numbered. You don’t take stairs to get to the second floor, like you do in the states; you take the stairs to get to the first floor. That means that, every […]

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In an effort to reduce the onslaught of huge-ish posts, I may as well periodically toss out my little observations and call it good. This does sort of save me from writing for an hour when I don’t have an hour available. That’s never good, right?
Anyway, the observation of the day seems to be yet […]

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So here I am, sitting in Starbucks, all excited about hopping on their wireless Internet while I sip my coffee… and my computer can’t find it. What? you’ve got to be kidding me! Ever since I got to China I can’t find a single wireless network anywhere!
Wait…. ever since…. d’oh!
So there’s this little switch on […]

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<continues singing along with the Barenaked Ladies song>
There are now several things to discuss, none of which are the items I thought my next post would be about. So I guess the first thing I should tell you that I learned is to stop giving teasers and previews of blog posts. I will probably write […]

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Over the past two days, I have visited two schools and taught guest lessons at both of them. This was an interesting and highly educational experience, and both schools were very different. We went to both schools to coordinate first, and then I came back later to teach the lesson.
The first thing I noticed, in […]

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