Time for a Toothpick

. First, one of my students came up to me on Tuesday and asked if we could talk about a problem he was having. I said, "Sure, go ahead," as I tried to put on an air of professional empathy. There was a male student in the class, he said, whom he could not stand to be around. He and the other student had a history. I asked general questions, balancing my desire not to pry with my need for enough information to help him. "It is about love," he said. Which really put me in a corner--either he and the other student had been competing for the love of a third party, putting the wrong two-thirds of a love triangle in my classroom, or they had been lovers of the kind that dare not speak its name. The former was more likely, the latter improbable but very important to be sensitive about. It turned out to be the former, which was somewhat easier to deal with. None of the other teachers in essay writing had had former romantic rivals in class together, but they were able to arrange a transfer for the aggrieved student.
It's too bad, really. I liked the student, and I think he would have enjoyed thursday's (surprisingly successful) lesson on causation. I even managed to introduce the idea of necessary and sufficient causes, scaffolding toward it first by talking about the causes of fire as fuel, air and ignition (I started by differentiating between what makes something happen, and what makes the happening possible.), and hammering the point home by bringing the discussion back to the topic of one of our first classes:"A pile of wood is not a house." (wood is necessary to build a house, but it is not sufficient on its own. You need a plan, builders, etc.) If you can't tell, I was pleasantly surprised and fairly satisfied with that lesson, though ideally it should have included a bit more pair and group work than it did.

The second event is more direct, and pretty dramatic. On Thursday after my second class, I was cleaning up my papers and minding my own business when I noticed that there was still a group of students in the classroom. Initially I figured that maybe they were sticking around to discuss how wonderful prepositional phrases were (In the lesson, I had finally gotten to employ two skills I never thought would come in handy: diagramming sentences, and phrase structure linguistics as practiced in Chomsky's Syntactic Structures) As I looked more closely, however, it appeared that one of the students was crying. I walked over to see if I could help, and the students told me that she had a "weak heart" and that sometimes she had to go to the hospital. Long story short, I end up carrying a convulsing student down six flights of stairs to a tuk-tuk, where some of her friends went with her to the hospital. I really hope she's okay, and I guess I'll find out Monday.

I'm glad I'm racking up the good karma, because otherwise I would feel really guilty about all the times I refuse or ignore the the impossibly adorable street urchins of Phnom Penh. They're cute, they're stubborn, and they view any gesture of human kindness as an advertisement of an easy mark. Anything, even eye contact, is like blood in the water for them. Some of them aren't even orphans--the begging is organized and controlled from above, hopefully in a manner similar to Threepenny Opera.