# of ComLaw midterms graded:  64

Average grade for Q1:  1.6/5

Average percent grade for Q1 so far: 32%

[Update: As of 7pm VN time, I've now graded 75 and am done for the night. Average grade is now 1.7/5. Woo-hoo! We're up a tenth of a point! (But still 8 tenths of a point under a passing grade of 2.5/5!)]

Below is the question I drafted for our first ComLaw midterm and am currently grading.  I’ve graded about 25 so far and they are pretty bad overall.  We had a relatively low failure rate last semester, but based on what I’ve seen so far, it’s going to be much higher this semester – at least if the students’ performance on the first midterm is any indication.

Question 1 (5 marks)

9 Dragons Shipping, a company in Can Tho that ships items by airplane, was hired to ship 10,000 live chickens from Can Tho to Ha Noi.

While on his way to deliver the chickens to Ha Noi, the pilot for 9 Dragons Shipping, Mr. Bao, decided that instead of going straight to Ha Noi, he would turn his airplane to the east and visit his family in Cam Ranh before continuing to Ha Noi.

As he flew over Phan Thiet on his way to Cam Ranh, Mr. Bao noticed a big red button in his airplane that was labelled:

EJECTION BUTTON

WARNING!  IF YOU PUSH THIS BUTTON, ALL ITEMS IN THE AIRPLANE WILL BE EJECTED IMMEDIATELY!

Mr. Bao was curious and decided to push the button to see what would happen.  When he did, all 10,000 of the live chickens were ejected from the airplane and fell toward the earth.

The chickens landed on a surfboard shop in Phan Thiet and completely destroyed the shop.  For three days, the surfboard shop was covered with dead chickens, which looked and smelled terrible.

Ms. Thuy is the owner of an outdoor patio café next door to the surfboard shop.  Luckily, none of the chickens hit Ms. Thuy’s café, but because of the dead chickens next door, no customers came to Ms. Thuy’s café for three days and she lost $3,000 in profits.

(A)    Ms. Thuy hires you as her lawyer and says she wants to sue Mr. Bao.  Please fully advise Ms. Thuy about all common law claims she might have against Mr. Bao.

(B)     Ms. Thuy asks you whether she should also sue 9 Dragons Shipping.  Please fully advise Ms. Thuy about any problems she might face if she decides to sue 9 Dragons Shipping in addition to Mr. Bao.

My friend Bart’s Aunt Margery made it back to Atlanta safely and sent us some photos from our dinner at Tib last week.

Thao and Margery:

The Good Doctor Roundeye and Margery:

Working my magic for the ladies:

Aunt Margery if you read this, we’re glad you made it back and thanks for sending the photos! Can’t wait to see the rest!

Time:  7:45pm

# of ComLaw midterms graded so far:  0

# of 2-hour naps:  1

# of Call of Duty games on Xbox Live:  4

This looks like a bad Saturday Night Live skit, but as far as I can tell, it’s legit:

Not really sure why the guitarist thought it would be a good idea to attend the video shoot in sock feet, but whatever.  He does lay down some bad licks at about the 1:30 point.

*Note:  Does anyone really think Jesus would even like being talked about in this fashion:  “He is like a mountie, he always gets his man, and he’ll zap you anyway he can.  Zap!”  (I am not making this up.)  What does that even mean?  Now I have an image of Jesus in a Canadian mountie uniform zapping people with lasers.  Make it stop.

**Note:  Of course someone has done the Marilyn Manson version: 

I think the original video is more disturbing.

“That’s terrific, Sal, thank you very much.  Beautiful, beautiful.”

It’s 1:23pm on Saturday here – I just finished teaching my ComLaw class and am about to head home.  I’ve still got work to do – have about 270 or so ComLaw midterms to grade.  Going to try to do around 50 a day – so it will be a few days before I’m finished.

Not much going on this weekend.  Thao went out to her family’s in Long An and won’t be back until tomorrow.

No news – just wanted to put up a quick post.  Hope everyone is doing well!

Namaste!

My friend Robin, who manages my favorite Indian restaurant here in Saigon, recently entered a contest (sponsored in part by my other friend, Tim, who owns the gym equipment import company) to see who could improve their body the most over a three-month period.

Here’s Robin’s “before” picture three months ago:

And here’s his “after” picture this past weekend:

He won the contest, and got a check for $2,009, so he was pretty excited about that. I’m personally amazed at how much he changed in just three months. Now, granted that was three months of zero carbohydrates, zero sugar, and zero alcohol – he basically only ate lean meat and vegetables for three months. But damn!

Well, I think I’ve finally turned a corner, reached a plateau, broken new ground, etc., as far as teaching goes.  Based on my experience, I think there must be a pattern where when people first start teaching they really want to be a friend to their students, to be easygoing with them, to not have too many rules, to give them the benefit of the doubt, etc.  But then, over time, you start to feel like your students might be taking advantage of you a little bit, and you start to get a little stricter and to put up with less bullshit, etc.  Until finally, you’re probably an old, cynical, curmudgeonly teacher who’s seen it all before and just wants to do your job, teach your material, and get the hell out of there.

I’m not quite to the curmudgeon level yet, I don’t think, but I’m making progress.  My first couple of semesters, I was about as easygoing a teacher as you could probably imagine.  I didn’t care if students from other classes came to my class, if my own students came to a different one of my classes than the one they were signed up in, if they came late, etc.

But a series of recent events has completely changed all of that.  Our first midterm this semester was yesterday, and I did a series of three review sessions – open to all ComLaw students – last week.  When I emailed the students to announce the sessions, I asked them to please come on time as we had a lot to cover and so they wouldn’t distract me and the other students by coming in late.  Well, that didn’t work too well, as people were still coming in to the sessions 15 and 20 minutes after it started – and they weren’t just coming in, they were coming in, realizing the room was already full, going out, and coming back in dragging chairs from other rooms, making noise, and generally being distracting.  So that pissed me off.

Then, starting last semester, our ComLaw department made a department-wide rule that students could only attend their own teacher’s classes (unless they had permission from another teacher to attend their classes.)  On Saturday and Tuesday, I had two separate incidents where, after I had already asked the class if everyone was from one of my classes and not another teacher’s classes, I recognized students who I was pretty sure weren’t in my class.  But when I asked them whether they were in my class, they made up some bullshit about having “special permission” from the guy who heads up our student services department.  Of course, when I went and asked him about it, he had no idea what they were talking about.

So I went nuts, basically.  I turned both of those students in for cheating – as in my book knowingly breaking the rules to attend a class you know you’re not supposed to attend and then lying to the teacher about it is cheating, as you’re essentially helping yourself to an extra class that your fellow students aren’t able to have.  But I think what really galled me was the sheer sense of entitlement – that those two students felt that they were somehow different or better or more entitled to break the rules and attend my class even though they knew I had turned down the requests of numerous other students who had bothered to ask for permission.

So then I decided that the reason they had been able to essentially sneak in for part of my class without me knowing it was because I wasn’t controlling my classes enough.  Because I was letting students from my three classes attend any one of my classes interchangably, it was hard for me to do an accurate headcount and confirm that everyone present was actually in one of my classes.

So, continuing my general trend of going nuts and probably drastically overreacting, I sent my students an email saying that we were going to have a few new rules for my class for the remaining seven weeks of the semester:  (1)  you can only attend the specific one of my classes in which you are officially enrolled, no exceptions; (2) when I start taking attendance, I am going to put a sign on the door that says “Class Has Started,” and once that sign is on the door, no additional students will be permitted to enter the classroom and will be marked absent for the day, no exceptions; and (3) I am no longer doing the weekly summary outlines that I had been preparing for my students for weeks 1 through 5.  Basically, I was spending a lot of extra time to try to distill the really important stuff that we covered in a particular week, and to restate in very plain English that they could understand.  But that was taking me several hours a week to do and, sense I was feeling taken advantage of, lied to, and generally pissed, I’m not going to do that anymore.  They can do their own outlines from now on.

And the head of our ComLaw department also sent out a separate email saying that any student caught attending another teacher’s class without permission may lose all 10% of their attendance and participation points for the semester, which in many cases would cause the student to fail ComLaw.

So we’ve tightened things up a little bit.  After I emailed my students, I started to feel a little bad about it – like I’d kind of gone Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on them.  But then I thought about it some more and realized that the vast majority of my students won’t be affected by it anyway.  Probably 80 or 85% of my students are good and attend their own class, don’t come late, and do their own outlines anyway – so these new rules really won’t impact them at all.  And it’s the other 15 or 20% who are constantly coming in late, sneaking into other classes, etc., who will and should be impacted – so I really don’t feel too bad about that.

I’m still going to be nice and friendly in class, and to help my students out outside of class as much as I can, etc., but I’m going to be a little stricter and more disciplined about things for the rest of this semester and going forward.

There, I feel better already.

Well, the students in our volunteer group didn’t like my idea of the raised fist against the Vietnam flag.  They said it looked:  (a) like something an old person would like; (b) like something the government would like; and (c) like we were trying to start a revolution.  They’re probably right on all counts.

We’ve got some design students working on ideas for us, but tonight while I was working out, I kept trying to think of something.  One of the things I was thinking was that our group will try to uplift people by making their lives better.  So I started thinking about thinks that rise up, things that pull other things up, etc.  And I thought maybe a kite would be a cool, simple logo.

So I played around in Word for a while and here is what I came up with:

It’s still got the Vietnam flag colors – the red and yellow – set against a bright blue background.  I also found a font that looks like simple handwriting, and tried it with RMIT on top of the logo and C.A.N. on the bottom and with RMIT over C.A.N. on the right side.  I thought it looked pretty good.  For some reason the fonts didn’t upload along with the image when I uploaded it – but at least you can see the image above.  If the students in our group like it, hopefully the design students can improve upon the basic idea and turn it into a real logo.

The RMIT Community Action Network has been officially approved as the name for our new community service club. (Actually, there’s one more person who needs to sign off on it, but he’s kind of a higher-level dude who probably really doesn’t care what the name of our little club is – so since the other two people who we’ll be more directly involved with have signed off on it, I think we’re 99% there.) We’ve got some great projects coming up already and are excited to get going.

I’m meeting with two design students later this week to discuss designing our logo, posters for our first informational meeting next week, and our website. I’ll link to the website once it’s up and running.

I think I’m about as excited about this group and the work we’ll hopefully be able to do as I have been about anything since I’ve been in Vietnam.

Tonight Thao and I went and had ice cream with my friend Bart’s Aunt Margery, who has been traveling around Vietnam for the last couple of weeks. She just got into Saigon today, and we already had plans to take her to dinner tomorrow, but she didn’t have any plans tonight so we met her for ice cream tonight as well.

Peace.