Highlights from My (Boring) Break

Yeah, so I have not exactly been keeping up with my blog. I doubt that I'm the only one in our cohort to neglect their writing. Who can blame us? There really hasn't been much to write about -- at least not much about our education as teachers. I have settled into a holding pattern while I wait to hear from my placement district. I should fire off an e-mail to them -- maybe tomorrow.

I suspect that most readers will find my break-week activities exceedingly dull. When given the opportunity, I can out-lazy most anyone. (It's a good thing I'm not teaching English composition. That last sentence would never pass scrutiny.) I've let my inner geek run wild, and spent most of the past few weeks surfing the internet, playing video games and watching movies. Surprise, surprise.

On the gaming front, I've started playing a free massively-multiplayer online role-playing game called Urban Dead. The game takes place in a fictitious cityscape that has been permanently quarantined after a zombie-virus outbreak. Many players take on the roles of survivors fighting to stay alive, while other people play the zombies and try to snack on the survivors. To make things more interesting, survivors that fall to zombies (or other survivors!) rise again as zombies, and zombies can receive treatment (voluntarily or not) for their "condition." This gives a character many opportunities to switch teams. The text-based interface is quite primitive by industry standards, but such minimalism has its charms. The flow of gameplay is entirely determined by the players themselves -- there are no computer-controlled characters or scripted objectives -- and Urban Dead boasts a rich metagame, with players on both sides coordinating raids on enemy territory and working out new zombie-warfare tactics. On a more practical note, players are limited to 50 actions per day, which makes Urban Dead much less of an addictive timesink than games like World of Warcraft. Enjoying this game will not cut into my schedule in any appreciable way as I start student-teaching.

Andrea and I have also watched a couple of good movies within the past couple of days. Yesterday we rented Role Models, the first half of which provides a hilarious comedic take on how not to interact with students, or children in general. (The second half is debatable -- the protaganists' hearts wind up in the right place, though their methods remain unorthodox at best.)

Today we went to see District 9 in the local cinema, which turned out to be the best sci-fi thriller I've seen in years. The premise is cool enough to start with: a space-alien mothership breaks down over Johannesburg, South Africa, and the surviving bipedal prawn-creatures have been herded into a squalorous refugee camp straight out of recent world news stories. All I can say without spoiling the plot is that the film holds a funhouse mirror up to the strained relationship between real African refugee camps and the nations that host them. It's a damn shame that no public-school social studies teacher will ever get away with showing District 9 to his or her students since the ultraviolence quotient gets jacked way up over the course of the film. But I would still heartily recommend it, along with Hotel Rwanda, to any student mature enough to cope with the grit and the gore.

Cohort members, I look forward to hearing about how your breaks went. Surely most of your stories can top this post.