Elbowed; Frustration; Don't Go to Hong Kong; Tony and a Baseball App; Trump a Traitor; Can't Listen to So Many Podcasts

• Sitting on the bus one evening, this older local woman annoyed me when she bumped me as she went to find a seat behind where I was seated. And then as she got off the bus, she stunned me with an elbow to the head. I don't think and don't even suspect that she did it on purpose. It just seemed that she was off-kiltered in her walking. (Or it just could be that it is easier to get away with bumping into people than it would be in the country where I grew up?)

• It is bloody hard to get these kids I am teaching to answer a question with more than one word. It is also hard to get these students to do anything but copy what I or some other student said. There was a lesson plan where a coin was tossed. I review the exercise with the students in subsequent classes. But it is so hard to get the students to call head or tails before I toss a coin. And when they do call it, they will always call "heads." Which shows to me that they still don't get it.

• A few students have told me that Hong Kong is not a good place to go to these days.

• Tony is obsessed with some baseball game app on my phone where he can play through a whole season with a particular team. The particular team he choose to be is the Houston Astros. At the time of my typing this, Tony told me that they had just beaten the Minnesota Twins 21-14 in the wildcard game. Said I: that is a football game score! Tony's Astros will play the New York Yankees in a divisional series.

• In an SPC, a student was telling me that he had heard that Trump had committed treason. I went on for about five minutes about what nonsense that was. Trump, I told him, was trying to deal with a mess of treason and was now the victim of an attempted coup because of it. (  I have to stop get upset about it. The world is fucked. The elites are crazy. Not much Trump can do about it.)

• I gave up on listening to so many podcasts. For one thing, there are too many. For another thing, I know what they are going to say. And with so much choice, what is the point of listening to one podcast episode religiously?