smut

Today, everyone is preparing for the visitation of some minor officials on Thursday. This involves re-painting everything, redesigning classrooms by borrowing painted boards from other schools (to be returned after the guests leave), and troupes of people coming into classrooms (during classes) and criticizing things like plants and small tears on maps. It involves all staff to spend the whole weekend without meal breaks, repainting walls that were painted in September. And watching while our director gives shrill orders about what may or may not go on the walls for aesthetic purposes, however useful it may be for teaching. Aesthetically pleasing wall decorations include: shelves with large books, and wooden boards with famous men’s faces painted badly. It also involves canceling all of my classes so that the students can wipe off the floors every time someone tracks mud into the school. We are all of us Sisyphus today.

Actually, although my classes have been cancelled, my useless work level is low. I just planned all my lessons for tomorrow and talked to one of the teachers I work with about Thursday. So I am not Sisyphus. But I am a foreigner and it is easier for me to withdraw from such a situation and get away with it. Teachers here seem to have fallen into two categories today: those wearing bandanas and repainting, and those wearing suits and supervising.

I take back the part about my useless work level being low. I just spent three hours translating a chart (not a very useful chart) which is supposed to map the evolution of plants on one side and animals on the other. Most of the time was sucked by trying to get the font and size to perfectly match the hand-painted Kazakh. And this time, it wasn’t self-motivated. The problem is that there’s not a dictionary which translates from Kazakh biological terms into English terms. And on this chart is an extra phyla with a drawing of some indecent creature, pink and lumpy. No idea of what it’s supposed to be or what the drawing is of. So I should have just written “advanced corn smut” for fun and left it, but I tried my durndest and have added a phylum to the annals of biology for the benefit of my students, who will have the chart for a single class period before it’s returned to the other school. Sigh