I had a meeting this morning with two classmates. Because it was such a beautiful morning, I decided to walk the mile or so to campus. I probably need to do that 5 days a week but alas I’m not here that often. If I lived in a town and worked in the same town, my car would have very few miles on it. That’s an actual dream that I hope we’ll be able to manage some day.
My two classmates are Chinese and very bright. We worked diligently for a couple of hours and we’re ready to turn in our portion of the class project. We’re sure pieces will change a bit as the work we developed gets moved into the course template, but for now, I’m quite pleased with our product. We’re the first part in a multi-piece course so it’s important how we set the stage for instruction.
It strikes me that working with these two women is so very different than when I worked on a project last fall semester. That was a near disaster. Instead of a team of three like this semester, we were a team of four and we had a straight-up idiot in our midst. That she’s moved on from the masters program to the PhD kind of wrenches my heart when I think about it. I am hoping that a hard-nosed professor will finally say to her that this level of work is just beyond her capabilities.
Anyway, back to my classmates. They often switch to Chinese when we work together which does not bother me in any way. Towards the end of our meeting, they were having quite a conversation and I said something that made them laugh because I chimed in with the exact subject of their conversation. I can’t take any credit for understanding a word they said, but it was a funny moment when Chinese and English just flowed together perfectly.
As I was writing this entry, the local public radio station played this. What a great piece of music and it seemed appropriate for my day so far: