u/panchovilla_

The majority of these posts seem to be North American centric going to Europe or vice versa. I'd like to hear about people's experiences outside of this sphere. Me for instance, I've lived and worked in Mongolia, China, Turkey and Vietnam. Lots to share over 9+ years, but would love to hear how other people have liked/disliked other places that aren't the usual 'moving from us -> european country' post.

Edit: I can't imagine why people are downvoting this sort of post. I just asked for a point of view outside of the norm here.

I can't recall this ever happening before, certainly not at my current institution. We have these 6 week intensive semesters and when admin sends out notifications for that schedule I pretty much arrange my life around it. This has worked well for the last two years.

Yesterday I get a late night email that tells me starting next week I'll be taking on more classes after the semester had already begun (started like 3 days ago). This is incredibly frustrating, as I have both personal and academic obligations I've already scheduled around the original schedule. Technically I'm able to move things around, but it's super frustrating and feels like I just got caught up into a whirlwind.

Perhaps this is more common than I'm lead to believe? What's yalls take.

This is, I think, my third post about a no-phone policy in a langauge course I teach. The first was my amazement at student engagement. It was truly astounding, attention was laser-focused despite some grumbling. The second post was about 3/17 student comments I got criticizing the policy. I emailed my academic head asking for guidance but never got a reply.

Today we had an all department meeting on the upcoming Summer II term and when any other business came up, I asked for support on implementing the policy again. I was honestly taken aback by pretty much every single person in my faculty arguing that I can't restrict 18+ year olds access to their phones, and that we need to "encourage", not force, them to not use their phones. The bottom line was that ANY negative feedback, no matter how unjustified, is to be avoided at all costs.

I pushed against this pretty hard, arguing that students really can't be trusted to stay focused and that I'm simply removing the temptation. If they want they can use their phones after class, ask me, talk to eachother. At a certain point I could tell no matter what I said, I was alone on the matter.

So, despite the head saying they agree with me pedagogically but on a customer service basis we need to not force students to do something they're uncomfortable with, my experiment is more or less dead in the water. I now have to expend energy asking them to put their phones away (department approved) but can't tell them outright not to use them. I hate private education, what the fuck.

So for Summer 1 I introduced a pretty strict no-phone policy in my classroom. I teach an intensive English course, and told students they needed to buy some kind of translation dictionary to look up words they don't know. If they want to use tech to supplement what we covered in class AFTER we study, fine by me (honestly it's a great way to review).

We all know the reasons, unrestricted tech access in class means almost no focus and a totally shattered attention span. Instead of wondering how to minimize it I simply removed the temptation and retention and focus has soared. It's harder, yes, but I've taught this course now for two years and exercises I thought were simply too hard were solved with ease. Why? My guess is because they actually dialed in and focused instead of half focusing and scrolling Tik Tok.

However, three out of 17 decided to write in their evaluation forms that my policy should allow phones in class because they come across words and sometimes their dictionaries don't have the word they need, etc. I will be honest, since this is my first term strictly enforcing it I clearly have some room to adapt it. What do yall think?

I already sent a message to my academic head (probably didn't need to, but thought I might get ahead of it) and asked them for their opinion as well. Summer II is just a few weeks away!

Ok, so it's 5 p.m ish in Da Nang and the beach is getting crowded. There's a little public access path I like to walk in with my bicycle, lots of people walking in and out of this place and it's generally a pretty clean area despite the foot traffic.

VN guy sort of gets ahead of me and my bicycle as we're both walking into this footpath, and as he's chomping down on some single use plastic snack he simply throws the plastic down on the ground. I'm pretty much right behind him. I double take to make sure i saw what I saw and was like "HEY". Dude turns around, still chomping on his snack with his mouth wide open, I swear I was loosing oxygen to the amount of mouth breathing this joker was doing, and just stares at me and the plastic he littered.

I point down to the plastic he threw on the ground. At this point he's like, maybe 3 or 4 paces ahead of me and he starts shouting out in Vietnamese to his wife/girlfriend/sister/female friend and pointing at the garbage. It becomes very clear to me very quickly that he's telling HER to pick up HIS garbage. She looks sort of dumbfounded as she can't see it (it's at my feet) and I just continue to stare at this guy in amazement as he shouts at her as to where it is. Eventually, she finds it, does that embarrased smile/laugh thing and says "sorry, he forgot" and I'm like "he didn't forget, he can see it!".

At this point homie has literally opened ANOTHER single use plastic snack and is lumbering toward the beach to litter who knows how many more times. I know you can't take the village out of the villager but jesus christ man even when confronted with a red-handed crime he put it one someone else to fix. Crazy yo!

I was in and around the Austin area for the early to mid 2010s. My buddy told me about his friend who would bury a bottle of Captain Morgans in Zilker park a few weeks before a festival or show there. He'd walk in when the event went live, happy as you please, and dig it up in a pirate costume. My guess is he'd give out shots of rum to land lubbers at the fest.

What've you heard over the years?