Adventures from Beyond Contact

A slightly belated "Chag Purim Sameach!" to my Jewish readers and a longer overdue "Happy St. Patrick's Day!" to the Irish ones. This is the first entry in a long time because Trashiyangtse's telecommunications tower, shown here mystery-lit in mystic mist, went offline on the morning before St. Patty's Day and was only repaired on Purim:

Here is a brief look at my time without the net...

Wednesday
On the second week of maths club, my teacher gave to me: two logic puzzles! (And information on a dead genius!)
The children had a great time with this Sea Charting problem. See if you can locate one aircraft carrier four units long that looks like this: (| []  []  |), two battleships three units long that look like this: (| [] |), three cruisers two units long that look like this: (| |), and four destroyers that look like this: O. All of the other spaces are filled with open sea. The numbers indicate how many ship-bits there are in each row/column. Ships cannot touch, not even on a diagonal:

Thursday
When I awoke to the top of the mornin' and put on me' green, I had in mind that I'd write a blog post called "Kiss me, I'm the only Irish for miles!" To my amazement, though, I had a conversation with a white person (specific ancestry unknown) on St. Patty's Day, the first one I've talked to in Yangtse not counting William and Nancy. I wrote the first three of my teacher tests that day and he, a young guy from Washington, was one of the two statisticians who interviewed the test-takers afterwards to see how we felt about the questions. For my part, I loved the Math Content one but I hope that Irish luck was with me because I found some of it really challenging, I thought the Maths Pedagogy one was like a morn in spring, while parts of the English Content one got my Irish up. (Which of the following sentences is grammatically correct? None of them.) Most of it was good, though. I really enjoyed writing the tests and learned a lot about my strengths and weaknesses.

Friday
In first and second period I gave my grade fives a retest on multiplication. To my great joy, a few students who got a zero the first time around have mastered the operation with the help of a more explicit understanding-based algorithm. In third period, an off-block, I was kicking back in the staff room looking over the tests when my Vice Principal informed me that a government school assessor was going to observe my fourth period English class. I went into hyper-stress mode trying to add sparkle and polish to my lesson plan. When the time came, I delivered what I planned to do from the first and, of course, it was perfectly fine.

Saturday
Actually, Saturday is too amazing not to have its own entry. I'll write that tomorrow morning.