Hot Plates and Kettles

Today there was a purchase of two electronic items: A hot plate and a pan, and an electric kettle that boils water. One of them was for me. I'm trying to at healthier. Most of my meals here have been eating out, and while it is tasty, it is only recently where I've tried to cut back on the amount of food I eat (which means, unfortunately, that some of the food I order has to go to waste). Inherently I dislike wasting food, so the only solution is to cook my own. And who knows, maybe I'll start eating breakfast again if I do.

The electric kettle, however, was a gift for Will and Tamir, who have gotten their own apartment off campus. It's not a bad set-up. It's smaller than our apartments and it reeks of new paint and paint thinner (they had to paint the apartment and clean it well). Ann and I decided to get them a welcoming gift, and while I originally suggested a bear, we decided to get them a gift they could actually use and would actually want. And a hot water kettle, that boils water to make it safe, is a great thing to use.

It's actually no longer strange getting water from jugs. It's no longer strange that I must ration my water every day, or that I need to boil it first. It's not strange that my plugs need to be more full than stuffed peppers or that the chords are tearing apart. My tolerance for these things has grown, despite how dangerous or annoying they are.

But Will and Tamir did a good job, I thought, in cleaning- it was enough to make my Aunts pleased (with cleaning, not with decoration), which is saying something. Will still has a beer bottle sized hole in his wall that leads to the outside, and he's not sure what to do with that. I don't know what to tell him other than "stick a beer bottle in there and hang stuff from it", ensuring that I will never be an interior decorator.

The other thing that's been happening is that I caught two students plagiarizing on their first assignment of "Tell me about your hometown". However, since I could do another post explaining how this does not automatically kick them out of school, I will shorten it to today, I had to refuse requests to do the paper over. I will not, because there is more than one and to allow one is to be unfair to the others, and it isn't an assignment that will damage their grade. It could be the deal breaker, but it is unlikely. One student is so upset, and I know he is a good kid, but I refuse to bend the rules.

This paints me, I know, as strict. The students are no longer afraid of me (they realize I have a sense of humor, even if they don't understand it), but they do respect my strictness when the need calls for it. Me, Mr. Laser, and Mr. Red Pen of Zero make an excellent team of humor and respect. I need them to pay attention and learn with everything I got, because somewhere in the back of my mind I think, "You are not qualified to teach them about this".

And yet I still do, so there's that.