Order of the Phoenix

At work yesterday when it was brought to my attention that the new Harry Potter movie was now in theaters, I looked up showing times online and found that the theater in north Provo still had tickets from 6:15pm on. Of course, by the time we actually made it over there to buy tickets, they were sold out until 10:00pm. Sure, why not?

Unfortunately, although I thought this was the best book-to-movie adaptation since Chamber of Secrets, it is apparently very confusing for someone who has not read the book. Now I have to translate the mental notes I made and put away during the movie – inconsistencies and things I thought were important enough to include (like the two-way mirror, or more of the last scene with Dumbledore and Harry!) – into a good explanation of the book’s plot, and how the movie did or didn’t follow the same plot.

I wish I knew where my copy was…

fall semester 2007

Sociology 310. Foundations of Social Inquiry. Basic ideas and arguments forming sociological inquiry, including philosophical foundations, philosophy of social science, and development of classical theory.

Sociology 311. Contemporary Sociological Theory. Ideas, critiques, and arguments that form contemporary sociological inquiry.

Biology 100. Principles of Biology. Introductory course for general education students.

Religion C 351. Survey of World Religions and the Restored Gospel. Survey of non-Christian religions in light of the restored gospel.

Korean 101. First-Year Korean 1. Han’qul, the phonetic system, basic grammar and vocabulary, discourse, reading, and culture.

psat

this week we started tutoring the 2 kids of jarom’s korean professor. he works with the son, sihyun, who is 10 and about to start 5th grade. I tutor the daughter, daye, who will be a junior this fall. she took the psat a few months ago and is studying to retake it in october, plus the sat next spring.

I had no idea it would be so hard to prepare someone for a test. part of it is probably due to the fact that I myself never took the psat and didn’t study at all for the sat, but a large part is because the vocabulary isn’t used in everyday speech. daye is really smart, but with english as her second language, she’s having to memorize hundreds of words just to answer the multiple choice sentence completion questions. it’s hard to make a good guess when all 5 choices are words you’ve never seen before.

the other problem is that I’m terrible at explaining what words mean. some of the words from the other day are ferocity, obsequious, and distort. when daye doesn’t know any of the synonyms for those words…it gets really complicated. luckily she’s good at memorizing and if she reads a definition enough times she’ll figure out what the word means.

I sure am glad I don’t have to take any more big standardized tests.