So my water schedule is back. Apparently they can fix it during election season but once that's all over things go back to normal. This means no water from 9am to about 4 or 5pm. Normally this isn't a problem as I usually shower at night anyway. However, I keep forgetting about the water schedule when I try to wash my dishes and foolish think there will be water at 11 am. I guess I'll just have to adjust right.
So what has happened lately? Let's see this month Jason and I have been giving a small English course for high school students. I was doing a beginners class at 11 and then Jason would come at 1 to help out with the advanced class. These classes have certainly been interesting.
The beginners class started off kind of rocky with the class starting with about 7 girls and then dropping down to one the next session. As much as I wished the other girls would come back, I tend to work better with individuals so I wasn't too bummed out about having only one student. Juliana attended a middle school where she learned Italian and entered high school knowing nothing about English. She worked pretty last year and now she has a decent grasp of the language but still needs a lot of help. I thought she was doing pretty well during our classes but she stopped coming the third week and I ended that class. I really hope I get to work with her when school starts.
The advanced class started off with the opposite problem; every time we had class more and more students showed up. I wanted to keep the class manageable and eventually split the class into two group of up to 15 kids. Of course that didn't happen until week 3 and only a few kids came. I know that Jason wasn't sad to see a lot of the boys who in were in the class go because they tended to get really loud. I too found them rather frustrating but I felt like I was making headway with them during each class. I wasn't making huge leaps or anything but I could get them to calm down and do their work for the most part. Anyway, I designed this class to be more of a creative/ critical thinking class. I never once gave out a vocab list or taught grammar or verbs or anything like that. During the first week, Jason and I handed out pictures from magazines and had them make stories about what was going on. The next classes we made them write skits based off of different scenarios. After that we gave out quotes and did a class discussion. The first class last week was a discussion about what life was like in Albania and what the future has in store for them. It also focused on the 2012 Mayan Calendar prophecy. During the second class that week, we had them listen to two instrumental pieces and then write about what ever came to mind while listening. All of them produced very interesting things (one girl wrote a song, another drew a cartoon, another wrote a story about her friend) and we ended the class with a discussion about what they made and why they made it.
This week is the final week of course and I wanted to end it with another musical exercise so I'm going to have them listen to a song and do a pseudo fill in the blank exercise and then we will discuss the lyrics. I really hope they've been enjoying it. I know I've learned a lot.
