Monday, January 10, 2011

Back To Work

Today was my first day back to work after the two week break.  Although I only worked for 3 hours, I felt extremely productive.  Today we learned about animals and animal vocabulary, my knowledge of which is impressively extensive, at least in comparison to the island's ten year old population.  Do birds have ears?  Where do lions live?  Can a turtle run?  I'm pretty sure even as a ten year old I knew the answer to all of those questions, but they popped up a lot today.  In one class, I gave a poignant lecture on all the different names for baby animals, paralyzing the students with my formidable wisdom.  I decided to spare the other classes this, although I'm sure in the long run they'll be worse off for it.

The younger students (10-12 year olds) seem to think their teachers and educational materials are infallible.  Which I guess has its upside, but whenever there's a typo on a worksheet or somebody (somebody being me) misspells something on the board, it's like the whole universe caves in.  Even in German, when you'd think the kids would have had enough experience by now to deduce from context clues what was actually meant, they seem incapable of accepting that there would be a mistake.  "Grabben? I've never seen that word before, I have no idea what it means" several of the students whisper amongst themselves.  "Well, that's because it's suppose to say 'graben' with one 'b'."  This is answered with dull stares.  "Just mark one of the 'b's out," I say.  And then after they've marked out one of the 'b's, there is a chorus of "Ach, so..."  which is German for "Oh, yeah."

I've also noticed that they rely far too heavily on rulers.  Anytime a chart or a simple line has to be drawn, a forest of hands rises up, all asking to go retrieve their rulers from their magical place of ruler safekeeping.  All of my attempts to convince them that they don't really need rulers, that they're learning English, not geometry, have failed.  I have switched my efforts to avoiding any lesson plans that might involve lines.

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