Updates
The last week or so has been relatively uneventful. Things are about the same at school in that I don’t really feel like I do much. At first that was fun, but now it’s getting old. Hopefully things pick up when I start my after school conversation club, as well as working with the “American South” themed classes. We’ll see.
A few funny stories from school, however. First, I was working with a class and discussing the history of the USA. I came to the period preceding the Revolutionary War, so I divided the class up into groups. Each group had to do some research and tell the class about one of 5 topics (i.e. Boston Tea Party). One such group was “The Battle of Lexington and Concord”, and as I was walking around the classroom making sure that nobody needed help, one student asked me a question. He asked, “What was Lincoln’s last name?” I have no idea why that was even a subject they were discussing because last time I checked, Lincoln didn’t have anything to do with the Battle of Lexington and Concord. After the student asked me, I asked the entire class if anyone knew what Lincoln’s first name was. Here is a sampling of the answers: Mike, Andrew, Brian, George and Alex. Wow.
There have been many instances where students have disagreed with me about grammatical rules, vocabulary, etc. This time I said the sentence, “Bill did the shopping last weekend”. My question to the class was, “What part of speech is ‘shopping’?” They all said it was a verb, and then I explained to them what a gerund was. After they still didn’t understand I explained it in German to no avail. I guess there’s only so much I can do.
While I was eating a calzone today in the city center I saw two cops beat down a homeless guy because he was smoking too close to a shopping entrance, even though there were other people doing the same thing. I think it had more to do with the insults he was saying to the cop than his actual smoking. I really can’t interfere because I could be deported for the smallest of instances. Surprisingly nobody else did anything. Interesting thing to observe.
3 years ago