Meeting the mob

Well, Gaye and Derek finally arrived in Hungary on Saturday afternoon. After allowing them a few days to get over their jetlag and reset their internal clocks, we introduced them to our Grade 2 class this morning.

The kids were very excited to meet them as they had heard through the local grapevine that they were in town. Apparently someone saw us all at Tesco, told someone else, who passed the message onto their neighbour, who informed their priest, who notified their butcher, etc, etc, until everyone in our class knew that Gaye and Derek were in town.

I was really pleased that the kids got to meet other native speakers. They introduced themselves, told Gaye some stories about their dead hamsters and then sang Happy Birthday to Derek (in English and Hungarian).

Gaye and Derek are also writing a travel blog about their trip to Hungary and other parts of Europe. Feel free to check it out: From Máriapócs to Frankfurt 2011.

- Amanda

Gyereknap (Children's Day)

In Hungary, Gyereknap is celebrated on the last Sunday in May. There are lots of activities for kids, and it generally seems to be a pretty fun occassion. 

Today Daniel and I, along with all of the other teachers, and all 160 students from our school, participated in a school fun day to celebrate Gyereknap. We all trudged down to Pápa tér this morning, set up camp, and then spent many hours participating in team sports, playing games, eating lollies and having a pretty terrific time.

Here are some of my favourite pictures from today.

Krisztián participating in the jump relay.

Some of the kids creating chalk drawings. 

(Yes, they are drawing on the road. And yes, the road was accessible to cars at the time!)

Gábor, with his face painted devil-style.

 

  

Me, very excited to be holding a ferret.

The ferret doesn't look too impressed though :(

Teachers vs students tug-of-war.





 

All in all, a very fun day. The kids went home at 1:30pm and boy were they tired!

- Amanda

Excellence in Teaching

Amanda and I hit some major milestones in our ever advancing journey towards excellence in teaching this week.

Things were going well until Wednesday when one of Amanda's nursery kids decided that he'd had enough of English and simply walked out of the class! He was being punished because he was fighting with another student so Amanda made him stand by himself near the door. The little guy obviously thought that this was crap because he soon decided to open the door and leave the class altogether. After being dragged back inside, the time-out area was hastily reassigned to the other side of the room.

On the same day, one of my Grade Two students fell asleep in the middle of an English lesson. It was just after lunch, and the room was soothingly warm. We were learning about the exciting world of ordinal numbers when I noticed that Szabina had her eyes closed and was resting her head on the desk. The other kids thought this was hilarious and started singing "Are you sleeping?" I was getting a bit worried because she still didn't wake when I shook her arm lightly. It took the entire class to yell "SZABINA!" before she woke up grumpily and rubbed her red eyes.

Later in the week, when we were preparing to assess the kids on the ordinal numbers, Amanda and I wrote the first twenty numbers on the back wall. As we were doing so, we came to twelveth. The spelling didn't look right but we couldn't think of an alternative so we left it. Unfortunately, the parents saw the word, realised it was wrong and corrected us the next day. Pretty embarrassing. The situation was made even worse when I corrected someone's homework without picking up on their misspelling of ninth (nineth). Given that Amanda and I could barely spell the words ourselves, it didn't really seem fair to test the kids on Friday.

The final example of our stellar teaching abilities occurred this morning in our Saturday class. We were trying to explain the phrase "a rare opportunity". So I looked up the word "rare" in the English-Hungarian dictionary and said "félig sült" which was only met by more confusion. It was only then that I noticed the small note in brackets (steak), and it was thus explained to me that félig sült is a half cooked steak rather than an uncommon event. Sigh.

It seems that we are doing our part to lower the English educational bar one notch at a time.

- Daniel.

The mysterious purple hippo of Máriapócs

The other day I was playing outside with Iago when I asked him "Where's your fetch?" I was expecting him to wander around for awhile until he found something we could play fetch with - like a stick, or maybe a pinecone (we have heaps in our garden and sometimes he picks them up and wants to play). 

Anyway, he ran around for a bit, then started furiously digging in one particular spot. I was a bit worried that he was trying to catch a mole but then he wandered back to me with.....a purple hippo! I still have no idea why there was a squeaky purple hippo toy in our garden, how long it had been lying around, or who put it there.

- Amanda

I'm a real student again!

Well, it's happened.

I've officially became a real uni student once more. I handed my first assignment in late. It felt pretty good actually. Although it was only a single day late, it's the thought that counts.

I've been enjoying getting back to studying, my philosophy subjects have been really interesting. I've had one subject in particular that is a lot of fun called "God, Freedom and Evil" which is about looking at the premises and conclusions of arguments for and against God and trying to pull them to pieces. The actual content could be anything, although the religious aspect helps as there are no perfect arguments either for or against. Such is the way for things that are defined as unknowable! Still, what I really like is to be able to really look at these arguments and ask, "Well, is that really true?" It's awesome.

I'm also doing a Media Studies subject, which is a part of my writing minor, which is a little bit paranoid (in that it thinks that the media is a conspiracy attempting to take control of the world) and a little bit self-inflated (the only way to stop media, and thus save the world, is to study it!) but it's good as a comprehension task.

Anyway, I am having a lot of fun, and now that I'm officially a real uni student again I get to only bathe half as often as I used to!

- Daniel.

Speedy readers

Apologies in advance - I geeked out and included a graph with this blog entry!

A few days ago Daniel and I noticed that our little Grade 1s are already able to read. And I mean seriously read, not just recognise the letters of the alphabet. For example, they can look at simple rhymes or short paragraphs in Hungarian and read the words, even if they have never seen those words before. This is pretty amazing considering that they only started primary school last September. 

And if the fact that they have learned to read in only nine months isn't awesome enough, one of our colleagues informed us yesterday that most of the kids in Grade 1 were already able to read by Christmastime last year. So in less than three months, these kids were able to do what English-speaking kids take years and years to learn.

So, what's their secret? In spite of the fact that Hungarian is a bewildering language to Daniel and I, it's actually quite a simple language to read. This is because each of the letters of the Hungarian alphabet has a unique sound. Once you know the sounds for each letter, you can just sound out the word and hey presto, you are reading and your pronunciation will be correct every time. 

Unfortunately, as we well know, English is not like this at all. Many English letters have multiple sounds depending on their arrangement with other letters within words. And then, even worse, sometimes the same letter arrangements are also pronounced differently depending on the word. Take the words 'tough', 'bough', 'cough' and 'dough' - they all have the same four letters (ough) but in each word these letters have a very different pronunciation. It's crazy! I think this at least partly explains why it takes English speakers so long to learn to read.

Anyway, Daniel and I were wondering whether this fact gives Hungarian kids huge educational advantages. I mean, just think of all the classroom time that it must save. Teachers here probably don't have to spend years and years doing lots of reading practice or correcting poor pronunciation and spelling. Instead they should, in theory at least, have lots more time to devote to other areas, like science and maths. So we would expect Hungarian kids to be waaaaaaaay ahead of kids from English-speaking countries in these areas. But as the following chart shows, this is not necessarily the case. So I guess there goes that theory!

READING, MATHS AND SCIENCE EDUCATION SCORES IN OECD COUNTRIES (2009)

- Amanda

Online again

Good news - we are finally back online! Our internet service resumed yesterday after we negotiated with our school to pay for the service ourselves (since the town's budget is too tight to pay it for us anymore).

Last weekend was fairly uneventful. Without the internet to confuse us, we managed to teach some English grammar to our Saturday morning class in a much simpler way than usual, and for the first time in a while we came away from the lesson feeling like we had achieved something positive. As a native English speaker, I don't often give much thought to grammar, but now that I've actually had to teach it to other people, I realise how tricky it all is. I've also come to realise how much of the way I speak, read and write is a product of habit and simply being able to hear when things are right or wrong, rather than any real understanding of why that is. This makes teaching grammar quite difficult. How can you explain to someone that what they have just said is wrong when you don't even really know why? It's especially hard with our weekend students as most of them know more English grammar than we do...so if we correct them, they tend to ask things like, "Oh, is that because I should use the third form?" I don't even know what the third form is, let alone if it's relevant to what they just said so I usually end up saying "yes" and quickly changing the topic.

Anyway, the rest of our weekend also went well. Last Sunday we ventured into Nyíregyháza for lunch and stumbled across some sort of festival. There were lots of rides, a few stalls and of course, as you would expect in eastern Europe, a large stage filled with American-style cheerleaders. I still don't really understand what was going on, but it seems likely that it was somehow related to the fact that it was May 1st (May Day).

It seems that May Day is still a pretty big deal over here, and while we didn't see anyone dancing around a traditional maypole, we did notice something that is loosely related - lots of trees decorated with colourful streamers. From what I've been told, it's traditional in Hungarian villages for young men to visit the houses of their sweethearts or potential love interests on the eve of May 1st and to decorate a tree in front of the house as a sign of their affection. These are known as májusfa (May-tree). As Daniel and I were driving to Nyíregyháza on Sunday, we passed quite a few houses with trees adorned with streamers, balloons and other bits and pieces. It was quite cheery.

In sadder news, our working week started off on a sombre note as we attended the funeral of one of our colleagues on Monday afternoon. About six months ago, the Grade 1 teacher Judit fell sick and was unable to continue working. We later found out that she had stomach cancer. Unfortunately the treatment was unsuccessful and she passed away last Thursday. Naturally, the entire school community has been deeply affected by the news as Judit was a long-term and much beloved staff member. Her death has been particularly traumatic for her Grade 1 class. I assume that many of them had never had someone in their lives die before and it seemed to really shake them up.

The funeral was held in the famous Greek-Catholic church in Máriapócs. Even though it's quite a large church, there were so many mourners that about half of the attendees (including Daniel and I) had to stand outside. In a touching display, many of school's current and past students provided a guard of honor for Judit and after the ceremony everybody formed a long, long, black line and walked slowly to the nearby cemetery for her burial.

As you can probably imagine, the mood at school is still rather sombre at the moment. In a way it's a good thing as it's helping to keep the kids quiet. This is especially important right now as the older grades are currently undertaking their end-of-year exams. There are currently only about five more weeks of school left.

- Amanda