The show must go on...

Today was the school's music gala.  It is an annual event to show off the kids' hard work during the year.  Again we saw that, although it was a little long to watch each kid perform a number of times, it was impressive that many of the children could play three or four instruments.  I was pretty upset as I was going to miss out on playing my citera due to my new sporting injury, but when I woke up this morning my range of movement in my arm was just a little bit better which allowed me to play.

The kids were great this year, we had traditional folk dancing, a play at the end and many different renditions of many different songs on recorder, piano, trumpet, guitar and of course citera.  It was a good afternoon.

- Daniel.

Trooper

This morning our school opened up the classrooms to parents who were invited to come along and observe their kids during their lessons. Many subjects were on display, including several that we teach. Daniel had a particularly busy morning with open lessons in PE, English and Nature Studies. My day was a little cruisier - I helped Ili out with a Grade 1 English lesson, then took my Grade 2 English class, and finished up with Grade 1 drawing. 

My first lesson with Ili went off without a hitch. This is the norm in Ili's lessons as she's always super organised. Unfortunately my Grade 2 lesson was a bit of a fizzer. I thought it would be a good idea to show the parents what a "normal" English lesson looks like, rather than a jazzed up performance for their benefit. Unfortunately this resulted in things being pretty boring and well, just kind of painful. It was especially awkward when I gave the kids a worksheet based on a story we first encountered only a few days ago. It seems that I overestimated their ability and many (perhaps even most) of the kids in the class struggled to complete the work. A roomful of confused kids was not exactly how I had hoped to impress the parents!!

Luckily, I bounced back and had a pretty fun drawing lesson with my Grade 1s. I even roped the parents into helping their kids to complete the project. It was hilarious watching as slowly but surely each of the parents took over their child's work and got right into creating beautiful crepe paper Easter eggs. 

Speaking of bouncing back - or perhaps not bouncing back - Daniel managed to injure himself quite badly this afternoon. He was outside playing football with the Grade 3s and from what I understand, decided that it would be a good idea to get the ball off another player by jumping on it. Of course this didn't work and Daniel took a massive tumble. He ripped open his knee and also seriously sprained his arm. Apparently all the girls in Grade 3 rushed to assist him. I assume the boys just kept playing football. While he's in a fair bit of pain at the moment, I think Daniel is actually rather pleased that in the future he'll be able to boast about his old "football injury", rather than the much less impressive "netball injury" that he is currently limited to.

Oh well, at least Iago thought it was funny.

- Amanda

PS. Daniel has asked me to change the description of how he came about his "football injury" as he doesn't think it's accurate. I stand by my story. If you want to hear Daniel's much more heroic, but also much less plausible story, then please feel free to hassle him for details.

Cubes!

Today we had an open day in Grade One.  The school had planned to have the open day in January, but then Ili broke her hand and it was delayed until today.  The lesson today was for the parents of next year's prospective students so although there were a few familiar faces they were mostly new to me.  I have heard that next Wednesday we are having an open day for the parents of the current students, but when I asked the Grade Fours they knew nothing about it.  (Other than Ili, my Grade Four class is my main source of information about school events).

Regardless, my open lesson in Grade One today went well. We were learning some new Easter words that they had only met yesterday, so they had to concentrate very hard on remembering them in addition to dealing with the stress of having 20 strangers staring at their every move.

I think the kids did awesomely.  They were able to play all the games, sing a few songs, and do all the actions.  Grade One can be hella fun when they're all well behaved.  Actually, I tend to find that the open lessons are more fun than normal lessons because the 'bad' kids are less likely to be crazy when in the presence of the 20 strangers, plus Ili, plus their Hungarian form teacher, and last but not least: the principal.  It really means that we can get a lot done and have a lot of fun doing it.  *Sigh* If only they could be that way every day.

In other news, Amanda did a cool art project today involving the kids constructing a framework cube made from paper.   It involved carefully decorating 12 strips of paper and then gluing them into shape so it was interesting watching who was good at decorating and who was good at the construction.  There was one boy who made three cubes in the time that it took others to complete only one.

Lastly, Amanda discovered that her school in the nearby city of Mátészalka had put up a video advertising their English program!  It's quite long and there are a lot of people speaking Hungarian, but if you click through it you'll find sequences of Amanda teaching.  Find it on YouTube here!

- Daniel.

Poster-rant

Teaching definitely provides an exciting emotional rollercoaster, and there are many occasions where I really don't know whether to laugh or cry at my students' antics. Today, for example, I was helping the the Grade 4 students to put together posters on Hungarian cities. Daniel and I thought this was an awesome cross-curricular activity as the kids learnt about cities in their Nature Studies subject, had to write about them in English, and then got to design and construct beautiful posters to display their work in their Drawing subject with me. 

Anyway, things were going pretty well. The posters were well underway and the kids seemed to be grasping some of the little tips and tricks that I'd taught them to make their posters look pretty (like using a ruler instead of just hacking away with scissors, and working from the inside out to create a neat, well-spaced heading). Awesome.

And then it happened. One of the boys came up to show me his completed poster. He was so proud and I felt like a teaching god for inspiring such incredible work. Then I noticed that he'd glued some of the writing on upside down! My ego deflated in about 2 seconds flat. It was so devastating to consider that either, a) he had so little understanding of the English sentences that he'd written, that he couldn't even recognise that they were upside down, or b) that all my reminders about doing things carefully and checking the layout before applying glue had fallen on deaf ears. Aargh! So frustrating!

Fortunately, I got over it pretty quickly and we managed to fix the problem without too much obvious damage to the lovely poster. Hooray!

- Amanda

Remembering 1848

This afternoon Daniel and I attended a ceremony at school to commemorate the 1848 Hungarian Revolution (a brief history lesson can be found in this previous blog entry). Students have been going missing from our classes for several weeks in the lead-up to today's ceremony, so it was great to finally be able to see exactly what they've spent so much time practicing for. Many of our Grade 2, 3 and 4 students sang in the school choir and half of the Grade 2 class also put on a special Hungarian folk dance number. The girls were absolutely in love with their big skirts and fancy braided hair. So cute!

As it was a Hungarian ceremony, there were of course many long speeches and recitations of famous stories and poems. Usually I find this sort of stuff pretty dull, but today everyone seemed to be putting a lot of effort into making things as dynamic and stirring as possible. I thought two of the Grade 8 boys did an awesome job reciting Sándor Petőfi's famous poem, Nemzeti dal. This poem - along with the list of twelve demands (12 pont) - played a central role in inspiring the 1848 Hungarian Revolution, and really cemented Petőfi's reputation as Hungary's national poet. Sometimes it feels like every second street in Hungary is named after him, with every alternative one being named after Kossuth Lajos, another major revolutionary figure. So much for originality!

Anyway, Daniel and I were pleased to be able to wear our cockades again today, although we both got told off by the Grade 3s for wearing them incorrectly. Apparently the cockade must always be worn on the left side of the body, over the heart. Makes sense. 

- Amanda

Budding artists

Yes, this is yet another entry about my art classes with the kids. I'm so glad I had the camera with me today because Gyurcsi and Bíborka provided two perfect examples of the different approaches of boys and girls to the task of painting a vase of flowers. As you can see, Bíborka's flowers are bright and colourful...and Gyurcsi's, well, not so much! Kids are awesome.

- Amanda

Loot. Woot!

Poor Daniel had another tough day at work today. In addition to his regular classes, he wound up teaching two extra surprise lessons as well...and one of them was with the Grade 2 ratbags that he was so angry at yesterday. 

In the other hand my day was pretty cruisey. I was also teaching a couple of extra lessons but I hardly even noticed because I kept getting interrupted every 5 minutes and handed flowers and chocolates. It was awesome. Before coming to Hungary I'd never even heard of International Women's Day, but it seems like it's a pretty big deal over here (and in many other countries as well). Daniel snapped some pictures of me with my loot during the morning break, but by the time I finished teaching, I reckon I had accummulated about three times as many goodies. The gifts were all given to me by my male students and it was lovely to see the boys being so sweet and shy for a change.

In unrelated news, here is a picture I took last night of the church in Máriapócs from our backyard. Some nights the view is particularly spectacular and last night was one of them. Unfortunately, the photo doesn't really do the scene justice but I thought I'd post it anyway.

Finally, some exciting news - Daniel and I have booked our tickets back to Australia! We arrive in Melbourne on June 28th. I feel like it's still a long way away, but I suspect that the time will pass really quickly.

- Amanda

Angry Daniel

Today I lost my temper.

I had a P.E. class with the Grade Twos and they pushed me until I cracked and started to yell at them... well, yell at them more than usual.  Grade Two has always been very problematic, Amanda gets frustrated to tears with them because they have no discipline, they are very slow and they generally think that they are the greatest gift to all humanity.  There are a few especially bad kids, and a few especially good kids, but the general theme of the class is that they are chaotic.

In my P.E. classes, I have two simple rules.  You have 5 minutes to get changed and be in the hall, anyone who isn't in the hall has to go back to the change rooms and misses out on sport.  I had to instigate this because they were taking up to 20 minutes out of a 45 minute lesson to get changed which (when you consider that they took another 20 minutes to get back into their school clothes) meant that there was only 5 minutes for sport.  My second rule is that I will give you 3 warnings for bad behaviour whereupon you will go back to the change rooms and miss out on the rest of the lesson.  They are easy to understand rules that give the kids a definitive guideline as to what will happen if they are ratbags.

Anyway, in today's lesson, one of the kids got his three warnings before the five minute deadline was even up.  So he had to get changed.  Two girls didn't make the 5 minutes, so they had to get changed.  Another kid started kicking the football around while other people were finishing the warm up, he refused to participate and he pushed another child, so he had to get changed.  Four of the girls decided that they were sick.  So they had to get changed.  No one was listening.  No one was following the rules.  So I cancelled P.E. mid-lesson and marched them all back to their classroom.  I then yelled at them more harshly than I have ever before and gave them so much homework that even the good kid's eyes bulged.  I always believe that it is unfair to punish indiscriminately but in that case, no one is good.  I'll go in there tomorrow and if anyone hasn't finished my homework, I'll put a bad mark in their books.

That's right you crazy little milk-drinkers - I'm a bad-ass.

And I feel kind of bad about it, after all, I just terrorised a bunch of 8 year olds.

- Daniel

Spring butterflies

Sometimes I really think I have the best job in the world. I get to spend all my time hanging out with lots of cute and funny kids, and watch them as they try new things and learn new concepts. It's a pretty amazing thing to be part of.

Today one of my Grade 1 classes finished constructing their Spring butterflies and I couldn't resist taking some photos. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, they absolutely loved this project and had a great time slopping loads of tempera paint on to their paper to create their butterflies. In fact, some of the kids had applied so much paint that it was difficult for them to fold the paper in half again today in order to cut out the wings. Still, I think they did a great job - and I especially love that some of the kids got creative and turned their colourful butterflies into vampires. Afterall, nothing really says Spring like lots of blood and fangs, right?

- Amanda

Return of the Unitard

The Unitard is back...and as you can see from the photo, he's thoroughly enjoying his first week's readings for uni. Hahahahaha. Personally, I don't think he's got any right to be so grumpy. I mean, really, who ever does the readings? Especially in the first week, and especially if they're not directly related to an impending assignment. For shame!

In other news, I had a pretty fantastic experience at work today. I was demonstrating a painting technique to one of my Grade 1 classes and the kids were so impressed with the result that they burst into spontaneous applause. It was awesome :) Thursday afternoons are kind of a bugbear for me at the moment, so it felt really good to receive some positive reinforcement.

- Amanda