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.