Yesterday afternoon Daniel and I had the pleasure of teaching together for the first time in many months, and we spent it wisely. By the end of our 90-minute session with the Grade 3 and 4 students, many of them had been irreparably scarred and Australia's appeal as a top international tourist destination had taken a significant beating. It all started, perhaps unsurprisingly, with 'Waltzing Matilda'. Last year we thought the lyrics were too difficult for the kids so we didn't teach it. This year, we figured we'd try it anyway. It was pretty terrible. The kids who did understand the song's story seemed bored by it, and those who didn't understand were just bewildered by the whole thing. Awkward.
With fifteen minutes of school left before we could let the kids go home, I figured it would be a good idea to fill in the time by showing some YouTube videos of Australian animals. The first video was fine - a cute kookaburra laughing away. The second video was a little less endearing - another kookaburra happily laughing away until it was attacked by some other bird. Ooops! I quickly switched to a different animal and brought up a video of an adorable fat wombat being cuddled by a zookeeper. All was going well until about 30 seconds into the footage when the keeper suddenly started groping and exposing the wombat's penis. What the hell? Who does that? Of course the kids found it completely hilarious.
After swiftly killing the wombat video, I moved on to yet another animal - the kangaroo. Unfortunately, the video I chose was even worse. This time we only got about five seconds of footage of kangaroos jumping around and eating grass, etc before a gigantic closeup of a kangaroo vagina appeared on screen and a tiny pink, slimey kangaroo joey emerged. By this time the kids were pretty grossed out and everyone was begging me to abandon my futile search for cute Australian animals. It was definitely a lesson in the importance of vetting teaching materials before (as opposed to during) classtime.
Speaking of being grossed out, today I made a pretty shocking/funny discovery. Over the last week or so many of the kids in our classes have been showing off their new cigarettte-shaped chewing gum sticks. Since they're banned in Australia, it's been ages since I've seen such things and it's a pretty repulsive sight to see them being consumed by kids. Anyway, this afternoon I walked into one of the Grade 1 classrooms and several of the kids proudly showed me their new 'ciggies'. I told them that I didn't like them and thought they were yuk. Of course, this had no impact at all :( After most of the kids had gone home, the teaching priest who was also in the classroom asked me about my reaction and I told him about my abhorrence of smoking and my surprise that the kids were allowed to eat candy cigarettes in Hungary. The priest then informed me that they weren't actually cigarettes, they were magic wands! He also held up the box (which looked a lot like a cigarette pack) in support of his claim. At this point I realised (somewhat belatedly I admit) that the priest was the one who was actually supplying the kids with the magic wands/cigarettes during his weekly Religious Ed lessons. He's such a nice bloke that I feel kinda bad for thinking this is really wrong.
Oh well, I guess in hindsight it's not actually that much worse than showing semi-pornographic videos of Australian animals :)
- Amanda
No comments:
Post a Comment