Intermediate English

Hey again everyone! Thanks to some prodding by Angela J. I´m back with another blog entry. I would like to dedicate this post to my Intermediate English students that were in my class from October to April. I imagine that the dynamic between my class and myself is similar to the dynamic my classmates and I had with our younger high school teachers. They tend to view me more as their friend leading the class (which is kind of true- all of them are my personal friends outside of class) and thus they tend to falter on the, er, behavior front. However, they never cease to amaze me with their dedication, intelligence and creativity in class. Every time I challenge them to write a story, create a dialogue, whatever, they always go above and beyond what I expect of them. Their speaking and writing abilities have improved so much from when I first met them! In October they came to me only knowing the past and present tense, but now can carry on conversations in a past, present, future, conditional and perfect tenses. Their ability to remember vocabulary words is also impressive, as well as their ability to disseminate the information in the readings we review in class.

To end our six or so months together (about half of them were moved up to Advanced English and the rest have slowly stopped coming to class) they threw me a surprise birthday party on my birthday! This consisted of: letting me start class, leading me outside after the first 5 minutes of class, blindfolding me, making me walk mindlessly around the community center, suddenly putting me in the microbus, picking up the other people who were invited to my party, getting some soda, and driving me back home. When the blindfold was finally removed, I was face to face with our poolhouse beautifully decorated with streamers and balloons (courtesy of Emily, I later found out). They had brought cake, napkins, soda, and had sweet talked Kyle and Emily into providing everything else. I was moved to tears and didn´t mind at all that the new students wouldn´t be taking their assessment test that day.

It made me realize that when you give of yourself selflessly, the rewards are better than you could ever expect. That sounds cheesy but it´s true! Overall it was the best birthday present I´ve ever received.