Uncharted Waters

Paata and I discovered last week that we were far ahead of where we were scheduled to be in the textbooks in three of our classes. This was due to a number of factors, including, I’m sure, my dismissal of many of the textbook exercises as either stupid, irrelevant, unintelligible, or too advanced for the students (as you may be able to guess, I’m not a big fan of these particular books). The upshot of this situation, however, is that we decided to put the textbooks aside for the remainder of the semester in favor of a mixture of supplementary grammar exercises when Paata is in the class without me, and more creative activities whenever I’m there.

The prospect of planning new curriculum on the fly has been daunting, especially with the play also still on my plate (the date keeps getting pushed back—it looks pretty well settled for this coming Wednesday, but I’ve said that before…). For inspiration, I thought back to some of my favorite activities from my own days as a foreign language student, and after talking them over with Paata, we’ve started putting some of them into action. In the eighth and ninth grades, we’ve been learning the words for rooms and furniture, drawing floor plans for both our real houses and for our dream houses. This last allowed us to practice using the “unreal conditional” construction, “If I had the house of my dreams, I/it would be/have…” It also provided a stark reminder of the material conditions that these kids live in: several of them completed that conditional sentence with phrases like “I would have my own room,” or “I would have a soft bed.” After some encouragement I had them dreaming up Coke fountains and rooms full of candy, but it took a while to get there.

In the seventh grade, meanwhile, I took our last unit in the textbook, which dealt with physical descriptions of people and clothing, as a jumping off point to apply those descriptions to monsters (with the added helpful vocabulary of claws, horns, spines, fangs, and the like). From there we’ve moved on to talking about fall and winter holidays, starting with Halloween (another nice thematic transition, in my opinion). Today we even carved a jack o’lantern in class, something I never thought the textbook-centered school environment would ever be flexible enough to allow.

In other news, the main excitement in the past few days on the home front has come from Operation Wean Nikolozi. This has been nominally ongoing at least since I got here, but it went into high gear this week. The first night was pretty rocky for everyone in the household, but things have slowly but steadily been getting better since then. The presence of Paata’s mother is a big help, but even with her here I can tell it’s been an incredibly taxing week on all of them.

I’ll end for now by noting that it's at least 70˚F here again today, at least in the sun, which still hadn't gone down last night even by 6:00, since we’re not on Daylight Savings Time. Definitely doesn’t feel like December (although the flip side of not changing the clocks is that the sun doesn’t come up until after 8:00). I’m enjoying the warmth, but I’m also looking forward to some nice, cold, snowy New England winter when I get home.