October 28, 2010: More administrivia at Ujpest

October 28, 2010: Tomorrow is the last day in the two month cycle where teachers are required to indicate the number of classes they've taught each day for the last two months. This requires establishing a user account on the server at school in order to access the excel spreadsheet summarizing my teaching these past two months. If a teacher ends up having taught more than is required in their contract, they'll get an increase in their paycheck. Since I only taught one extra class during the last two months, I don't expect to get much extra, but there are some teachers who put in regular days of eight straight classes, some containing double classes (in other words, the class they are scheduled to teach plus another class of an absent teacher -- try to do that when you have two classes doing different things!) I feel sorry for some of the teachers since they must be exhausted at the end of the day, not to mention the end of a week of eight classes a day teaching loads. At any rate, filling out the excel form was fairly easy and took just a minute to do once I knew what went where.

In the afternoon there was another English teachers meeting to discuss whether and how to create a common syllabus that all English classes for the bilingual students could use rather than one for each of the three bilingual classes. I was surprised to learn that each 9C student has eight conversation lessons per week (I teach two of them) while 9B and 9D students have only two (me). I guess the reason for this is that the form teachers for 9B and 9D feel that their students need more grammar and workbook lessons than conversation. At any rate, it was agreed that the syllabuses of the three classes would be the same so that the sequence of topics would be consistent among all three classes and the other conversation teacher and I will coordinate as to what we're teaching so we don't duplicate each other's work, or are at least consistent in what is being taught. Fine by me.

Since the fall break starts next week, I decided to take it a bit easy with my classes. For the intermediate English classes, I decided to try some activities that are not dialog related. I gave them the task of pretending to give directions over the phone. As you know, one of the most difficult things to do in a foreign language is to speak over the phone since it is not possible to see the other person gesticulate when on the phone. I had the boys put their chairs back to back in pairs. Then one of the boys was to give directions on how to go from school to his house. The other boy would listen, ask questions, and then write down the directions. When the giver of the directions was done, the listener would repeat the directions to make sure they were correct or that there were no misunderstandings. In the case of 9C, I believe this exercise was a great success. It was so gratifying to hear the boys speaking English to each other -- almost like I was in a US classroom. Then, after each boy had a chance to participate in this exercise, I tried another activity that Bonnie Theberge and I did at JPL in the V&V course we taught. I had the boys create an airplane out of a piece of paper. The airplane had to satisfy two requirements: it must be able to fly three meters and it must be able to be flown two times. You can imagine the bedlam this part of the exercise created with 14 year old boys. They had a great time creating masterpieces with paper. Then, I told them to take out another piece of paper and write directions on how to create their airplane in English (It probably would have been a challenge to write the directions in Hungarian also). I gave them some words that they would want to know such as "fold", "diagonally", "horizontally", "vertically". Although it was easy to get them to create the airplanes, it was a real challenge to get them to concentrate on writing the directions and stop testing their planes. The bell rang before I could do part three of this exercise which I won't disclose since I'm sure that some of the boys will be reading this blog entry and I don't want to spoil the surprise of part three. They'll just have to wait until we return from vacation to find out what happens.

Well, I guess that's it for this blog entry. Please remember that I'll be leaving Budapest for Venice this Sunday, and since I'll be meeting with friends and have a house guest starting tomorrow, I may not have time to submit any more blog entries until I return from Venice. At that time, I hope to have all sorts of great pictures and stories to talk about in my adventures there. So until then.....