October 5, 2010: Another Day of Teaching

October 5, 2010: Today's classes went fine. The form teacher of the 9E class came to observe me teach. I was given no advance warning -- all of a sudden she entered my class, greeted me, and sat down in the back and took notes. (This teacher does not speak English so all I could do was nod my head at her.) I was so flustered that I started to teach the class the same lesson as last time, but I guess that just strengthened the response of the class and they seemed to behave well and best yet, even answered questions IN ENGLISH! (Actually I have found that many students now feel comfortable trying to speak English in class instead of Hungarian which of course is good.) Eventually I taught the lesson I had planned on teaching and thoroughly drilled them on the dialog before allowing them to practice it on each other and then test them individually. Over all, I think the class went fairly well. Fekete Kati tried to call me in the afternoon to tell me that the form teacher liked the class and told her to tell me so, so I guess I "passed" the test. Actually Kati told me that form teachers often visit the classes of their students to make sure the students are doing well and a visit is not to evaluate the teacher. (I'm not so sure whether this is really true, but the worst that can happen is that I get advice on how to improve.) Kati also told me that the form teacher plans on visiting my 9E class 2 class on Thursday, so we'll see how that goes. (Recall that that class is the one that gives me the most challenges disciplinewise.)

One other thing to mention about teaching is that I've noticed that the students seem to really enjoy teaching me how to say words I'm teaching them in Hungarian. Of course this can be distracting at first, but I've found it really invigorates the students and best of all, I can learn a new Hungarian word from time to time.

I also met a new teacher to the English staff. He's been assigned to our office and he once lived in Brentwood several years ago and stayed there for a year. He was living with his uncle (I think) whose house, by the way, is right next to Dustin Hoffman's house. He told me about a friend of his who is from California and teaches in District 11 in Budapest. He said he would like to introduce me to him some time. That would be fun to meet someone else from California who lives in Budapest.

After my long day of teaching (six classes in a row), I entered grades into the grade book since they were due today. Then I went to the bank to see if I could straighten out my ATM card. Fortunately, that problem has now been resolved and I can now use my ATM card just like I was able to use my ATM cards in the US. 

Hungarian language curiosity: In studying Hungarian with Balazs, I learned how to express weights that I need to tell the butcher when I buy meat. To buy, say 800 grams of meat, it's expressed as "80 dekagrams" of meat rather than "800 grams" of meat. This reminds me of the way that Korean expresses millions as "one hundred ten thousands" instead of "one million". One more reason that learning a foreign language is so interesting.