November 10, 2010: The stick has broken!

November 10, 2010: Do you remember from my blog entry several weeks ago, my description of learning a foreign language? I liken it to trying hard to break a thick stick that seems unbendable. At first the stick barely bends, but with greater pressure, the stick bends sllllooooowwwwwllllyyy until SNAP!, it breaks. Learning a language is like that. At first it seems impossible to make any headway with the foreign language one is studying (that's how I feel right now with my Hungarian lessons!). Anyway, I've been teaching at Ujpest for almost eleven weeks now, and the other day I noticed that several students in some of my classes have broken their sticks! It's really quite exciting to see this phenomenon. I usually have to teach a long sentence to the students by breaking the sentence up into speakable chunks (they're not allowed to read anything during my class -- I give them the written words to our dialogs at the end of class after we've practiced speaking them.) and eventually tie the chunks together after they've mastered each smaller chunk. Well, the other day, I noticed that the students were able to repeat what I said without my breaking the sentences into smaller chunks. And it wasn't that they were merely repeating my sentences without understanding what they were saying -- they repeated the sentences as if they already were a part of their repertoire of the English language. Now if only I could get those students who seem to be uninterested in studying at all to engage in my classes.

Meanwhile, I've decided that my assignment of the National Parks was a failure -- not for the students, some of who put in a lot of effort to the assignment -- but it's my own failure. It's just that they're not quite ready to be making a PowerPoint presentation in English at their level of speaking. You wouldn't believe how many presentations I sat through where students merely read what they had copied from the US National Park websites. And it appeared that many didn't even understand what they were reading! I tried to tell the students that I am not a reading teacher, but that didn't seem to stop them from reading their presentations. I'm going to have to figure out some way where they present something with no written words on the slides they're presenting. I've decided that it is important for them to learn how to present something to the class, and I'm already thinking about a way to do this. If there are any English teachers out there reading this, I hope you will send me some ideas. Thanks!

After leaving school, I stopped by the market to pick up ingredients for a pork roast -- the weather today is cool enough that a cooked roast sounds really good. My butcher seemed pleased to see me again and he understood what I requested without any hesitation the first time I said it. My vegetable seller also was pleased to see me again and gave me a hearty greeting and send off after I purchased my potatoes, mushrooms, carrots, lemon, eggs, and tangerines. I'm definitely home again.

I smell my roast in the oven as I type this blog entry. I guess I'd better go check it out to make sure I don't overcook it this time. I finally decided to calculate the actual temperature I set the oven at by converting Centigrade to Fahrenheit. No wonder my last two roasts were a bit overcooked -- I had cooked them at 250 C instead of about 180 C!