November 11, 2010: Freshman hazing week

November 11, 2010: Seeing the students this week has been a bit unusual. Apparently this is freshman hazing week -- the week that freshman are being "initiated" into the school. I first noticed things were a bit unusual when I saw students wearing underwear over their normal outfits of jeans, slacks, etc. One boy even wore a small yellow silk thong which had a "cute" decoration right over the fly. Periodically my classes have been interrupted by upperclassmen who visit the freshmen classes to make sure that the freshmen have been doing their "assignments". These tasks have included wearing hand decorated bow ties that say "Smile at me if you like me", wearing handmade necklaces of birds. One boy was even instructed to sing a song when the upperclassmen visited. Other students have had to carry a plumber's best friend around with them all day. I guess the culmination of all of this is next Friday when there is the "freshman prom" which begins with a show in which the freshmen (I presume) will have to put on a stage show -- all in Hungarian of course. I can hardly wait to see what I'll find them doing tomorrow.

Meanwhile, my fellow teachers and students are becoming excited to hear the talk about JPL, GRACE, and GRAIL that Joe Beerer will be presenting next week. I've read the presentation to select words to review with my students before his presentation, and they seem to have a pretty good understanding of the words that Joe will be using. I've even challenged my students by offering bonus points if they ask a question at his talk. I stipulated that the questions they ask must be topic relevant -- that is, no questions such as "How many brothers and sisters do you have?" which doesn't pertain to NASA or space. Of course, one of my students promptly asked if he could ask Joe "How many of your brothers and sisters are in space?" Leave it to the students to try to find a way around the system!

Today my classes went fairly well. I returned my challenging class's tests to them today and told them what grade I would be recording for their performance in English conversation thus far. Although some of their written tests were pretty well done, because they did not take their dialogs seriously (by not preparing for them at all before class), their grades severely suffered the consequences. This must have sunk in (finally!) because from that point on, the class actually seemed to take the dialog more seriously. The other classes went fine, too, although I still have trouble keeping students quiet and orderly. 14 year old boys just don't seem to be able to sit still for 45 minutes in a row. Other than that, classes seem to be going fine.