January 25, 2011: Another Day at School

January 25, 2011: Yesterday I met with the students in my challenging class and it was very apparent that they did NOT want to learn English, save for one boy who seems to be doing well. (The other teachers of this class told me they had the same experience with them so it's not just me.) After 35 minutes of trying hard to pry English out of their lips (in between trying to get them to behave that is), I had finally had it and decided to focus the class on the one student who wanted to learn. I instructed all the boys to study the dialog we had just reviewed "quietly" at their desks and continued to drill the interested student on new sentences and actually engaged him in a conversation speaking English for ten minutes. Strangely enough this approach actually got the class deadly quiet -- all of the boys were raptly listening to the one student and me going over the dialog and practicing free form English based on the topic I was teaching. Could this be a solution to my problem?

This morning I met with the same class and I explained that I was tired of trying to engage them in a lesson they had no interest in learning -- learning English for them seems to be about as significant as me learning how to become a hair dresser: just no motivation for that. So, I told them that from now on, the boys who want to learn English should sit in the front of class and those who are not interested should sit in the back. I explained that I would give those not interested in learning worksheets to do while I devote my energies on the ones who are there to learn. Of course it ended up that all the boys wanted to learn, so the class started out on the right foot. But, as in so many classes (even the good ones) there comes a time when boys will "help" each other by translating what I'm saying into Hungarian even if the point of the lesson is to try to get them to ask me when they don't know something. This becomes problematic because I constantly have to fight to make myself heard. Finally I had had it again and asked one of the translators why he felt entitled to disrupt my class. The answer was that he was trying to help me get the students to understand me. I informed this student that he was not the teacher and that if I needed help in explaining something in Hungarian, I would ask someone to do it for me. I challenged the student by saying that it was difficult teaching English and if he wanted, he could try it himself. He accepted the challenge and took the dialog and stood in front of class to teach it as I sat in one of the classroom's chairs. He spoke each sentence of the dialog and the boys repeated after him enthusiastically. Then he told some of the boys "Everything off of your desks" just like I do and in general entertained the class (and me) as to how I teach them myself. This lasted for all of two minutes and he gave up and I returned to teach. It was really very funny, but unfortunately not enough to get them to speak the dialog fluently. That's because the only work that the students do for the class is during class time. They don't seem to study at home for my class.

Another Hungarian curiosity: After I've taught a dialog, I give each student a strip of paper with the dialog printed on it for him/her to study at home. I usually can fit three or four dialogs on a page and cut them into strips in order to save on paper costs. The funny thing is that most students in all of my classes fold the margins of these strips of paper so that all they can see are the dialogs -- by the time they are done, there is no margin whatsoever and in fact many of the students rip the margins off entirely. I'm not sure why they do this, but it seems to be something that most people do in all of my classes. I've never seen students in Malaysia, Korea, China, or the US do this before, so it seems to be a Hungarian phenomenon.