Ben-less

So today I went from being Aum-less to being Ben-less as well. Our mentor Ben was unfortunately ill today and therefore couldn’t help to translate my lessons. I did however have the principle in my G.11 lesson for the first 5 minutes. He helped to translate an instruction, I’m not entirely if he said the right thing or confused the students further but they wrote something. Then Poom, one of the boys in my G.11 class, translated for most of the rest of the lesson. I’ve got to say I’m very grateful for him too.

In my G.12 class later on one of my students translated for me again. It was only small corrections, but it was helpful. I had asked them to write an informal letter to a friend about problems they were having in their new house. They seemed to understand what I wanted them to do, which was good and by the end of the lesson I had made sure that everyone had written some form of letter. I even got some students to read theirs out. So as much as I need to set out the layout more clearly so that the students understand what they are doing, the students did understand and wrote some really good letters. But some of them do seem to rely on Google translate too much. You can tell when the word order is weirdly muddled up that they’ve translated directly from Thai. It was also a trick I used to use in secondary school, and considering these students are 17 and 18 with a higher second language skill than I had, they shouldn’t be too dependent on it. Hopefully hearing English more, having constructive feedback and seeing English written correctly should improve their sentence structure.

After school I had a super nap. It was great. What’s a super nap I hear you ask? It’s a nap that happens the moment you lie down (only intending to for 20 minutes of course) and have to be woken up an hour and a half or two hours later for dinner. I did feel a lot better though.

After dinner instead of Cardio Club, Eilidh and Kate taught Hannah and I Ceilidh dancing to teach in Eilidh’s English Activity. It’s a form of Scottish dancing and we learnt a very simple one to teach the children, as they are only in G.4-9. It only took five or ten minutes but was simple enough that by then I was dizzy from spinning and dancing in a circle. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow.