A few jokes, and teaching!

Ten days since the last post. My apologies!

I've heard a few jokes in the past few days that I liked and thought I would pass along. One is simply "your handwriting is really nice"... but what is understood is that you're (jokingly) accusing the other person of writing for the secret police. Useful when someone asks you a sensitive political question or something like that...

Here is a nice regional take on a classic:

A journalist goes out on the street to interview passers-by, asking about the recent electrical outage. He asks the first passer-by, an American, "What is your opinion on the electrical outage?" to which the American replies "I'm sorry, what do you mean by outage?". Then the journalist asks an African (yeah I know it's not a country this is how the joke was told to me :p) who replies "I'm sorry, what do you mean by electricity?". Finally the journalist asks a Syrian who replies "I'm sorry, what do you mean by 'what is your opinion'?".

On the subject of teaching, one of the students in my program knows a priest at the Chaldean (a Catholic sect mainly in Iraq) parish in the old city of Damascus. Within two weeks of landing in Damascus, this student started an English program on his own from the ground up, dividing the students into three small classes, and initially teaching each class one hour a week (a lot of work!). Another student in the program (also with a Teaching Arabic degree) took over the lower level class, and increased its hours to two meetings of one hour a week, and hopes to do three. Then, this week, I took over the intermediate class from the founder of the program, and have agreed to do two hours a week as well.

Unfortunately, I hadn't met the students at all before I went in to teach, and in fact I was only told that I would be teaching the day of. The lesson I prepared was a bit over their heads, so this coming week I'm going to take a step back and review a little bit. We're doing a very hard topic in English, which is when to use the simple past (I went) versus the present perfect (I have gone). I had planned to teach "Where have all the flowers gone" last Thursday but we didn't have time. Hopefully this week!

The students are great, I have to say. I watched the lower-level class before I taught my own class, and I was a little dismayed by discipline problems in that class, which is I suppose natural considering that the kids are between 14 and 18 years old. Luckily my class ranges from 16 to 20 something, and so the students are more focused. I think with a more appropriate lesson plan it's going to be a great experience!