I teach 3 hours, give or take, of adult classes a week. It's a refreshing break - students that want to be in class, don't require grades as incentive (I'm growing a little hatred for grading), and know how to study. This week I tackled the town, introducing words like post office and mayor's office, grocery store and farmer's market. I let the students come up with the words in Romanian, then I translated to English, expanding on some ideas. For example, Romania doesn't really have libraries, but since libraries are my favorite building in any city, I made sure to teach them that, then threw in the story of when I lived in the desert of Arizona and had to wait for the bookmobile (so now a group of adult in northeastern Romania know the word bookmobile).
Yesterday one of them wanted to know the english for parking lot.
I also taught them the word sidewalk. Romania kind of has sidewalks. There are some crumbling, uneven stones that line the road in my village and since I live a little outside of the "Downtown" I walk on the road for a while before reaching the beginning of the crumbling, uneven stones. I introduced the word sidewalk, then drew an aerial picture on the chalkboard of a road, with a line of grass and then a a sidewalk.
-We have sidewalks, my students protested.
-Yes, but most of the sidewalks are full of cars.(the side of the road, i.e. sidewalk, is generally lined with parked cars.
-But that's because we don't have parking lots, the throw back at me.
And standing there, in front of the class, I had an epiphany. Maybe parking lots aren't that bad. So much for the peace corps making me a hippy.
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