Besides my interaction with my host family, I don't spend much time with my students outside of school. Classroom management is a daily struggle and dressing up, hanging out with other teachers, and otherwise appearing professional was my classroom management plan of action for the first several months of teaching.
I am now beginning to feel comfortable enough to "hang out" with students in the non-educational sense of the word.
Right now "hanging out" is taking on the form of ping pong. Florin and Sandu, 5th grade twins, live near me and the day they learned sports vocabulary in english class with me they began to invite me to play ping pong with them.
"Teacher, avem un masa de tennis afara. Va-asteptam pentru tine!"
"Teacher, we have a tennis table outside. We will wait for you to come!"
(um, so their english is slow in the coming. At least they used the word teacher.)
"OK." I told them. And so I found where they lived and they were so excited to see me at their house and they offered me carbonated water while pulling the slightly warped, dusty ping pong table out from the barn.
Florin, just eager that I am there; Sandu, always the more skeptical one, putting every ounce of his body into beating me.
When an hour has passed and I tell them I have to leave, they look at me in disbelief that I would leave so early...
"Mai vin" (I'll come again). I reassure them.
And I have come back to play, several times. And now other 5th graders show up and since I'm in my twenties and generally speaking have better coordination than they do, I almost always win and it's a big deal when one of them beats me.
Thank goodness for all those hours in the hanger in the Philippines, being beaten at ping pong by my brothers. Who knew it would come in handy.
1 comment:
It was a lot of fun beating you. . . its important to have people to assert your superiority over.
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