June 2, 2010

June 2, 2010

So, I have to start off this entry with a little apology, what I am apologizing for may have gone unnoticed, nevertheless, because I wanted to stay consistent with these last 28 entries, I must be honest in the fact I am writing this entry the morning after June 2nd. It would probably have no consequence, figuring the majority of the people who read my blog are not even up yet. It is now 11:30, my time, on June 3rd and I am writing this from my favorite place in my city, the café called the Matrix.
To give my excuses, I didn’t return home from my one lesson of the day until after nine and I was simply too exhausted to give my full attention to writing. I did nothing more than throw the soup I had cooked earlier in the fridge, grab the book I am reading at the moment, Pride and Prejudice, and slip into bed. I was asleep quickly, after reading nothing more than a few pages.

Well, you may ask, why were you so exhausted? In fact I shouldn’t have been due to the fact I normally did not have any tutoring lessons on Wednesdays because it was on that day, which Andrea would come from Hradec and we would get a chance to visit during the week, rather than just the weekends, and have dinner together. And this fact actually allowed me to take a short nap after I had finished making the soup I ate for dinner. However, after I awoke, after much debating with myself, whether I should switch my alarm to a later time or not, I went to the school gym again and worked out. I do not do anything completely strenuous, but I still get rather worn down as I am just beginning to work out regularly.

It was from my workout that I went up to where I am now, the Matrix, for my one tutoring lesson of the day. I always enjoy my lessons with this girl. She has a very compassionate mind and it is always interesting to hear her opinions on her country because they contrast so vastly with any other person I have met in the Czech Republic. She has very liberal ideas and, I believe, it is for this reason our conversations flow so freely. We talked about some of these ideas for the first half of our lesson. Then for the second half and a little bit longer we discussed a paper she was working on for one of her courses at the University in Hradec. I helped her edit it just a little, but it was written extremely well, just as the paper I had seen the day before had been. The only problems, which were reoccurring, were with prepositions, and I have also noticed with nearly all the people I give lessons to is that sometimes because Czech and English grammar are so different in relation to the ordering of sentences that in some places the beginning of a sentence should be at the end of the said sentence and vice versa.

My day at school went well again. I have been trying to get my classes, with the greatest of my efforts, to do more speaking. So, for each of my regular classes I gave them a topic like my city or my family. They were then given ten minutes to prepare a speech. At the end of the ten minutes each student had to give a speech of one minute on their topic. It was amazing to me how few students could speak for a minute on a topic after being given ten minutes to prepare.

However, I do have to look at from another perspective. If I were to ask another group of people to do the same, even in their native tongue, they may have a lot of difficulty. One minute can seem like an eternity when you are staying in front of a group of your peers. I do feel somewhat successful though. I got each of my students up and talking in English. Some maybe only for twenty seconds, but there were a few who were able to go for the full minute and more.

As for my last class of the day, my conversation class, I have certain group of students who had decided to skip the conversation class earlier in the year and they got caught. So, now these students must attend not only the conversation class they are assigned, but the other one as well. Well, last class, the long hour and half class I had the day before I had told them to go to the computer lab and research a famous historical Czech person. A couple of these students thought they would attempt to be clever and simply went to Wikipedia, copy and pasted all the information they found into Google translate and then turn it in as though they had done extensive work. I was not able to supervise them in the computer lab because I had my other group studying for their exam next week. However, those that tried to sneak through the assignment were in for a big surprise.

To give one example, one of the students handed me, proudly, two pages of small print, about one famous Czech. Little did he know, during the class I made each student who had completed the assignment, grab the microphone and read their entire report. You should have seen the shock on the one student’s face when he found out he would have read two full pages of English, and it was not simple English, into a microphone before the class. It may have been cruel in a sense, but I was also amazed when the student finished and had actually done a fair job of pronouncing very difficult words. He took his time and sounded them out. He was beet red by the time he finished, but in my opinion, although it may seem like it was nothing more than a punishment, him reading words he had never seen before taught him a lot about the pronunciation of the English language.

As for the other part of the class who has an exam next week, I handed out study guides to them. About half the class is taking this test seriously and I have already informed them in Czech through Google translate the importance of this very test on their final grade in my class. Hopefully, next week I will be surprised.

I almost left out my favorite part of the day; I got to speak with Andrea for the first time for an extended period of time. We spoke for over a half-hour. She told me about her party and what had been happening in her life so far since she has been home. I swear listening to her is better than reading, or does it sound more comparable to say, listen to a book on tape, she has so many stories. And she told me all she could muster until our conversation turned to her new phone. Now, let me state, although my mind does change periodically, that a phone with the internet seems excessive to me. But, she did convince me she had made a well-thought out purchase, she had done her research, and I had to agree with her that if it was something she felt would be useful then it was a good purchase. She didn’t, however, like when she told me that the phone had a built-in GPS and I told her that I was pretty sure that you can still by maps.