13/08/10

After speaking to a class today I asked if anyone had questions and when one student raised his hand I got very excited because they very rarely ask questions. “Yes?!” “Your bata [white lab coat that teachers wear here] is buttoned wrong.” I looked down and sure enough I had mis-buttoned my bata by one button. Shoot.
Yesterday the students in my first period class had been dead to the world, so I made them all stand up and dance around for a minute to wake up a little. When I do stuff like this they actually think I’m crazy. Today when I walked in they greeted me so loudly that my ears rang so I joking said that at least they were already awake today and we wouldn’t have to dance to wake up, but they responded “no! We want to dance!”
During the 20 minute break in classes a couple of my students came up to me with a battered picture book of “The Three Billy Goats Gruff” and asked me to explain the story to them. I have no idea how to say troll, or monster even, in Portuguese so that was difficult to explain, but I began to relate what was happening on each page to them. A lot of students are very interested in English, plus anything the white teacher does is a spectacle, so by the end of the book I had a large group of kids around me listening to my rendition of the story. And apparently I remember a very different version than the one I read to them.