I thought about going home today - about leaving this all because somebody wants to exploit the culture here, somebody else just wants to alleviate their guilt by dumping books, and somebody else wants to make money off of everyone else's desire to learn English. But I took a step back and realized why I see other people for their selfish motives and it's because I'm not seeing their humanity, which is the same as mine, essentially selfish. It's just how we use that selfishness that's the catch.
I graded a lot of my students' projects today - they're writing summaries of 8th grade topics to help their studies for the exams. In addition, they're writing different types of questions and doing presentations which have to include a visual aid of some sort. I can already see how far they've come from last year because many of the groups have clearly sought to understand the material, and their summaries reflect that. They start their presentations tomorrow, and I'm really psyched to see what they come up with.
The biggest challenge with the whole thing so far has been that they don't really know what a "sentence" is. I asked for 5 sentences, and I've received 5 lines, 5 paragraphs, and one of 5 sections. It's so basic a concept to me, I don't know how to explain what a sentence IS, other than that it starts with a capital letter and ends with a period. But they're putting together some excellent questions that drive to the heart of the concepts. I'm planning on compiling their projects into a study guide, and I think it will work really well - they've never had a textbook that has answered questions in it, so it might be hard to show them how to use it, but a wonderful asset at the end of the year.
Peace
John
