M - I - Crooked Letter - Crooked Letter- I....

After lunch today, we came back to the Elefante Brancho campus to the CIEL language school.  Here German, Spanish, French, and English are taught as foreign languages.  We were there to give short presentations about some aspect of American culture to the English classes that were meeting in the evening.

We took our mandatory tour, listened to the welcome presentation, and it was all very good, but the whole time, my mind was on the students.  This whole trip, more and more, my heart has been turning back to EFL and how much I loved doing it, how great it was to be an EFL teacher.  I could not wait to be in the class and meet the students, to see what they were like, to watch them work with their target language.

We were ushered in pairs to our respective classes, and our group of students was fantastic.  They were interactive.  They were not afraid to ask questions.  They laughed at and with us, which was to be expected and was a great relief.  Nothing is worse than a class that doesn't laugh when I'm trying to be amusing.  They were tolerant of technology glitches.  It was great.

Just like teens everywhere, they were intensely curious about life in my country.  I have never met a teenager who wasn't curious.  This is what makes the problems we're having with education everywhere such a mystery to me.  Teens want to know EVERY FREAKING THING.  How can we get them to realize that school is the place to scratch that itch?  How can we change what we are doing in schools to channel that natural need they have to know into a the beneficial need to know everything?

I could have stayed there with them for hours.  I was having that much fun.  Nothing energizes me faster than a responsive class.  They had business to attend to, though, and we needed to get out of the way.  We left, all bright and cheerful, chatty about our visits, happy as a flock of little teaching larks with our brief encounter.  I don't know what they got out of it, but I hope they took something positive other than just hearing a native speaker talk.  I hope in some way, even if it was only learning the childhood song I used for the title of this post about spelling Mississippi, some learning came from it.  It would be unfair if all the good in the encounter was just on my side of the desk.