By far the most significant event of my day today was my new class.
Anything new is fun, almost automatically. At least, anything new is interesting. A break from routine. It wasn’t entirely a new experience. I’ve taught kids before. And I’ve taught at that school before. (I was a bit surprised they called me, because my last experience teaching there was less than positive) But, it was a new group of kids, so it was new.
I was told there would be between 20 and 30 students. There were 11, which was maybe a good thing. With little kids (6 and 7 years old) any one of them can demand all your time at any one moment, and the rest of the class descends into anarchy within seconds.
They were a good bunch, though. Lively, intelligent, cheerful, relatively open to suggestions. Only one knew how to read, but about half of them could spell their own names. One spoke quite good English, because her Dad’s American, but she wasn’t arrogant or show-offy about it. They all knew ‘head and shoulders, knees and toes.’ That seems to be the very first thing Czech kids learn in English. Over half of them could count to ten, and 3 or 4 of them could almost make it to 20.
It was called an “English Club,” and I had them for 3 and a half hours so, as you can well imagine, after an hour or so it was basically just baby sitting, but that’s O.K. It was baby sitting in English.
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