Class photo

Today was the last day of model school. I almost didn't go because I seem to have gotten this viurs that is going around and am not feeling well. It was more a desire not to have to deal with the consequences of missing a session rather than any great need to say goodbye to the students that was my prime motivation for getting out of bed. But I was very glad I made the effort. We began this last class by giving out certificates for attendance--even though we gave an exam and quiz grades were never really an issue. And this was not a class anyone was taking for credit; these students were middle school teachers primarily there to improve their English skills and perhaps learm some teaching techniques. After the certificates were handed out it was picture time. This it turned out seemed to be a bigger deal than the certificates. After taking a few group photos, everybody seemed to want to get a picture with the teacher. We thought we would cut down the time by having half take a picture with each of us, but it turned out everyone wanted their picture taken with both and then someone got the bright idea of having their picture taken with both of us and everyone jumped on that bandwagon. It was quite a hoot to be that in demand. We invited some students to the campus teahouse afterwards and about half a dozen came but they seemed most interested in having some issues of pronunciation clarified and it made me wish I'd done more of this in class. In particular, they were curious about how to pronounce certain phonetic symbols. Unless you are a linguist you are probably not familiar with our phonetic symbols. But if you look in any decent dictionary you will see next to the word some funny looking symbols that actually tell you how to pronounce the word. We don't really need this because we all know how to pronounce words, but for someone learning the language these symbols are the key, and the students could not believe I did notknow what an inverted 'e' (one phonetic symbol) stood for or how it sounded. I had to get them to show it to me in a word. They also mentioned how structured the educational system is here at least at the level they teach and they appreciated the fact that our Western teaching methods emphasized more discussion than lecture. But since most of them haver around sixty students per class they said that this was not a realistic teaching strategy for them. So even though my university class was cancelled and I truly regret not having the opportunity to finish out that class it was a real eye opener to spend some time with these young middle school teachers.