When I am in the States, I frequently look at the calendar and wonder where the past month has just gone. Time passes so quickly, the days and weeks hardly stand out from each other. But I just opened my teaching journal for inspiration for my blog and I was struck with disbelief at the date of the first entry, February 24. When I think about how much my students have improved, or how much information we have covered, or how much impact they have had on me, it’s overwhelming. I don’t understand how all of this could have happened in just one month. It just feels like so much more.
This week was my last at NEED, the Network for Environment and Economic Development, the non-profit where I work, but before I get to the story of how my work wrapped up (which will be in another entry), I’ll share some highlights of the past few weeks in the classroom.
The students requested that we sing some English songs, so I thought a lot about what kinds of songs the 16 Burmese students might like and be able to sing. The songs needed to be slow enough so we could follow the lyrics, fast enough to hold the students’ interest, and recent enough that if they were hanging out with an American, they should get a relatively positive response if they mentioned it. And ideally, they should be able to relate to the music. I found some videos for pop songs on YouTube for that consisted only of words appearing on a dark screen, and the next day in class, we set up a projector, laptop, and speakers. The first song I played was one I’ve always loved: “Say” by John Mayer, about getting up the courage to say difficult things. The class definitely understood the message, and within a short time, they were all singing the chorus in perfect harmony. It was such a powerful moment, I had to focus entirely on the screen so I wouldn’t cry.
Another day in class, we were talking about telephones and went over some key phrases that Americans (and maybe Canadians) use. But I thought we needed to put it into practice, so I grabbed two rolls of masking tape, declared them to be our telephones for the day, and so we made “calls” across the classroom by holding one roll to our ears and tossing the other roll to a random student at another table. It was incredibly funny and a total surprise to hear what they came up with. Some students pulled out vocabulary words and phrases that I didn’t know they knew, like “long time, no see” and “hangover” (which I jokingly explained as “I drank too much last night” or “I make poor decisions”). I also taught them some new Incredibly Important Vocabulary words, like “dude,” “sweet,” “awesome,” and “suck.” I figured they’re likely to hear those words, so they should know what they mean. Somewhere, Ashton Kutcher is smiling… and somewhere else, my former English teachers are weeping.
One of the biggest and most hilarious challenges was pronunciation. Learning how to make certain sounds can be a difficult and embarrassing experience, so we all laughed about it, knowing we looked like complete idiots as we made exaggerated sounds. It was very strange for me how to explain how to make certain sounds, since I haven’t thought about this for a long time, if ever. If you’ve never experienced either learning or teaching completely new sounds, imagine trying to explain how to make a bubble with bubblegum to someone who’s never tried before—it’s a bizarre thing to think about. We spent a long time working on the sounds for “dee,” “tea,” and “the,” and concentrating on words where the “th” sound is voiced (like “this”) and when it is unvoiced (like “three). I put together a tongue-twister for them: “I think that those three trees are thick” and it kept us all laughing for a long time. Side note: Burmese and Thai people (like many other Asian communities) have trouble with r’s and l’s, too, and at a market one day, a shopkeeper asked me if I wanted a “Miller” (she meant “mirror”), which first confused me… and then made me laugh a lot.
The final story I’ll share is a simple one. I found a version of Mad Libs online that was geared towards ESL students, and after doing a little more review of the parts of speech, we filled in the blanks with fantastically random adverbs, adjectives, and prepositions. When we were all done, we started to read the story, about a new Olympic version of tag, and I discovered a flaw in the plan that I didn’t anticipate: none of my Burmese students knew what tag was. I tried explaining it in the classroom, but I could tell they weren’t getting it, so we all went outside in the blazing sun for something I’ll call Grammar Freeze Tag. I wasn’t sure how it was going to go (after all, my students are between 17 and 31 years old), but I had a feeling they would like it. We had one tagger, and to stay safe from being tagged/frozen, you had to say a word in the chosen category. We started with animals, then we moved on to verbs and adjectives. This game brought out so many giggles and fits of laughter, and we played as long as we could out in the heat. When we were done, we triumphantly went back into the classroom, ready for more adventures in grammar. It was a beautiful thing.
Tongue Thai'ed 