A Saturday in September

I've been up early today because my landlady Gulnar will be coming to re-hang some curtains in my kitchen. I have a belief that if my place is spic-and-span, she will expedite the hookup to gas for this house for both heating and cooking. So far I've washed the kitchen floor and swept down cobwebs from around several windows. I'll clean the hall entrance and might even wash a few window panes. Back in the states, it's Fall cleaning time.

I also plan to work on a couple more posters for next week's English classes. My "What is the Weather Today?" poster was well received during the first 2 days of school. (Well of course it was: there were no textbooks or anything else to engage the students or teachers.) I'm thinking I'll add a bit of grammar ala Present Simple tense, Past Simple, and Future Simple. For older students, I'm also creating a thermometer poster and asking them to watch TV for the temperature forecasts for Masalli. Motivation? How do they know what to wear to school? Or what is most important information for planting tomatoes? Or . . . something about climate change!

I'm not sure what's got me stirred up about teaching this Fall. I think it's just seeing the lack of motivation or interest by the teachers and wanting to show them how to engage the students. They think it's me and I want to prove to them it's them. Site mate Sally and I put on a week-long teacher training that was poorly attended. We even wondered if teachers know the ranking of the education system is in this country. We're not sayin'!

I plan to use the time without textbooks to do things differently: get all students saying something in English, have them draw words in their copy books to better learn and remember. Most of all, I want to get my grammar-focused teachers to have confidence in themselves to teach at their best. I want them to have successful English students as the reward for improving their teaching efforts.