Fact: My Students are the Best

Yesterday, my Program Manager Gülnara müəllim from Peace Corps came to my school to meet with my counterparts and me and to observe some of our classes.  One of the classes that she sat in for was the 11th grade class that Tamilə müəllim and I teach together.  Every week we have this class twice and all year we have had a system where one day we use the textbook and the other day we read a novel (I was lucky enough to be able to buy class sets of books from the US with a donation from our local shopkeeper).  In the fall we read Charlotte’s Web and now we are reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  While the students liked Charlotte’s Web, they LOVE Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and yesterday they were literally cracking up talking about it.  As we do every class, they gave summaries of the chapters they read at home, answered reading comprehension and analysis questions, and then read a new chapter of the book.  Throughout the whole lesson they were just generally having a great time, laughing and joking around IN ENGLISH!  It was funny to watch.  At the end of the lesson, my manager asked the students to stay after class for a minute.  She told them that she was so impressed with them and that in all of her travels around Azerbaijan (and she visits a lot of schools to decide where to place volunteers and again to visit volunteers), she has never seen an 11th grade class like them.  And then for the rest of the day she kept repeating how wonderful they were, asking me how we got them to such a high level, and was likening their work to college classes she took.  Tamilə müəllim and I were so proud.  And I couldn’t agree with Gülnara müəllim any more, my kids really do rock!  In a system where it is almost encouraged to not come to school when you are in 11th grade, my students come to every class and I am blown away by not only their level of English, but their insights into the books we read.  I really wish you could all meet them!

It's Writing Olympics Time!

Last week we did our annual Peace Corps English writing competition "Writing Olympics."  Basically we get kids grades 6-11 (and university students, but I don't teach university) and give them a few questions to choose from.  They write essays that are judged first nationally in Azerbaijan and then we send the winners to the international round (which includes Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Moldova...and I think a few other countries).

The main criteria for the essays is creativity, which is very difficult for my students.  No matter how hard I tried to help them write more exciting essays during our practice writing activities, I got the same boring essays from all of my students.  Usually they write something about helping poor people because, as I found, they can make anything about how you should help poor people (I guess that's a message that is really drilled into them).  Finally, in one of our last practice sessions, I finally got an interesting essay from one of my kids.  I had given my 6th grade students the start of a story about a magic, blue cat named Joe and they had to finish the story.  While they were writing, one of my students randomly asked me to translate "bığ" which in English is "mustache."  Hearing this, another student decided to use the word mustache in his essay and wrote some strange story about how the cat magician stole a man's mustache and gave it to another guy.  The mustache then became gold and the man was never poor again.  While it was a totally bizarre story and still talked about helping poor people, I was really excited that it wasn't just the same old stuff as everyone else.  With this in mind, on the day of the competition, I gave my students a list of words from the 6th grade textbook that I thought were semi-interesting.  I figured that maybe if they had interesting words in their heads they would write an interesting essay (makes sense right?).  When I gave them the list I reminded them about the mustache story and how different it was…  Here is one of the results (a few spelling mistakes corrected), answering the question "Which would you rather be, a bird or a fish? Why?":

I want a bird.  I fly on the sky. I stole everything. I want a bird and I eat a reindeer.  Reindeer is very sweet.  I fry reindeer.  I want a bird and I eat people.  The people die me.  The people fry me.  The people eat me.  I carve to the people.  I go to my bird’s home.  The people call magician.  Magician made me carve my nose.  I gave to magician my nose.  Magician gave my nose to the people.  The people are very rich.

Can you guess which word was on my list?  And which other vocabulary words from this year the student remembered on his own that were entirely inapplicable?

My word: reindeer

Other vocabulary words: to fry, to carve, magician

So I didn't exactly get the winning story I was hoping for, but I at least got a kick out of the randomness of this essay!