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!