I’m going to try something new — we’ll see how well it works out. I’m going to attempt to do a quick, weekly update starting this week! I’m hoping that even if I write something very short and brief, I’ll pack in a little more information than I would otherwise. These days I wait and wait until I have time to sit down and write as much as I want to, but (not surprisingly) I never have enough time to sit down and do justice to the thoughts I want to get out.
So, here’s the first of my weekly updates!
Got a haircut. Every time I’ve gotten a haircut here, I end up with significantly shorter hair than I’d hoped to have. I ask for just a trim, but I think most of the stylists here are unfamiliar with how to cut and style curly hair, and so they cut my hair what seems like a trivial amount, but ultimtely amounts to several inches once my hair is dry and curls up. So, although my hair is still fairly long (past my shoulders), it’s about 3-4 inches shorter than it was last week. Boo. Good thing it grows back, right? Funny though, because I said this six months ago when I got my last haircut, and, just after it had finally grown back, it was time for a trim again and here I am, in the same exact situation I was in six months ago when I walked out of the salon. Sigh.
Some of my students went to Kyiv last weekend and when they returned, I asked them to tell me about their trip. For 99% of them, it was their first time in the capital (which means their first time in such a large city — thus, most of them have never been on a metro, never ridden on an escalator, never been to a museum, etc.) and so, not surprisingly, they had a wonderful time. Here’s the best part, though: they stayed in a hostel where they met several people travelling through Ukraine from different countries (Austria, Brazil, Australia). They were super excited to tell me all about these people that they met because (and this is the good part!)….they spoke in English with these travellers and got to have a real-life conversation with strangers, practising their conversational skills. And they had a converstion! And they were able to explain it to me! And there was this light in their eyes when they were talking, as if they had really realized why they’re studying English! It’s to speak to people — not just to sit around in a classroom and memorize irregular verbs, but to communicate and learn about other cultures and other people.
For most of my students, I’m the first American they’ve ever met. I’m also the first foreigner most of them have ever met. So in one weekend, they went to the capital and met several different foreigners and then had a conversation with those people in English — a language that wasn’t the native language for any of the participants in the conversation. Proof that, whether you like it or not, English is a real lingua franca today. If that’s not motivation to keep teaching English, I don’t know what is.
In other teaching news, got ahold of Bananagrams (awsesome game, especially for teaching English as a foreign language — look it up!) from a friend who wasn’t using it and played an easy version of the game today as a warm-up in some of my classes. My students loved it. I’ve been trying to use a lot of communicative games and activities lately, and I think I’m really starting to fool my students into thinking that they’re not learning when they really are. We played Bananagrams for about 10 minutes and then after that, I collected the tiles. They were distraught and didn’t want to give them back. They started begging me “please…please no lesson…please, more games! Let’s play games!”
Which is funny, because even when we do play games, they’re interactive games to help them learn English 
It reminds me of that cookbook someone came out with a few years ago about how to sneak vegetables into your food so that your kids are eating veggies without realizing it. My students will gladly play games all day long and never realize that they’re learning the whole time.
All this makes me even more motivated to make my lessons fun and interactive, to make them feel like a game, even when they’re not. It seems so obvious and simple, but of course my students like learning more when it’s fun and interesting. Who wouldn’t?
Goal: Continue integrating games and activities into my daily lessons to trick my students into learning!
And finally, running and running. My sitemate Elyse and I have been running together regularly for about two months now and for a while, we’d gotten into a nastly slump, where we couldn’t really seem to run more thn 25 minutes. Or at least, couldn’t run more than 25 minutes and enjoy it. Even our shorter runs just weren’t really very pleasurable — they all felt difficult and painful. But, last week we solidly broke past the 25-minute slump and had a few spectacular 30-minute runs. On Saturday I went for a run that was just downright delightful and then again on Monday, we pushed ourselves and did a fairly hilly, but comfortable 30 minute run.
Goal: Keep this up through the winter! If time, training, and money will allow, I’d like to run a half marathon sometime in March. There are half marathons in Jerusalem, Cyprus, and Prague. So if winter isn’t terrible and I have enough money to get to one of these places, I’m ready to commit. We’ll see how kind Christmas and the winter weather are to me before I make any official decisions
