When I finished my last class with the year 1 children, I felt quite emotional, it was a lovely class. I had found 18 English books suitable for their age about the school so after practicing their song for Friday and having a reprise of Walking Through the Jungle which they did months ago and which they mostly remembered but still cannot name the animals that they have just sung about, I let them loose on the books and it was nice and calm while I did some one on one work with a few of them. Then I kind of realised that was my last session with that group. Then I went and had my last session with the year zero children and they too were entranced when I let them loose on some books suitable for them. They even sat quietly or joined in appropriately when I read them a story. This story was a slight accident. I was printing out some books for the year 2 students, and kept getting it wrong, usually when I do this I give the resulting over print of individual pages to the younger children to colour, but this time I also read the book to the children as it had words that they were familiar with plane, boat, train. And it was so lovely. I do not know if it is because I am going at the end of this week or because there are less children in at present, but I just felt relaxed with them and they loved the noises we made for all the different transport system. This was how I had imagined class would be with them and it happens now just at the end. I still feel torn but talking to my son for the first time in weeks and hearing of his plans for November and my strong desire to join him doing some of these things does make me wonder.
One very nice thing happened today. The music teacher and my head suddenly hurtled out, I had no idea why in fact I thought that there might be a problem, but when she returned about an hour later, she was really relaxed and happy. She had been to a sort of nation day nearby and there she had met people who told her about apple projects and she even met a man who could tell her about and here we had mimes, guesses, snakes and then finally I realised what she was telling me, worms. She has met a man who can help us to get worms. Her genuine pleasure and relief makes me feel that some of the problems I have been having re the apple project, composting etc, is just that it seems a bit overwhelming to her. She has all this stuff on her plate and then this foreigner comes with new ideas that really seem alien, but now meeting local people who can help her, makes a great difference. I would feel the same to be honest and in fact one of the reasons I am hesitant about coming back is that I feel overwhelmed with what I would have to do if I came back, this year has been hard, but it is probably much easier this year,when no one knew what they were doing, but next year there will be more classes, more students, more everything.
A very elegant young woman came into school today and confidently asked in English how are you? Turned out she is a relative of one of our teachers, her grand neice, and she works as a private English tutor but all over Central Asia. It felt very strange suddenly having someone other than my head speaking with me at school and explaining things to me, I wanted to say I have been here some time, so sort of know what you are telling me, but then we started talking about children and language acquisition so that was quite nice.
I will probably curse my failure to take more pictures of the children just doing every day stuff. I grabbed some shots of my kruski students but these days only three turn up.
It is still cold, so really hope things warm up for Friday. Time to go and find out if there is any dinner tonight as it is past 7.
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