Sunday, October 16, 2011

Class and Greek Bakery

So I had an enjoyable lesson today.  On the way there I met two of my students, apparently their previous class had been cancelled because the teacher was sick and apparently substitute teachers aren't a thing here so they said they were free to do whatever they wanted.  They might not have been telling the truth, but I think they were.  So we spoke in English and I asked them about yesterday's lesson, what they liked about it etc.  In general here it would be tough to have a conversation with high school students in English (with one or two exceptions, and these were not even the most exceptional students in my class, but still good students), so it was nice to engage them in a real conversation. In today's lesson I used optical illusions where you have one picture but two possible interpretations.  for example:


The picture can be an old women, we can see her nose, and chin which is buried in the fur of her coat.  Or you can see a young woman who is looking away from our perspective so we only see her neck and ear clearly.

The idea was that the students would have to speak about what the picture 'might' be and what it also 'could' be making use of the modals of possibility.

Then I went to the Greek bakery in town and brought some sweets to my tatik in my old building.


We had eight, but between the two of us we at 5, though I offered her one for later, and she gave me some grapes and plums that she threw right on top of those guys (removed for the picture).  The stuff on the left is gata, an Armenian sweet-bread, basically dough, honey and sugar.  The two on the right are a lot like gata but with powdered sugar and cream in them.

I spoke with tatik (whose name is Satik.  Satik Tatik!) about the lesson I did, and then proceeded to do the activity in Armenian, though I focused on just the nouns (the modals are a bit weird, it's a suffix sortof, I don't really understand them, I might've been able to give it a shot, maybe I'll try later).

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