Lessons and Gossip

Yesterday I met with two new private students. Unlike others, these two didn’t find me in some random-and-vaguely-creepy method, like calling my school after seeing my name in the newspaper. The first is the sister of Oxford School’s director, Anita, and the second is the daughter of my contact teacher Kati. I’m pretty sure that half the reason Kati wants me to teach her is so that Kati can keep an eye inside my house. But since I’m desperate for both money and English conversation, we both get something from it. Not to mention, during our first lesson yesterday, which was supposed to be only half an hour, we talked for an hour and a quarter. Mostly we talked about ourselves and people we know in common, which brought out a good deal of interesting information about the Kassai teachers, the Varga teachers, and the various Szolnoki Americans.

The second gossip-provoking lesson is one I’ve been doing all week with 7th and 8th graders. They work in groups and each group gets an envelope containing 12 pictures of The Happy Couple. Each picture is some small situation, like couple meeting at party, couple at restaurant, couple getting married, couple holding baby, couple breaking up, etc. So the groups make up stories, tell them to the class, and the class votes on the best one (on a side note, the you-vote-for-the-best was my greatest idea this week - it actually makes them listen to each other).

Anyway, most of the classes made up perfectly typical stories. Until today, the 7abT class (this is why I love them): after making up almost-normal stories, they continued playing with the pictures, and made up stories about various celebrities, their classmates (two of their classmates are sleeping together - 7th graders!), and one disturbing story about how a classmate had been given a 1 by one of Kassai’s teachers because he turned down her advances. Yikes.