February 28, 2012

Another beautiful day greeted me today. While waiting for the mini-van to take me to the PedInst, the SUV from the Mercy Operation NGO stopped by and Johan reminded me that he had a DVD waiting for me with the photos from my presentation there last month. I promised to stop by after my class. I was about to walk into the PedInst when one of the students from the interpreter’s program stopped me to ask if I would excuse him from classes as he had a headache. I told him I had a terrible cold and was there to teach, so why couldn’t he attend classes? He begged to excuse his absence and I told him I didn’t know what the procedure was for doing so and walked away. When I walked into my classroom, there were only three students from the interpreter’s group and I indicated to the class monitor that I would not be teaching a class to three students and to be please go and see the dean about it. The dean walked in and personally marked 17 students as absent and told me they’d be punished for walking away from the class. The monitor indicated they were afraid of being in a class where English was the medium of instruction.

Nigora was late for her class, since she teaches at a private language institute, and the dean arranged for her students to join mine just for today. I tried to get the students to introduce themselves by saying their names and using an adjective that began with the same letter as their first names. After some hesitation, a few were able to do it, but then one young woman refused to play because she admitted she didn’t know what an adjective was. We played a game of collocations and I gave them a list of items to play “Odd One Out” the following day.

Decided to enjoy the sunshine and walked to the stationery store to buy additional paper for laminating cards in preparation for the workshop on Saturday. I was really hungry and didn’t feel like eating soup again. There wasn’t a single restaurant that I could think of that I wanted to eat at then. I made my way back home and reheated the remaining plov and had it with some salad. Caroline came back early as the conference was over and she needed to do some serious packing to be ready for her departing flight.