Class - Day 16 (Week IV)

What a truly miserable raining day. It’s now been two cold, windy, rainy days and I have had enough. I am putting my foot down in protest. Now I am fully aware that it won’t make a difference but I feel I must make my discontent know.

Other than the weather the day has been very nice. We had a lesson on using music as a learning tool in class and it was fabulous. Julie, our teacher, is always wonderfully animated and today she had fantastic, fun ideas that she’s used with her ESL students before. I am so excited about using it in one of my classes I’m just not sure exactly how right this moment. I’ll give it some thought.

One of the exercises Julie had us do was to take a list of random words she placed on the board and, with our group of three, write a short story using every word. Yes, this does have something to do with music because all the words came from the song “Warwick Avenue” by Duffy and she played the song for us after we had written and shared our story.

Well you can all imagine how excited I was about this exercise and I was fortunately grouped with the simply adorable Darren and Ben who, as a side note, are young enough to be my sons. (I know, I’m getting so old.) But they're great guys and I am sure their mothers are so proud of them and that includes Eoin and Louis as well. They're all really intelligent, resrespectful, kind and funny young men who make us all laugh throughout the day. It’s a good thing Julie is so patent and has a good sense of humor herself or these last three weeks would have been torture for her. Our afternoon teacher, Karen also made the best of our class’s antics and time together has flown by.

Anyway, Darren, Ben and I, in a matter of 5 minutes, used the following words to create a rather fabulous story.

baby ● loving ● together ● departed ● broken hearted ● tube ● tear ● promise ● leaving ● out of my mind ● confused ● hurt ● train ● answers ● spent

Since my pride for what we created is just bursting out of me I’m sharing our creation with you:

It’s a dark evening on the London Tube. A couple walks slowly together on the platform. Once of them is leaving, never to return. Broken hearted she was out of her mind with grief as she thought back over the loving memories they had shared and the time they spent in London’s East End. The train rolled slowly into the station, a tear rolled down her face. “Baby, we just can’t be together.” he casually said. Slightly confused and hurt, Lily watched as the train departed and sped of leaving her alone on the platform leaving her with questions and no answers. She made a promise to never to love again!

During the morning break I went to the dollar store (Euro store here in Ireland) and bought a set of juggling balls. I'm going to use them in my teacher practice on Friday for a warm up exercise. I love the Euro store because you can get everything for 1 - 3 Euro's and they have a great selection of stuff from housewares to school supplies. When I got back to class I learned something new about Eoin and Roisin that they both can juggle. Eoin even tried a few elaborate maneuvers but it turned out looking a bit like he was dancing the Funcky Chicken.

After lunch it was Maura’s turn to do her teacher practice 5 and her lesson and reading and writing was on the theme ghost stories. She was so incredible and she had them write their own version of a ghost story and interestingly enough each student wrote a happy ending where the ghost was welcomed by the people and asked to come back again or something like that. I think no matter what part of the world you come from (in this class Spain, Japan and Afghanistan were represented) people just want happy endings to all life’s little dramas.

I’m off to the gym with Jean Marie which will be nice and hopefully dinner afterwords because I’m in school at the moment but am totally famished. I think it’s a hormonal thing, at least that’s what I’m telling myself. I mean Vince was kind enough to bring me a hot chocolate just an hour or so my mind should be on studying and not food but alas it’s not and there isn’t much I can do about it.