English Lesson

On Saturday, my training group and I taught an English lesson in the Roma mahala. It went well. I’ve never taught a class before, but we’d received some instruction on lesson planning during one of our prior conferences. We made posters with translations and phonetic pronunciations of basic phrases: “Hello, my name is…” “What is your name?” “I’m from Bulgaria” “Where are you from?” It took 90 minutes to get these sort of down. About 10-15 people attended our lesson. It was held outside and anyone who wanted to could attend. Our students’ ages ranged from a few 5 year olds that just wanted to play with us to a woman in her mid-40s. Some of the kids were sort of familiar with English from school, others really struggled. It was rewarding when I ran into one of the men who’d attended the lesson this morning at the cafe and he said, “hello, my name is…” in English. I’m not sure he would have gotten the “Where are you from” question, but it was neat to hear him speak words in English that he didn’t know prior to our class.