Blogger Shorts

Posted on November 15, 2012 by brijerydoo

Sometimes, the stories we have to tell are not enough to fill a whole blog post, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth telling. I have collected a whole bunch of short stories from some of the TLG bloggers that will give you a taste of some of the funny, cute, or strange things that happen in our day to day lives here. Please enjoy.

Mary Ellen: In my 1st grade class we introduced a version of the alphabet song (from the English world CD). Within the first few notes, my little boys were holding out their arms in imitation of traditional Georgian dancing and threatening to start a dance party then and there!

Mary R: I found what I’m pretty sure was a Georgian qanci [Ed.- Drinking Horns] at a street market in Lyon. Wish I could know the history of that journey.

Jason: I love the reaction from students when I tell them the “o” in “hot” sounds like Georgian “ა” instead of Georgian “ო”. I don’t love the teacher’s reaction, which is to explain that I speak American English and that the correct pronunciation is British. That still doesn’t make it “ო”, but they don’t know that. [Ed.- “ა” sounds like “ah” and “ო” sounds like “oh”]

Raughley: Last night I was doing a review of last spring’s lessons with my two private adult students. At the end of the lesson the father of one came upstairs, pitcher of wine in hand. “Gaumarjos akhal tsels–” he paused and smiled, “English!” [Ed.- “Cheers to a new year of…English!”]

Brigid: I told this little boy in my 2nd Grade class that he had an awesome hand writing. He called me over at the end of the lesson, kissed me on the cheek and whispered in my ear “me miqvarkhar”. [Ed.- “I love you”]

Andrew: You know you are in a village in Georgia when you cannot play a proper game of volleyball because the grandfather took the net to go fishing.

Amy: One afternoon, one of my fourth grade boys accompanied me after school into town—on our …mostly silent… walk, we passed a beautiful flowering rosebush and he picked some blooms for me to put in my hair. Then, he climbed a cherry tree and picked a handful of fresh cherries for me. It made my week.

Gladys: A pair of 2^nd graders bashfully gifted me a red pen at the start of class; I don’t think they expected me to turn right around and mark up their half-finished homework with it – the moral conflicts of a teacher.

Neal: After two years of trying to adapt to the Georgian first-name-basis thing, I decided my classes would go much better if I had my students address me formally. This year, at my new school, I don’t answer to “Mas” or “Teacher”, and my students don’t even know my first name. They call me “Mr. Z.”, and it feels awesome.

Dan: Georgian students learn their capital and little ABCs at the same time so I adapted a pairing exercise and put large and little ABCs on post-its on the students backs and asked them to find their friend with the same letter. The post-its did not stick very well but the observing parents solved this by sticking the letters to the students foreheards. They were adorable!

Sabrina: I’ve learned one important thing about teaching this semester: kids (and many adults, apparently) will do just about anything for a sticker. Children who would normally never pick up a pencil in class (except to catapult it into the air) will dutifully copy out workbook exercises every day to get a little “Well done!” or Halloween-themed jack-o-lantern sticker. So, go get those stickers, TLGers!

Shawn: I gave up with lesson planning and decided to just throw paper balls at kids to get them to answer questions. Works better than any ice breaker game I found on the internet to date!

Please share some of your own cute stories, by commenting on this page. We hope you enjoyed this brief encounter with our day to day lives.