still and I took a 12 day trip to Egypt's watefront to improve my
mother's and mine health. As tourists we applied for visa at the
airport and got it in no time. The flight lasted 4 hours to take us to
completely different world. It was my 4th visit to egypt's red sea, my
mom's 3rd. I wanted to improve my German there speaking with tourists
on the beach but spoke only with one German psychiatric hospital nurse
for 45 mins. There were Italian and BRITIsh retirees on the beach.
I'll be back to Norfolk in a month. I'm missing my regular schedule
living on ODU campus and speaking English with many students. My car
will be repaired when I get back to Norfolk (hopefully).
I tried to tutor in English a six year old girl, Polina, a couple of
times. It was my first time teaching a kid - I used communicative
approach with total physical response. I asked her to stand up, sit
down, walk around the room, hand me stuff. Started teaching her ABC.
Played with her by throwing a toy bunny back and forth and made her
say a word she remembered in English, in my turn I also said a word
while hurling a toy for her to catch. I taught her body parts and she
had to remember them. Because I had to travel a lot with my mom to
visit my relatives in Ukraine and take vacation to Egypt, I stopped
tutoring English to my friend's daughter Polina.
I met my high school teacher of geography- school principal who
switched to teaching german in private high school in my neighborhood.
I visited and observed his German teaching methods once. It was a
teacher fronted method that he used with his students. he's been
teaching the same group of students for 7 years so that they were
pretty fluent speaking and writing German. He relied heavily on
traditional grammar and translation methods and strategies. The class
was rather small with around 8 students. I'd better catch him again in
school to have him introduce me to English teachers there.
Even though I'm afraid of flying planes, I think I need to grab the
cheap plane ticket for 99 $ round trip to fly either to Georgia
(Europe) or Azerbajdzan for a linguistic trip. My parents may not
understand my wanderlust, although they approved of my flying to
Germany which failed because of my ineligibility to get a German visa
in Ukraine.
