This week was an exciting week at our St. Andrew's center, where we teach. On Monday, we taught prepositions and connected them to talking about directions. BPS people may remember the song Mrs. Geraghty taught us that was just various prepositions - well, on Monday all of my students learned the same song. Unfortunately for my dignity, Fernando has a video of it which I'm sure he'll be posting somewhere public in the near future.
After a brief introduction to AMERA (African and Middle Eastern Refugee Assistance) and the ways it could help our students, Tuesday continued the preposition theme, with a brief geography lesson. We brought in (poorly done) copies of the world map and the map of the United States (the African map, unfortunately, was forgotten by the copier and thus was not passed around), and talked about the world using prepositions to describe the placement of countries and continents. Parts of that lesson most likely went over some of the students' heads, but it was fun regardless.
But today was the most exciting. We are supposed to do outings with our students every once in a while, and last week's attempt kind of failed, so we decided to try something a little more ambitious and take our students to the Egyptian Museum, home of the Tutankhamen exhibit. After emphasizing repeatedly in class yesterday that they were all supposed to meet outside the Mogamma (a government building) at 4:30, our first few students found us today at 4:45. We were really worried that none of our students were going to show up, but we ended up taking 12 of them across the street to the museum. After some typically Egyptian drama, we ended up getting all of our students tickets to the museum for only one Egyptian pound per student. I wish I could explain exactly how crazy that was - we had been worried that we would have to pay 60 pounds per student (around 12 American dollars) which is the adult foreigner price, but one of our more charismatic students managed to get the student Egyptian price of only 1 pound (around 20 cents). That exchange was so stereotypically Egyptian that I'm really having trouble finding the words to describe it. As one of my friends put it earlier, Egyptians are just really biased towards foreigners. Not necessarily in a bad way, just in a "oh look at the ATM I can take money from" kind of way.
Anyway, the museum was unbelievably overwhelming. Not in terms of people - we went in around 5 pm, and by that point the museum was close to closing and mostly empty of people. But there was just so much stuff, you can't even process it all. There's little order to be found as you walk in and just are immediately hit by the number of artifacts and sarcophagi and bits of ancient Egyptian everything. But it was unbelievably cool to see the King Tut exhibit, and be surrounded by all that history. I think my students found me hilarious as I fluttered around from display to display getting excited over everything. Dunno how much they really learned, but I think they really enjoyed the experience.
As always, pictures to come eventually!
After a brief introduction to AMERA (African and Middle Eastern Refugee Assistance) and the ways it could help our students, Tuesday continued the preposition theme, with a brief geography lesson. We brought in (poorly done) copies of the world map and the map of the United States (the African map, unfortunately, was forgotten by the copier and thus was not passed around), and talked about the world using prepositions to describe the placement of countries and continents. Parts of that lesson most likely went over some of the students' heads, but it was fun regardless.
But today was the most exciting. We are supposed to do outings with our students every once in a while, and last week's attempt kind of failed, so we decided to try something a little more ambitious and take our students to the Egyptian Museum, home of the Tutankhamen exhibit. After emphasizing repeatedly in class yesterday that they were all supposed to meet outside the Mogamma (a government building) at 4:30, our first few students found us today at 4:45. We were really worried that none of our students were going to show up, but we ended up taking 12 of them across the street to the museum. After some typically Egyptian drama, we ended up getting all of our students tickets to the museum for only one Egyptian pound per student. I wish I could explain exactly how crazy that was - we had been worried that we would have to pay 60 pounds per student (around 12 American dollars) which is the adult foreigner price, but one of our more charismatic students managed to get the student Egyptian price of only 1 pound (around 20 cents). That exchange was so stereotypically Egyptian that I'm really having trouble finding the words to describe it. As one of my friends put it earlier, Egyptians are just really biased towards foreigners. Not necessarily in a bad way, just in a "oh look at the ATM I can take money from" kind of way.
Anyway, the museum was unbelievably overwhelming. Not in terms of people - we went in around 5 pm, and by that point the museum was close to closing and mostly empty of people. But there was just so much stuff, you can't even process it all. There's little order to be found as you walk in and just are immediately hit by the number of artifacts and sarcophagi and bits of ancient Egyptian everything. But it was unbelievably cool to see the King Tut exhibit, and be surrounded by all that history. I think my students found me hilarious as I fluttered around from display to display getting excited over everything. Dunno how much they really learned, but I think they really enjoyed the experience.
As always, pictures to come eventually!
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