Watch out!

Inshallah, this is my last week teaching Technical English. We've spent the week working on writing paragraphs, which has been a lot of fun but also pretty challenging (see last entry). To teach the students to write a topic sentence, I would write an outline on the board and request a opener. It worked pretty well as I picked really controversial subjects (like "Should the USA have invaded Iraq?") and write pro and con arguments. This would undouptly start a plethora of angry sentences against the action that I would read out loud, agree with, then coldly reject. Eventually the students would get the idea and finally someone would write "There are a lot of different opinions about whether the US should have invaded Iraq" and they would get a round of applause and a prize. Perhaps in a month we will have worked them down to supporting sentences.

Next week I will go back to teaching Basic English again. Some of the new students just bribed me with chocolate cake and coke in a plea for me to be "easygoing" with them. (a very popular term here to to the fact that it is highlighted in the Cambridge Interchange Series that everyone in Yemen uses for teaching English). They were lucky because it was chocolate cake, so their little scheme will probably work pretty well. Actually, they are not my students but rather the students of another teacher. However, many of them approached me and asked me to teach them instead, saying that they had "heard about me." I was really flattered!!! I told them to speak with the boss and hopefully there will be a switch, otherwise, I am sure that whoever I teach will bring much joy. Here is a washed-out picture of me with two of my hopefully-future students. The one on the left is the Yemenese version of John Travolta.

As a goodbye gift to my technical students, I have prepared an exam where they have to write "should" and "could" statements based on the safety icons like this one, to allow them to practice writing statements such as "You shouldn't get to close too the rotating bar or your body could get sucked into the machinery and unless you are Elastagirl you are pretty screwed." (To my students: if you write that on your exam you flunk.) Took me the better part of an hour to find some really gory ones, and this one was my favorite. Hopefully they will find it amusing on what is generally a pretty dreary test day, especially considering that it is their Saturday. (We work Saturday to Thursday, with only Fridays off. Thank God for religion.)

In my hunt for icons, I came across this classic: http://www.safenow.org/. Brought back some good memories.