Ok, elaborating...

I’m loving teaching Form I because it’s a perfect storm of me knowing what I’m doing this time around with their syllabus, and them just being awesome. They’re just totally willing to humor me in my seeming craziness, and will ask clarifying questions instead of giving me blank stares (ahem… Form IIIB). Just the fact that they will actually say “no” loud enough that I can hear it when I ask if they understand, is huge.

But in an interesting turn of events, half of Form III has turned out to be fun as well! We had an excellent period with Form IIIA this week.

We were teaching past tense “if” clauses, which are for “unlikely situations. First we had to teach the meaning of unlikely, so me being who I am, I had to give them some sassy examples like “if all the dodgers of Form IIIA came to class, that would be an unlikely event.” It was hilarious then to see the light bulbs going on because they would get this smirk like they were thinking “oh, wouldn’t it be funny if I said this?” When we asked for examples, then, some of the students threw some sass back at us, which I loved. One said “If boys at MASS wore skirts,” a delightful throwback to our essay lessons.

In the middle of the lesson, we taught the grammar of these “if” clauses by making chains, starting “If we all CAME to class, we WOULD LEARN more. If we LEARNED more, we WOULD PASS our exams,” etc. Changing those tenses was pretty tricky, but they understood the idea. To end the class, we did chains like that starting with “If I had a billion shillings” (the rough equivalent of a million dollars), and had a good time with their answers. My part of the chain ended up being “If I moved to Dar-es-Salaam, I would wear trousers every day.” Hehe.