Cameras In My Face

And I'm not even a movie star! Yesterday, I had my second open lesson at Rakoczi primary school at which a publisher, several Hungarian English teachers, and a camera crew observed. I spent the previous evenings diligently planning for this event as I could detect that Etelka was nervously hoping I would pull through for her school and wow everyone. She even bought a huge bottle of Cola Light for me, knowing it's my favorite.

So I went to work on my musical instruments vocabulary lesson (which turned out to be a hit with the teachers and kids!) Ha, surprisingly. Thank God for "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" by Billy Joel who gave me the lead-in to my lesson. My 6th graders have no idea who he is, but at least now they know a few notes. They had to identify the musical instruments in the song and then at the end of the lesson, they listened one more time and were successfully able to identify MORE instruments after learning the vocab that I presented during the lesson.

Yesterday, I walked home grinning and with a bounce in my step because I had experienced that RARE moment in teaching where you witness the fruits of your labor. Even better was the fact that fifteen other teachers, the camera man, and the publisher witnessed it as well.

This moment pulled me a little more out of my Hungarian winter frustration funk...which had consisted of apartment bound days grumbling about the amount of snow being dumped on the street, monotonous days of teaching (pointless?) lessons, and too-short weekends. What helps even more is that Hungary seems to be experiencing a preview of almost spring weather...

As I live on a hill, the streets are now concrete waterfalls, the melted snow rushing away to collect in puddles that continue to make the bottom of my pants wet.