Tonight was my last night covering Green Pepper's FCE class. We started by going over the homework, a recent New York Times article on how sushi has been perverted for the American market (sushi is huge in Moscow) with fifteen words blanked out (exorbitant, pact, fraternizing, globs, depletion...I gave them a separate sheet with the words and parts of speech in random order. They could unfold the sheet to see the definitions too, if they got stuck. I used the same thing for Aubergine's advanced class the other day. I had them do it in class, which was a bad idea because it took forever and people got bored. I knew I should have given it for homework, but there was a little devil on my shoulder saying "This could fill LOADS of time.")

After talking in groups about the article and everybody's opinions on sushi, we did some stuff with abstract nouns in relative clauses (the way in which..., cases where..., situations where..., reasons why...), then finished up with a surprisingly rousing game of team scrabble. It was neck and neck for a while, but then Irina, Tatiana, and Mariana put an "x" on a triple-word-score adjacent to an "e" and an "o," for "ex" and "ox" and a total of 54 points. Killer. Ksenya and other Irina almost countered fabulously with "exorbitant" across the bottom (I let students have 10 letters instead of 7). I think there was some fishing in the bag going on with that one though. Plus it didn't quite fit on the board.

At the end of class they thanked me and said the lessons had been interesting. I was trying not to feel inadequate comparing my four months of teaching experience with Green Pepper's decades, but when I think about it, my estimation of my own teachers definitely wasn't correllated to age and experience. I thought Mr. Ryan and Ms. Reinthaler were equally great high school math teachers, even though she was 50 and he was 26 and once commented that watching her teach was "like watching Babe Ruth." Ms. Reinthaler could explain calculus so clearly that you wondered why you hadn't thought of it yourself, but Mr. Ryan had a wonderful spark that came, I think, from being so close to his own process of discovery. (I guess I can't exactly compare myself to that because our subject matter is so different, but I'm discovering how to teach and experimenting with things and not taking it for granted that I can go in there and wing it and they'll be happy, and I think they appreciate that.)

And there's the danger, as Artichoke put it, of aging as a teacher and "getting used to people having to listen to you." He thinks that's why Green Pepper relates to people how he does. Artichoke and I went over to GP's for a glass of wine on laundry night a few weeks ago, GP got going on something, and Artichoke and I pretty much listened for an hour or so. ("That man could talk the ears off a donkey" -'Choke, once we left) There must be a personality-type that's prone to that (Pear has been teaching just as long, but hasn't succumbed to that). GP reminds me a lot of one of my college professors (thankfully only one) who had been teaching for decades and felt the same sort of entitlement to fill your head with whatever. (For some reason it was only me that minded him, other people thought he was jovial or something).

My Tuesday and Thursday nights are freed up now that GP gets his class back, which is nice. Noon to 2:15 and that's it.