“You will learn.”

[A teacher hands me a sheet of paper, covered in Cyrillic writing.]
Teacher: “Take.”
[I take it.]
Teacher: “It is Ukrainian song, “Гарбуз” [Har-booz]* You will learn.”
Me: “Oh. Okay…”
Teacher: “You will learn. I will ask, and you will sing. Then you will learn next song.”
Me: “Okay. Sounds good.”

OH Ukraine!
*Гарбуз = pumpkin

This week in Gymnasium #2:

CrAzY PiZzA
I teach 3 10th form classes, 10А, 10Б, and 10В.
10Б is mostly indifferent to my presence.
10В is quiet, but they all generally work hard, and do reasonably well on class tasks.
10А is ostenibly the “best” 10th form class – however, until today getting them to say more than one word was like pulling teeth from the mouths of angry cats. They tend to stare at me with a look that mixes fascination, distrust and outright fear.

Generally I teach 10A with another teacher, but today she was absent, so I flew solo.

Our current topic is food, which the students (and myself) find phenomenally boring, and mostly irrelevant (Honestly, they don’t need to be able to describe traditional British cuisine. Most Brits I know can’t even do that.)

So today, I decided to go off-script and try to energize them
“How?” You ask.

In two words: CrAzY PiZzA (I wrote it that way on the board – they loved it.)

As a class, we talked through the process of making pizza… but not just any pizza… CrAzY PiZzA! It may sound quite silly, but they absolutely loved it. Formerly silent students were shouting ingredients, and everyone was laughing. We drew the massive CrAzY PiZzA on the board, and added everyone’s ideas.

In the end, our pizza had: pineapples, sausage, cheese, garlic sauce, mayonnaise, kiwi, banana, mushrooms, Christmas pudding, salo (raw pig fat), beets (they ARE Ukrainian, after all), bacon, eggs, pumpkin, grated carrots and currants.

Also this week in Gymnasium #2:

Fifth grader: “I want to suck-eed.”
Me: “Uh… no. You want to succeed.”

This just happened:

Farewell, sweet 1 tsp.! You shall be missed.

So, little measuring spoons that have magnets are great! Except… they have magnets… so they stick to things like… say… pans. And sometimes, you don’t see them. And you put your pan in your toaster oven.
Toaster oven: 1 – 1 tsp.: 0

OH Ukraine!