Crazy week

Was it really? Aren't they all kind of crazy these days? The weeks, I mean. People, too, sometimes.

I gave many grades these days, most of them good (am I nice or what?) mainly because most of them "happened" in the sixth grade where things are still somewhat simple and the kids wonderfully motivated. Are these kids different or will they spoil in a year or two? Because I don't see the same in the ninth grade. We have grades from 1 to 5 - 1 meaning "fail" and 5 being the best (excellent). I was almost worried with all those fives in 6A and 6B, but went through the tests carefully again, making sure that I had put everything in them I was supposed to and the kids actually knew all those answers. Yaay!

Can you imagine what the most difficult task was to those eleven-year-olds? Spelling! Yep, English is weird that way. They had to write down a first name and a last name of a person - spelled out by a recorded voice - and it was sooo hard! But since it was only worth two points (out of 64) they could still be very successful without it. And we will revise and repeat and exercise spelling again.

My ninth graders, however, are kind of out of control. Not having anything to hold on except for rules with more or less no consequences when disobeyed (notes to the parents are not considered consequences by these kids, nor is having a serious talk to anyone at school), the class gets very loud and I feel ignored, so I spend plenty of time trying to establish order of some sort with little success. I'm honesty surprised sometimes when I find out that we have actually done something at the lesson.

But how do you speak to someone who cannot listen? Who does not understand he is not being fair to others who do not want to hear his high-pitched noises all the time about this and that, mostly motorcycles and football.

This time I did it. Yay for me!! Even if I say so myself. To be honest, I was hoping for a little bigger success, but still.

On Wednesday there was this football game. Football, because this one is actually played with feet, but you dear Americans out there will understand it better if I say soccer, I guess :) A very important match between Russia and our tiny country Slovenia (population 2 million). Size doesn't matter, LOL! Slovenia won and qualified for the world championship in South Africa next year. Russians are not going.

I don't particularly like football and I hate all the fuss about it and I knew these ninth-graders wouldn't talk about anything else. And yes, their first question was: Did you watch the match? So I gave them two options - either do an exercise on what we are learning at present (IF-clauses type 1), or use the vocabulary I gave them (projected on the white board) to describe the match in past tense. The loudest one was the only one that chose the second option, but he did it. His text was, well.. not excellent, but very good as for him. He even wrote down that our Prime Minister had to clean our football players' football boots. I didn't know that. But he actually promised that if they qualified and was happy to do it.



The Russians, however, didn't take it well. They are demanding a parliamentary investigation on how it could happen, claiming that the game must have been sold. Both presidents watched the match, you know, and cheered for their teams. Medvedyev from Russia and our Danilo Türk.

And our politicians also talked about it. After the parliament session on Tuesday, our Prime Minister said, jokingly, that they had decided that it would be 1:0 for Slovenia. After the game he said he was glad that the footballers respected the government’s decision.

If you want to see how euphoric some people feel, maybe you should watch this: I feel Slovenia (Youtube)

The partying, drinking and all that stuff - well, 'll leave that to your imagination. Not too difficult, I guess.

The week… well, I’m still not sure why I felt it was crazy. Maybe it wasn’t. maybe it’s just me.