Interesting happenings at school today

Today was an interesting day at school, well parts of it anyways. I was grading writing samples that the sixth graders had written in preparation for their exam in May. Some weren't so great and others were amazing! There were lots of their little translations that made me laugh but I'll just tell you about my favorite. The prompt for this writing sample was to talk about a holiday that's celebrated here in Spain- some kids chose Christmas, Las Fallas, Valentines' Day, Fathers' Day, Dia de la Hispanidad, etc. One kid chose to talk about Halloween. I thought this was a bit ironic since they don't actually celebrate Halloween in Spain, it's just all the study abroad students/foreigners and some stuff we do at the bilingual schools. The kid's description was decently accurate for the level of speech, but they did invent words (most of the kids do). I was reading the description and all of a sudden I read "we falseydress"!!! I started laughing at the kids around me kinda gave me skeptical looks but I couldn't help it. Falseydress is an excellent verb, I like it.

One of the other topics was to invent a story- the only restriction was that the story had to start with something like "Jo looked at the map and decided to go left." Some kids wrote about finding a store, others wrote about a trip to Mexico or Brazil (those countries are to the left of Spain on a map!), etc. but my favorite was this kid who's really creative and very smart. He actually didn't have any mistakes in his whole paper and I was blown away by his creativity. He talks about how Jo went left and the road she was going on led to a forest and she got scared and decided to turn back but the road behind her was changing and it was a giant wall that she couldn't climb so she couldn't go back but had to keep walking. Then the road in front of her started changing again as she was walking and all of a sudden everything was brown and she was in a desert and she died. [at this point I was like woah that's crazy! but the story goes on...] That was in (some year a few hundred years ago) and recently an archeologist was researching in the desert. They found Jo's body and took it back for examination. They found that that Jo was actually just really drunk and crazy. How creative is that?! I was impressed by the creativity and the fact that his English was perfect. I do however think it's a bit odd that an 11 year old is writing about drunk people...

Also today in school I got another tutoring job! One of the teachers is studying to pass her English teaching exam in June so that she can get a permanent job rather than just temporary ones every year. She has to learn 25 different topics for a written exam and then defend a teaching style in front of a panel. She wants me to record the topic outlines that she's written so that she can just listen to the pronunciation over and over again to help herself and she wants us to do a conversation hour to practice her fluency. Not really sure how I feel about being one of those people on a recording, but it'll help her out and it's something really easy for me to do. So yay for more income :) no worries I'm sure it will all be spent on trips and food!