Happy New Year!

I hope the next year will bring you all lots of love and pleasant surprises and calm and happy evenings with your family and exciting moments and much much more!

I'm really thankful for the year 2011 because I got to know so many wonderful people and experienced so many new things.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Greetings from stormy Estonia

I haven't written for a long time because it was the end of the second term at school and I was awfully busy. I've probably mentioned this before -- this year I'm the class teacher of a group of 12th-graders and every December the seniors have to organize the Christmas prom.

 The school auditorium two hours before the prom started. 

We decided to make teachers dance with their students just like in the reality show called Dancing with the Stars. So I practiced jive with one of my students for almost a month and I think we did pretty well :)

 Seniors singing... Whenever they sing somewhere together I can't help thinking about their graduation. This will be really tough cause they've been my students for almost 7 years and they are definitely one of the main reasons why I decided to keep working as a teacher.

 Me receiving my present at school on Dec 22nd. In Estonia you have to sing or dance or read a poem to get your present.

Before Christmas I went to church twice cause they had Christmas concerts there and some of my students also sang.

We spent Christmas at my parents' place. Here's me desperately trying to invent a poem in front of Santa on Christmas Eve :D By the way, Red Hot Chili Peppers is going to give a concert in Tallinn in July and I got the ticket :)

There are many other things that have happened. The worst thing is that my brother managed to break my laptop. I took it to an IT specialist today and they said there's a problem with the hard disk. I'm keeping my fingers crossed here and hope they'll manage to recover the files I had there.

 Sunrise we had a week ago

Have to go now, Karel is pretening to be Santa here and I'll have to read a poem to get my present :D Hope you all had peaceful Christmas. I miss you...

Christmas Show 2011

I'm so proud that we managed to pull off another great event - it was the 20th time our school celebrated Christmas with a show and 4th time when we had the Christmas Show on the theatre stage of our town! 

I think the show is improving with every year and it's quite a masterpiece already.

This year the topic was nations and nationalities or UNITY IN DIVERSITY. 

Every class was given a country - it was like lottery. 

Then they had to brainstorm, investigate and write a script. So all the short plays or shows were original pieces of work by the students. All in all, 15 classes of students participated (9th-12th grade) - which is about 450 students in all. Other classes helped to organise, host and record the show. 

To me it seems that this show really helps to create friendships and change  the relationships within the classes as well as show how wonderful their other schoolmates are. A lot of alumni came to see the show as well as many parents. I'm so happy that we managed to have another wonderful show and just to give you another glimpse I'll post another video from last year featuring our national hero whom we also talked about in Boone - KALEVIPOEG. Some sentences in that clip are in Estonian but all in all you'll get the point I hope.

AND I'd like to wish you all wonderful holidays, Merry Christmas!!

A news commentary about our show.

Christmas Show 2010

Here's just a sample of what the students do in our school every year.
In this video there is a class to whom I teach British-American literature. They were 10B last year.

Enjoy!

More poetry time

After a terribly hectic time at school I had, now the time has come to slow down a bit. The school inspection carried out by Very Important Authorities is over, I’m done with the paperwork I hate and finally I am able to take a deeper breath and come back to what I’m enjoying the most – teaching!

These days I’m giving the lessons on the unreal past to my students and I’m sure you know they are having a hard time with all these ‘wishes’ and ‘if onlys’, ‘would rathers’ and ‘as ifs’… To make things easier, I prepared a powerpoint presentation about expressing regrets – now when I have a digital projector in my classroom I can do all the stuff I haven’t been able before!!! As a closing activity, in order to revise grammar terminology and different grammar structures, I had my students write a short poem. The format is really simple and it goes as follows:

1. Noun

2. Adjective + and + adjective

3. Verb + adverb

4. Like or as

5. If only or I wish

Some students strictly stuck to the format, some of them didn’t, but it was ok – they were imaginative and creative and that was what I wanted.

Let me share some of them with you:

Life
Crazy and unpredictable
Rushing madly
Like a natural phenomenon
If only I could know the answers to all the questions

Life
Long and short
Going desperately
Like a crazy clock
If only I could turn back the time


Life
both black and white
clinging to the happiness left
like a trout against the stream
If only we could fly!

Play station
Gripping and fun
So excellent
Like Megan Fox
If only I had money for it

An old wise man
Experienced by life and marked with its scars
Persistently trying to pass down his wisdom
Like a book trying to make us live with dignity
If only I had listened to him when I could

Friends
False and trustless
Lying with every step they take
Like the worst enemy
If only people didn’t lie…

Bums
drunk and stinking
sitting desperately
like a tree in the forest
If only I could help them.

The suicide
Potent and painful
Hoping naively
Like an eternal oblivion
If only she had known what you feel for her

The assassin
Strong and infallible
Killing cruelly
Like his inviolable faith
If only he knew Allah had never called his name

Heart
True and false
Loving desperately
Like a young lover
If only I had understood that!

And this is something especially for us ;D

Teachers
Smart and friendly
Teaching so quickly
Like a fastest car
If only I had my own petrol station!