Thankful for my Kazakh students

November 23, 2007 · Filed under Uncategorized

Last night I served my Kazakh students pumpkin cookies and salted pumpkin seeds.  They seemed to appreciate the former and were not sure of the latter.  Three girls gave me a big cake and a Thanksgiving card when they arrived to the classroom.  They were sooooo sweet.  I’ll bring the cake to a gathering of about 22 ex-pats in the mountains when we celebrate Thanksgiving together in every sense of the true meaning of Thanksgiving.  I asked my students last night if they had any questions with the last 5 minutes we had remaining and even after our time was up, they kept asking me questions about America.  My Kazakh students are not from Ken’s university but rather they yearn to go to the U.S. next summer on a work and travel kind of program. 

One little girl named Bo further practiced her English as she was about to leave and said that she so appreciated my being her American English teacher.  She used other synonynms like I had told them to do, she definitely got her point across and it warmed my heart.  Earlier in an exercise I had given them, they had to work in pairs and explain from a turkey’s point of view why THEY were not qualified for the Thanksgiving meal but that their partner was.  The word “tasty” kept coming up as a reason why the other turkey was better than them.  Others used the words “delicious” or “healthy” but I kept hearing that they were not “tasty” but the other person was “tasty.”  Some did use their imaginations such as saying they were beaten when young or just had one leg.  Difficult to be imaginative if you don’t have the vocabulary for it.  So I’m thankful for my eager students and hope they learn not only English from me but also Who to be thankful to.