Saturday, May 31, 2008

Last Day of School


Yesterday was my last day at World Relief. For those of you who don’t know, this semester, I have had the honor of teaching English as a Second Language to a group of refugees and immigrants (mainly refugees). We met Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays for two hours. My students are from all over the world, but they are primarily from Burma/Myanmar, Somalia, Liberia, Ukraine, Iran, and Afghanistan. At times, it has been extremely challenging, but I have truly grown to love my students; I love laughing with them and getting to know about them, their families, and their cultures. Our last week together was really fun… we have been studying the body, so to review I drew a life-size person on a long white sheet of paper. In two groups, students had to label as many parts as they could (I told the women that it wasn’t necessary to write “boobs”—yes, I taught that word to them last week because they asked :). Afterwards, we taped them up on the walls and asked what they wanted to name our new friends. They decided on “Matt” and “Kiley.” It was really cute. They crack me up.

3 comments:

nealy said...

Cute story, Ki! Are you sad it was your last day there?

I love reading your blog! You guys are so cute!

Kiley said...

I'm actually really sad it's over. It's kinda like "you don't know what you got till it's gone" kind of thing. But I know I'll still see my students--if it's just stopping over at their apartments or volunteering in their class next year or something.

Christy said...

Fun story, Kiley. I used to teach conversational English when I was at ISU and I always had so much fun with the students; this post brought back some great memories for me. Thanks for sharing!