Haiku 6: Pond Skater

A city tour by some fab guides this morning, and lovely wine afterwards. Have to say I was tired and hungry, but I'm grateful for the experience nonetheless! Leon is bloody beautiful. Then a bit more lesson planning… I’m finding the teaching exhausting! When the end of this week came, I felt almost comatose. The conversation classes I do with the teens are my favourite – I learn a lot about them and it’s nice to have a small group all to myself. The grammar lessons are my least favourite – I’m given the coursebook exercises to go through and it’s very tricky to make the lessons engaging. Also this week: I was an examiner for twelve students’ mock Cambridge oral exams! A surprisingly enjoyable experience – I actually really liked making the students feel as relaxed as possible and later deciding on their marks – there’s some impressive students at Asuncion. The ones with the best English all seem to be online gamers or avid Youtubers, soaking up their language from Americans, whose accent they’ve borrowed – so interesting, the best language learning clearly comes from immersion.

A very nature-based haiku this time round...

---

The shadow below;

so different to the body

skating the pond’s skin.

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Spent some time this afternoon reading on a small dock built over a man-made pond, near a building site. Oddly enough, the most peaceful place I’ve found for myself in Leon. Not that this isn’t a peaceful city; I just can’t quite seem to settle if I haven’t seen a body of water for a while (no matter how small!). The longer I sat the more creatures became visible – fish, frogs, and this pond-skater, which you can hopefully see on the video (will it upload?), whose shadow on the sand below appears to be more beautiful than its body above, and a completely different shape (I decided it must have see-through paddle feet... definitely the correct scientific term.)

I’m not particularly looking forward to my lessons tomorrow, but then again it’s the year group where the teacher only wants me to teach grammar, and to go exactly by the book… But I took something from the pond skater today. The shadow, the impression, that this experience will leave on me has its own shape, I just can’t quite see it yet. When the trials and small triumphs of the school days have all been forgotten, I think that impression will last. I’m looking forward to seeing what all this will teach me.

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