June 10, 2009
Dinner was a success last night! I had lots of fun with them and the conversation was good. They had so may questions for be about the gospel for which I was grateful because that’s something I can talk a lot about in Italian. I’d taken one of the new Plan of Salvation pamphlets in Italian and I gave it to them. Professor Monaci’s wife was really nice. She’s actually the one that had the most questions for me and any time that her husband would change the topic she would come up with another question. She looked the pamphlet that I gave her and then said she’d read it later that night. The food was really good. We had…bunny! Well, actually we had rabbit but I felt really bad about it so I called it bunny. Haha. I figure that since I’m already a dog killer I might as well be a bunny killer too. Actually, the rabbit was very tasty. It’s quite common here to eat rabbit and sometimes horse too. Professor Monaci and his wife have been married 21 one years. They were surprised when I told them that I was getting married in a couple of months. They had all sorts of questions about that and teased me when I got a huge smile on my face about it. I think Professor M.’s wife is somewhat of a romantic so she said it was nice to see someone so in love.
Professor M.’s son was really funny. He’s almost 8 and I thinking he was excited to see someone knew in the house because he was sort of hyper. Every time Professor M. and I would speak English to each other he would imitate us by saying, “Shwa shwa shwa shwa.” It’s funny to see how he perceives the English language. I asked him how Chinese was because I wanted to see if he came up with something different. And he did. I don’t remember exactly what it was but it was funny.
Dinner was long; probably about 3 hours. We had four courses: primo, second, fruit, and desert. At around 9:45 I excused myself because I knew I was going to have to ride home on my bike…in the dark and I was sort of nervous about it. Most of the way was lit except for the last part and that was really scary. I couldn’t see anything and the only thing that lit the road was the moon but it was cloudy so it didn’t help much. There were a lot of fireflies out and I ran into a few of them but I made it home safely!
This morning Professor M. and I had the 3rd class in the first hour. Professor M. tried to get the students started on a discussion about the film that we had seen: The Dead Poet’s Society. He was trying to ask them questions about discipline and strictness but I think everyone was still asleep because no one responded. He asked about smoking and if should be forbidden on campus like it has always been up until this year. The revolution kid in the back that always dresses like a hippie said that it shouldn’t be against the rules because people should be able to make their own decisions. And asked him why he thought that that rule had been there. He said that he supposes it was there because the principle and teachers thought that smoking was “dangerous”. When he said that word “dangerous” he did the little quotation marks with his fingers. It made me think: does this kid really believe that smoking is dangerous? I don’t think so. I think these kids are just lying to themselves because they KNOW what happens in the long run. But its just like that mass absence that the other class did last Saturday. If enough people come together and decide that something is okay…then that becomes their reality. Another boy in the class was saying that what he wants to do is not always what he should do. The thought came to me that “What I want to do” and “What I should do” are not always the same thing. I think that when you are young you definitely know what you “want to do” and you most of the time you know “what you should do”. Over time, with the experience of trial and error you learn to keep the two in balance. Even without the gospel I think these kids should be taught to listen to the “what I should do” voice and to learn to trust that voice. Everyone has this voice within us. Sometimes it’s called your conscience and sometimes it’s called the Light of Christ. Unless you’ve got serious psychological disorders or a really messed of family this voice within will help us make good decisions.
The next class was we had was the 4th class. This was the class that Professor M. was going to have to drop next year but the students got together and complained and figured out a way that they can keep their teacher so it looks that he might continue to teach them next year. He’s not so happy about it because they’re not very good students. He went over what their grade might be for the year and a lot of them might be failing their fourth year. I wonder how much they really care.
The next class was the 2nd class. We watched some more of About a Boy. It was funny because I would laugh out loud at some parts and not everyone got the joke so I was pretty much the only one laughing. I felt like such a loser and they laughed at me.
The last class of the day was the 5th class. Professor M. did an exercise with them where he timed them and they had to talk in English about a certain topic for 3 minutes straight. It was good because he’s trying to get them used to the time limit that will be on their final interrogations. The best student in the class went and he was awesome! He laid everything out neatly in the themes, plot and style of the literature he was commenting on. This other girl went and she wasn’t half as good. Professor M. said it was sort of like…
No comments:
Post a Comment