sorry for the long time no post.

in colloquial class yesterday, our ustatha ran out of things for us to do so we just practiced pronouncing words that are essentially unpronouncable. and when she said the word 'ghel' and said it was uncle and then the word 'ghel' and said it was a question word, i made the mistake of asking her what the difference was. she then leaned over her desk slightly, stared me right in the eyes, and made a sound analogous to a choking dinosaur. this sound lasted about a full minute (i guess she really wanted to make a point), in the mean while the rest of the class is laughing openly and i'm sitting in my seat incredibly uncomfortably. after she made me make various attempts at creating this unpleasant sound, which (surprise, surprise) i can't, class was finished.

i realize that i haven't told you very much about our english classes. i have 3 things i want to cover: our students id pictures, the homework, and the best class ever.
1) all of our students had to turn in pictures for id cards--they just needed to be passport size, with names written on the back. however, most of them must have gone to the photo place nearest to campus which does 'glamour shots.' needless to say, we have a bunch of pictures of very serious sudanese and sri lankan men with smiley faces and exploding flowers all over the background. i cracked up when i was passing the id cards back, and they all said 'we know we have the stupid girl picture!' hahaha.
2) we were covering 'i can ____' in class the other day, and we had them write sentences about what they can and can't do. much to my delight, one of the students wrote this: "I can speak English quite well, but I can't spell. Can you spell parlamint? No I can't I'm sorry. My seplling is very poor. I can also sink but I can't sing." I'm still not really sure what he meant by the last part, but it was amusing none the less.
3) I decided to bring in "for the longest time" by billy joel when we were doing our lesson on superlatives. i printed out the lyric sheet, and we read through it pointing out words that they didn't know. i then pushed play, and proceded to sing a billy joel song with a group of refugees in egypt. it really wasn't something i had ever thought i would do in my life. and who would've thought billy joel would be such a huge hit? the next class four people had bought "the billy cassette" and three others had asked to borrow my cd (i'm burning cds for them). anyway, they want me to bring in one song a week. and i think i will.