Good times English

I recently started helping out with 3eme English, because they have to take a test this year and if they pass they can continue on to high school, and since they suck at English and I'm really good at it/have a lot of time on my hands I offered to help them an hour each week. On this test they have to take, half of it is oral and they read a text in English and are asked questions about it. So, that's what we are going to do, just some extra practice speaking English.

I realized as I was preparing for the first class, how much I missed talking to people in English about random and interesting things. I was ridiculously excited and poured over every book I had in my house to find a suitable paragraph quote or two to share and have a conversation with them. Keep in mind that these girls are in the equivalent of 9th grade but ages range from 16-20ish. I started off with one of my favorite quotes from Slyvia Plath's The Bell Jar, I changed it a little for the sake of background of the students :

I saw my life branching out before me like a green mango tree. From the tip of every branch, like a fat orange mango, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One mango was a husband and a happy home and children, and another mango was a famous poet and another mango was a brilliant professor, and another mango was an amazing editor and another mango was Europe and Asia and America, and another mango was a doctor and a lawyer, and beyond and above these mangoes were many more I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this mango tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of these mangoes I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the mangoes began to wrinkly and go black, and one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.


We read the text, several times and then I ask the first question- What is this story about? Several hands raised- yes, you? Mangoes. Well yeah, sort of..... So we work through it line by line, once they realize it's not a real tree but that the tree represents her life they are following. We get to the crux of the story and I ask Why is she starving? Because she can't pick a mango. Why? Because choosing one means not doing any of the others. Do you think that's true? What? That you can only be one thing in your life? And it gets going, there are yes and no answers and then I ask Okay, can you be really good at two things, for example can you be an excellent doctor and a good mother? It was a good conversation, they were pretty much split down the middle, some saying you could only do one thing and some saying you could two more than one. I explained this was a common problem people had when deciding what they wanted to be and I asked if any of them had felt this way and they just looked at me with blank expressions on their faces...guess not.

Next text I felt really nerdy about and felt bad I couldn't share it with anyone which is part of the reason I'm blogging about it. I combined a concept from the movie Starship Troopers slightly with that wonderful television show Battlestar Gallactica, here it is:

In a country called Caprica, there is a special law about citizenship. The founders of the country felt very strongly about service and civic responsibility. In this country in order to be a citizen you had to complete either 3 years of military service or 3 years working in a poorer, less developed part of the country teaching or doing community development. After that time you were a citizen and were able to vote, run for government and have greater access to government services. If you didn't do this you'd still be a member of the country, but not a citizen so you couldn't vote or be president.


K, so running on that idea of service is required for citizenship. I personally really like this idea, making people responsible for the betterment of their country. I asked if they understood and what it took to be a citizen in Burkina Faso- according to them citizenship and nationality are different things, if you are born in Burkina you are a citizen but you have to have Burkinabe nationality to be the president, so you're parents have to be Burkinabe as well. Whereas in America in order to be a citizen or president you have to be born in America, that's all, no one cares who your parents were. (They thought that was crazy by the way). And then I asked them what they thought about this, a land where service was required for citizenship. Some liked it and some hated it, they shouldn't make it mandatory for them to give service in order to be a citizen, that's not fair, what if people can't do it. It's not that they can't do it or aren't citizens, they still get to live in the country, they just can't vote- they don't get in say in the governing of a country they don't help build and maintain.

Now I'll admit this discussion didn't go was well as the first, they clearly almost never think about politics or at least no very little political vocabulary in English. However, the success of both of these discussions left me feeling like a million bucks and I am very excited to have more interesting, thought provoking discussions with these teens in the future if we ever go back to school. Topics of discussion from, you dear readers, are more than welcome.