Wednesday 14 March 2012

Unexpected


In community education you have to be prepared to expect the unexpected.  A family of three new learners arrived in the class and I didn’t want frighten them off with political manifesto writing. So we played it safe with a book lesson and we’ll build up from there.  The family brought their four year old son who amused himself and the class by quietly drawing dinosaurs on the spare white board.
Last week’s lesson on local politics had had an effect on at least one of the learners, who is now looking into standing for election as a local councillor in May, and has asked me to help him with his application. I hope he sees his plan through: candidates tend to be much of a muchness in Shetland and it would be great to have someone a little different.
I’m currently sourcing poetry for tomorrow night’s poetry translation lesson. I want to have a few poems from each country, in case the learners are unable to think of a poem which they would like to translate into English. While it makes more sense to work on poems which have not already been translated, I have to be careful that I don’t present them with anything dodgy!  (My knowledge of Polish is sketchy and my Slovenian is non existent…)
Tonight we’ll set the poetry ball rolling with a study of rhythm and Robert Louis Stevenson’s fantastic poem about a train ride: “Faster than fairies, faster than witches…”