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…”
