What? You Can't Speak English or Bahasa? We're in Serious Trouble!

The title of this blog is the understatement of the year. Budi, my teaching partner, told me that although the school is not technically allowed to accept a non-English and non-Bahasa speaking student, we were graced with not one but two students. The icing on the cake is that these two students don't even speak the same language.

You have to understand something about our classroom. I'm not usually forgetful natured, but when I teach with someone else I tend to adapt to their whole teaching mentality (slightly, not absolutely). So guess who unwillingly adopted forgetful teaching genes (I'll give you two guesses but you'll only need one). Anyway aside from the forgetfulness that we both seem to have, we are both spastic and everything turns into a comical disaster (okay, again, not everything - our kids are doing great in their academics - but if you take the academics out of it, you get a clearer picture).

With all that said to you all, we get the first new student today. He is Korean. He uses motions and gives glares. Budi and I are mind boggled and just nod or try to follow him on a treasure hunt to uncover clues of what he's trying to say. We don't even know his name. He won't tell anyone his name. We even had a Korean translator and he refuses to talk to him.

All of my kids keep asking me, "Ms. Marie - what's his name? What do we call him?" If my students thought I knew every answer in the world, they were sure let down today. So since no one knew his name, everyone referred to him as "the new kid".

Throughout the entire day we tried to team up with him and try to understand and it got progressively worse. I had to leave to go to the bank around 2pm, since the banks in Indonesia are only open 9 - 3, Monday thru Friday (much thanks for Budi for taking my recess duty). When I came back, Budi told me a funny story.

One of my students came running up to Budi and they were mortified. They said "Pak Budi, Pak Budi, the new kid said 'shut up'!!"

Budi smiled and his eyes almost popped out. He screamed "Yes! He spoke his first English words!"

The grade three student was appalled. The student said "Pak Budi, it's a bad word."

Well Budi was so embarrassed but he turned straight faced and said "You're right. I'll talk to him right away." (turns out one of the other students taught him shut up - but it was definitely an event worth celebrating, even if it wasn't the best of word choices).

We survived - that's what counts. It's such a blessing to be team teaching with Budi. We definitely seem to compliment each other really well. Bring on Monday!