Lots of stuff today. Ulpan in the morning, whatever. After Ulpan, I ran into the girl I met at the computer science lecture on Sunday and bombarded her with questions about supposed practice sessions I read about on the course website and the assignment we have due Monday. She showed me a bunch of material on the website then brought me upstairs to a study room packed with students, where two other students in the course showed me how to access online notes from the lecture when it was taught previously as well as scans from a student who’s taking notes in lectures this term. SO helpful, as I’m reading them over now, even though they’re in Hebrew, everything from class is starting to come together. I’m hoping if I wear my glasses tomorrow I might even be able to absorb more than every other sentence! That’s the ideal I’m working with here.

Also this afternoon, three friends and I went over to the Ethiopian absorption center to talk about volunteering there. It’s looking like we’ll split into pairs and teach English classes to the new Ethiopian immigrants. I’m teaching with my friend Rebeccah and our students are around 12 or 13, and my other two friends are teaching 14-15 year olds. As soon as we walked in, the kids clumped around us and the teacher in a sort of circle of wonder asking completely random questions, mostly Hebrew with a few arbitrary English words thrown in. Rebeccah and I were talking to each other about what kinds of things we should teach and when we turned back to the kids, they had written a list of English words with their Hebrew equivalents to show us what they knew. It was a strange group of words too... the ones I remember are blood, forget... that's it. They seem really excited about English in general. A lot of these kids are still getting a handle on the Hebrew language so this will definitely be a challenge. After so many years of learning languages from Hebrew to Spanish to Arabic I feel like I should have a whole repertoire of language games and activities to draw from but it’ll take some deep probing into my history of elementary and middle school to fish them out of my memory. I’m pretty excited though I’ve had enough classroom experience to know that this will not be a walk in the park by any means. Disciplining in English is no fun, in Hebrew is hard, and in Hebrew when it is the second language of both the teacher and the students is something I have yet to experience.

I’m off to a Hapoel Be’er Sheva basketball game in a few so I gotta go…

Ilana