I taught James Bond today

Apparently I shouldn't wish for parental involvement.

One of the families at my school is a very conservative, Orthodox family--there are six kids in all. Three are school-age--2nd, 4th, and 8th forms. Great kids, all of them. You can tell that the parents care about their behavior and their schoolwork. But...apparently it's also a family where the father wants the kids to learn by traditional methods, ie when you learn a foreign language, you memorize lists of words every night, rather than focus on ways of using the ones you know to communicate. And so he's decided to remove Natasha, the 8th former, to the other section of the 8th form, where she'll be using the traditional, Ukrainian-made textbooks (that incidentally are chock-full of errors) rather than the British ones that I teach from. He's also coming in to observe the 4th form on Friday, which is the day before spring break.

It could be worse. He could be observing the 3rd form, which broke out in fist fights and name calling yesterday.

I realize that he wants what he thinks is best for his daughter. I realize that books with no Ukrainian or Russian in them may be intimidating to a parent who wants to help with their children's homework. But I'm still sad that one of the best-behaved, hardest-working students I have won't be in my class anymore.

~*~

Random moment from yesterday:

6th form boy I don't teach: Miss Sally, do you like Jesus?
Me, after processing the accent and doing a double-take at the question: Yes, very much.
[conversation ends]

Do you ever want to just see inside a kid's mind?

~*~

Nelya was gone this morning, so I was a subsitute teacher for her two 7th form classes. The first one treated me as most classes do with subs--the girls were well-behaved and the boys slacked off and threw a wad of gum at me. The second one was actually pretty good, plus one of the boys said his name is James Bond, and so we all called him that all class. :)

~*~

Other randomness:

~Tif and I had a Pride and Prejudice party on Saturday, complete with junk food.
~The junk food doesn't seem to make any difference with the fact that all my clothes are getting too big. I don't know whether I'm losing weight or if it's due to hand-washing everything.
~I think I'm going to Calvary Chapel in Kharkiv on Sunday for church!
~Next week is spring break, and I'm going to Zgurivka to visit the Malkos. Yay!