Seya-mat Myanmar thin chin de.

So I have been learning Burmese. School is tons of fun, my science class has 10 students (8 boys, two girls; 7 7th graders, 3 8th graders), I bought a shiny blue bike armed with a shiny blue bell, a basket, a rear rack, lights, lock, and pegs (1650 Baht, + 40 Baht for pegs, + 16 Baht for registration = $52ish), and teaching science to these kids is probably the most fun I've had in my life! I kid you not.

My students are Ko Myo, Kyaw Eh, Thin Thin Nyunt, Myo That Aung, Mya Aye Than, That Pying Soe, "Podolski", "Jack", "Juck", and "Lucky". Kyaw Eh is basically the school leader (he calls attention and parade rest during morning assembly every day, and sings the tuning note for the Thai Anthem). Juck is just brimming with confidence, has a hilarious pair of stunna glasses that he brought to school today, does backflips, dances, and flirts with Mya Aye Than by bothering her (she kind of does the same, hehehe). Lucky keeps up with popular movies and knows tons of worldly stuff (Pluto got nixed in '08, mummies are in the pyramids, etc.), Ko Myo wears a green pisou and recently came from Burma, Jack is tall, dark, and quiet, That Pying Soe "likes math" but Thin Thin Nyunt is better than him at it, and Myo That Aung raises his eyebrows back at me when I make weird faces to him. As I said, oodles of fun :)

You see, between my rudimentary Burmese (chai la? chai de!) and their rudimentary to pretty decent English, I stick in a lot of illustrations and acting and demonstrations, and it is basically like a huge party. So far I've had them act out "attract", like girl to boy, then "attract" like gravity (we were a huge mass all trying our best to squeeze Jack to death), a lot more gravity demonstrations, and others.

Today we acted out the difference between ice and water densities as a class, measured 10 meters outside using rulers (33 rulers' length + 10 cm), had a race to learn to calculate speed, figured out scientific notation, and discovered that the students are about as fast as a cockroach. One was slower (actually, Jack just decided not to run). Cockroach max speed: 1.25 m/s. Student speed range: 1-5m/s.

And then someone ran the dog over. It was 1:45ish.

"Teacher! Parami dog-- dead!" said Podolski.

I looked out the classroom, and saw two guys carrying the poor thing away by his legs. I gasped and was very distraught for most of the rest of the day. I was just petting him two minutes ago, and there he went... Poor baby. He was a beautiful, friendly little thing...

We finished calculating everyone's speeds, and then a couple of students pointed outside again, where one of the school trucks got stuck in the mud. There it was, its tires spinning out pathetically in the mud, so, since we were the highest level class, I waved all the students over, and we pushed the truck out. TEAMWORK!!! It would have been great, but the dog was still dead. I wondered if that was the truck that killed it. Sigh. Mud= no good. We need a road.

Anyway, I ended the day with the eighth graders. They wanted to learn a song, since it was supposed to be some other class time anyway. The teacher assigned did not show up. We listened to some songs on my iPod, and all decided that "Friday, I'm in Love" is quite awesome. As Kyaw Eh flipped through my Physical Sciences textbook, he chanced upon a penguin picture. We talked about animal baby names (chicks, joeys, calves, cubs! super cute) and then discussed why my iPod was scratched.

I told them, "I was running in the morning two weeks ago when I tripped and fell, so my iPod got scratched."

That turned into an English lesson on progressive tense + when + simple past... We will see how that goes tomorrow, when we start combining the basic sentences they will write tonight for homework.