Ranking game -’Victims’

This week I was going to do  role play as part of the conversation class, but one of my students couldn’t make this class this week and asked me to do something else and put off the role play until next week. So this weeks class was about ‘Life and death’ and went down well. The CCAA conversation class books are okay to use but I always have to add a little extra onto the material to make it last the full 90 minutes of class. This weeks class was rounded off with a ranking game that I found in a teaching manual called ‘Victims.’ The main idea of the game is that the groups of students are members of a committee of city elders who have to vote which of five girls is going to be the last member of a group of young people who will be sacrificed to the Minotaur in order to keep the city safe for another year. This list of girls and descriptions given to the students is below:

Chloe – one of six brothers and sisters, family very influential, so children have so far escaped being sent. Chloe is very talented, has won several prizes for singing and music. Engaged to be married to rich businessman who threatens to withdraw financial support from the government is Chloe is sent.

Arete – Only child, mentally retarded but adored by parents. Occasionally violent, once attacked young child through jealously but parents have seen to it that this should not reoccur. Occupies herself with simple sewing jobs.

Charis – Orphan, rather a wild character, has lived on the streets, kept alive through charity and occasional thievery. Has recently come to live with a middle-class family, responding well to affection and teaching; shows signs of exceptional intellect.

Thalia – One of five children, but her brother was sent last year. Thalia was very close to him and wants to be sent, hoping he may still be alive, but her parents are violently opposed to her going. Very popular, an excellent athlete.

Euphro – Eldest if six brothers and sisters, Family is fairly well-off. Ugly, nobody likes her very much as she is intolerant and given to unkind gossip. Mother often ill, so Euphro spends much of her time looking after younger brothers and sisters.

There is no correct answer to this ranking game, only for the students to make their choice as a pair/group and then to justify why they chose that particular person. It’s a little grim but people can always do as the book suggested and tell the students that some Greek hero arrived and slaughtered the Minotaur to save the sacrifices from their deaths. If I get the time, I’ll do this with my MEC students as an extra activity, they love talking so this will be right up their street hahaha!!

More uni woes

The local uni in our city has never been very good, but the last three years under its previous director its sank to its knees. This coming Friday is the election for a new director and the director has been trying to encourage people to vote for her again, with about as much success as a chocolate fireguard functioning. She is rude, arrogant, ignorant and only cares about herself. I only met her once and that was one time too many. My wife and her classmates were questioning her during her one and only visit to their class about the many screwups that have happened and she simply shrugged them off as not being important – things such as hiring an English teacher with no knowledge of even basic English grammar, teachers not getting a salary, dismissing tests that students wanted to take so they could skip English classes to concentrate on something else instead as unimportant, hiring another English teacher who was fired three times from her previous jobs, this list could go on and on. I’m curious as to what the director meant by her extremely close relationship with the governor and new mayor of the city. The guy has been the mayor since the beginning of the year but she hasn’t asked him to change a single thing. He probably doesn’t even know who she is, probably thinks shes the tea lady or something hahahaha!! I’ll be watching this vote with curiosity to see if any of the students actually vote for her. I’ll be amazed if they do but then again, for 100 in a test you can get anything here. More news on this as it follows…

Time

I’ve been a little busy to post here the last few days, too many things to organize and also two private students that are going to start up classes with me needing my time to get things sorted out for next week. Also I had to change my conversation class subject for this afternoon after one of my students told me she couldn’t come and asked me to move this weeks subject (role play) to the following Saturday afternoon. This weekend our class was about life and death, including a ranking game that was a littler gory, where the students had to choose one of five young girls to be sacrificed to the minotaur to save the city. I’ll post about this later in the weekend when I have a little more free time

Halloween party

Saturday night was the school Halloween party and teachers and students weere asked to go in fancy dress. Roberta and I went as zombies and won first prize in the teacher catagory hahahaha!! All that make up might look as though it took a lot of scrubbing to get off, but in fact, it only took a few minutes. Students were lining up to get their photo taken with Roberta hahahaha!!

Bargain hunting conversation activity

I did this activity as part of my conversation class about food/cooking. My group really liked this activity a lot

The first thing to do is save as many food leaflets/ads from supermarkets as you can. They might give you some old ones if you ask them.

Put your students into groups/pairs and give them each copies of the ads (and a calculator if they want one). Tell your students they have R$25 (or whatever amount you choose) to feed either their group or a family of five (depending which is bigger) for an entire day. they must prepare at least three meals for the day, and that each meal must consist of at least four food items including beverages. If you like, you can ask the students to cut the pics out and paste them onto a sheet of paper along with the prices, etc.

When the students have finished, ask the students to present their meals and discuss what the families had to eat for their money. Did their families eat modestly or well, did they buy any luxury items, etc.

Day 5

Day 5 was really our last day to look around the city as we had an early flight Sat morning. The first thing we did was pay to use the tourist bus. You see them all over the city and they are painted green. You pay R$20 and the bus will take you to all 23 tourist destinations and lets you get off four times. If you plan it right you can get off and walk between some of the destinations as the distances aren’t all that far so you don’t use your four chances to leave the bus too quickly. For example, you can get off at the  Oscar Niemayer center and walk easily to the Bosque de Papa Joao, saving one ticket.

 

The center is dedicated to the architect and contains models and photos of his different works. There is also a movie you can watch but to be honest it was boring and we left after watching about a minute of it. The eye contains works of art, you cannot use a flash inside the center and a person must be in any photos you take of works of art. I’m not really sure of the reason for this, the only good part of the eye galleries was one containing black and white photos of Brasilian people from the interior. They were really nice and showed Brasil exactly how it is and not like those photoshopped ones that always seem to surface everywhere,

We had lunch at a restaurant not too far from  center and then walked for about ten minutes to visit the Bosque do Papa Joao Paulo II. This square was built to commemorate the visit of the pope to Curitiba. It’s very calm and beautiful and you can by Polish souvenirs from the small store there. There is a metal statue of the Pope praying and for some reason they gave it plastic yellow hands which spoils the statue. They should have cast it all in metal to keep it looking all the same.

From here we caught the tourist bus to go to pay a visit to the Igeja Ucraniana.

This place was all made of wood and really impressive, Inside are hundreds of hand-painted eggs and outside a viewing tower of sorts, along with a larger egg made entirely out of metal. The view of this place from the main road is really nice but you have to get off the bus to really appreciate it

We wanted to visit another one of the parks but it was raining hard and we jumped to our final place to visit on the tour bus – the cell tower. It is about 105 meters high with a 360 observation deck that is permanently open to the public. In the base, there is a small museum dedicated to telephony. It costs R$3 to go up the tower, you can feel it moving in the wind hahaha!! The view is great, Roberta filmed all of it and I’ll try to find the time to edit all of the movie clips as soon as I can.

After the tower we caught the bus to return to the apartment as we had been invited to spend the evening with the people from CCAA Hauer as they celebrated Teacher’s Day

At the pizza parlor with the guys from CCAA, all the way over on the left is Luana, the director of the school

Day 4

This morning we visited the botanical gardens in Curitiba with Alex and Luana, who is the director of the CCAA school he works for. This is one of the best places we got to visit during our five day stay in the city. The outside gardens are really lovely, there are also lakes, some of which are still being finished off and a visitors area with presentations, etc. We discovered a bamboo garden too and got chatting with three people who were visiting Brasil from Uruguay. Roberta shot some video too but we have yet to edit any of this, lack of time now we are back to work.

After lunch we were on our own as Alex and Claudio had work so we returned to Estação to visit the museum there, It’s free and full of lots of exhibits too. They have many artifacts from the rail industry as well as a lot of old photos showing the conditions of the railways   past. This museum isn’t open on Mondays.

After the museum we discovered the zoo in the center of the city, by accident. We knew there was one from the tourism site but had no idea where it was hahaha!! Roberta discovered it asking what a large portal was as there wasn’t a large sign saying ‘Zoo here’. The zoo is free to enter and is mainly full of birds. There are lots of places to sit and relax and a large restaurant so you can go have lunch there if you want to. They have some pedalboats that cost R$5 for thirty minutes. We spent most of the afternoon at the zoo, just relaxing

In the evening the guys were free again and they took us to a place called ‘Cafe de teatro’, in the center of the city. They told us that sometimes famous people who visit the city go there but on there wasn’t anyone famous when we were there, or if there was we didn’t see them or they weren’t famous enough to be recognized. Food and drink there is dirt cheap, for all four of us to eat and drink was R$47, McDonald’s would have cost around R$70-80. There are no smoking in public place bans yet in the city so you have to find a table next to the windows so you don’t have to put up with secondhand cigarette smoke but the law is going to change soon so this won’t be a problem for much longer.

Day 3

We started the day by just resting after running around so much the previous days and after lunch we went with Alex to visit the school he works at, CCAA Hauer. I met his students from that afternoons TN9 group and chatted with them for a while. One of them wanted to leave early to go meet up with her secret boyfriend, not sure really what that’s about hahaha!!

Above: Myself with Alex’s students.

Later in the day, once Claudio had finished work, we went to visit Parque Tanguá. It was already getting dark by the time we arrived there but all of the park was lit and the fountains looks spectacular at night. We wanted to go in the daytime later in the week but we didn’t find the time. There is an observation deck that lets you see out over the park complete with a see through floor to view down the the bottom of the waterfall, but at night you cannot really see all that well.

After leaving the park, we went intothe city center to grab something to eat and drink. One nice thing about Curitiba is that you can be out enjoying the nightlife at night in safety. Police are about all night and move on transients so that they aren’t in positions to rob or harrass tourists. Food and drink in bars and restaurants at night aren’t so expensive and if you know someone who lives there they can recommend the best places to go

Day 2

First port of call was to Estação shopping mall as Roberta needed to pick up a new pair of shoes to go with a dress she had brought with us. While browsing in the store she came across the sunglasses rack and tried a few on hahaha!!

Estação is basically a shopping mall designed around the old railway station and a large part of it is there incorporated into the main building. There is a museum dedicated to the railway heritage of the mall inside and it’s free to enter. On Mondays its not open and we returned later in the week to check the museum out.

Later in the afternoon we traveled to Ópera de Arame (wire opera house) to take a look around. This place is spectacular, well worth visiting if you are in Curitiba. It is constructed of heavy duty see though wire and even the bridge going to the opera house is see through so that you can see the lake and koi carp below. A waterfall and three different heights of observation deck to take in the scenery. You need to wear flat shoes to walk around as stilettos slip through the gaps in the wire. When we visit Curitiba again next year we will go at night to see it all lit up, in the tourist guides the opera house looks amazing in the dark.

From the opera house we caught a bus to visit Bosque Alemão (the German woods). Unfortunately we couldn’t go over all of this area as they had restricted access to the bridge to the tower because of all the recent rain and we took photos of the area near to the visitors center and gift store. In the photo you can just see the bridge in the background behind Roberta. To get back to the city center from here requires either the tourist bus or to take the interbarrios bus. We took the later which takes a long time as it travels all around the outside of the city, but you also get to see a lot of the outlying areas of Curitiba too.

Vacation (only a week or so late hehehe!!)

We didn’t get access to the internet while we were on vacation to write any postings here so I thought I’d do it this week instead

Day 1

We flew as early as we could get in the morning on a direct flight to Curitiba so that we wouldn’t arrive tired and with plenty of Saturday left to go sightseeing and stuff. We flew with Gol and this was the first time that we had used the internet to buy tickets for a plane. I was a little worried about it but it all worked out just fine, leaving us only to present our id cards and the number the website gave us to get our seats organized. Total flight time was one hour forty minutes and by the time we had eaten the snack they gave on the plane we were more or less landing. It was Roberta’s first flight, she loved it hahaha!! We videoed it for her to see again later   When we left Brasilia the temp was a sunny and hot 32′C and in Curitiba was 22′C. Our friends Alex and Claudio met us at the airport and we got our first experience of the public transport system in Curitiba and it rocks! There isn’t an airport in Curitiba itself and it took 30-40 minutes to get to the apartment we were going to stay at. A quick lunch and then out to see the sights. There was no way we were going to see everything in the week we stayed there but we tried to fit in as much as possible. In the afternoon we went around the town center visiting as many places as possible. On 15 de Novembro we met a group of hiphop crazy youngsters who were intent on getting as many tourists as possible to take their photos

It never occurred to me to go join them in the photo hahaha!! All of the people we met in the city were really friendly, once they clicked on we were vacationing they even pointed out places for us to visit We spent most of the evening taking photos of the central part of the city all lit up. Very beautiful

Roberts with Alex and Claudio on 15 de Novembro