I love this motorcycle shot. I call it ‘Indonesian Limo’ because of the partition between the driver and the passenger. The hole is so the passenger can tell the driver where to go, etc. The next picture is me with Edward Jung, a branch president in Korea. Over the next 7 months, I should get to know him better. We really do keep Sam busy. Here he is collapsed on the couch in the foyer when he should be in class.
06 November 2007 – Tuesday
I slept in until 5 which felt good. Normal morning from there on including reading from MIN. I hit a section with a lot of new words and thoughts. I had a good exercise session at the gym. We read some from the Kitab Mormon – the build the boat and get ready to sail.
When we get to the office we get the second printer working. As we are waiting for class time, we start talking about their test scores and we realize that the main problem is vocabulary. We did a lot more on vocabulary this time but we just do not have time to give them more than 300 or so new words. But I realized that we can spend more time working on recognizing vocabulary by context. So next class we will start them from day one with exercises working on that area. Hopefully that will help. Each class we hold we learn a little more and hopefully the next class will be better. As they say, live and learn.
I started the class while Mary worked on some material for her class for the office staff. After opening exercises and going through the words of the song, I gave them a little pep talk based on a thought that came to me this morning. I likened our class to an aircraft carrier and each of them as a plane. We can catapult them so they can get up to flying speed, but once they leave us in a couple of days it is like the airplane that drops off the end of the carrier. If they keep up the speed they can sour as high as they want into the air of English. But if they decide to cut the power – that is stop using their English and building it up – they will plunge into the sea. So their success or failure is up to them, because we have done all we can to get them going.
We kept them together for a couple of hours and then broke into two parts. Our group went through vocabulary and some vocabulary in context exercises and then called it a morning. Then everyone piled into our car and we went to the mission home. Mary to teach an English class, me to keep busy while she taught, and the students to go to the Walkers for their afternoon lesson.
While we were eating lunch, Mary remembered that the lesson was at three and not one – we went though this last week but we both forgot again. So we decided to go to SoGo. That worked well and we got back in plenty of time.
While Mary taught her lesson, I talked to president Marchant and he invited us to have dinner with them and the Wassons a Family History couple from Bankok. Because of the traffic, the Wassons were an hour late getting back to the mission home so we got to sit around and just talk to the Marchants. After the Wassons got there – they are staying in the mission home – we had a lovely dinner with lots of conversation. When it was over, we excused ourselves and caught a taxi back to the apartment. We kind of broke a rule and took a non-BlueBird cab home. We got a little worried when he took a way we did not know but Mary soon figured out we were going the right way. It turned out his way seemed faster than the way Sam usually takes so I gave him a nice tip.
Our students were busy all this time with the Walkers. They had a short lesson and then watched two of the ‘The Work and the Glory’ books. I have decided I am going to read those when we get back. Maybe they are on CD and we can listen while we drive all over the country seeing our children and grandchildren. Anyway I gave Sam enough money to take them all to the Steak House for dinner – a whole $20 investment. They also had some shopping they wanted to do so it worked out well.
By the time we got home it was late and we were tired so we did not read from the Kitab Mormon. I did do some studying from PMG before turning off the lights.