We had our second try today at PBL’s (Problem Based Learning) with Gelya as the facilitator of my group. I’m a bit traumatized from the experience so I won’t say much, but it’s a lot of effort. We’re working on asking questions about what is going on in a particular case study, and we go through things line by line, for 3 pages of the story, asking 10 questions about each sentence from the story. It’s painstaking and so hard to do. The point is to not assume anything and figure out what we want to know more about before we move on to the next line of the story, which usually has answers to some of our questions. Still, we persist in this format…
We had visitors for lunch, one of our coordinators who lived in this house last year, and a man who is the author of the Lonely Planet in Germany. It was interesting to see the dynamics of this lunch. We had three large trays of Spanish style ravioli, garlic bread, salad, two kinds of juice… it was more food than we’ve been served for lunch and Erica and I knew something was up. Our house mom told us at lunch that the she was the only family recommended by this gentleman in the book, then she went on to say that other families only served their students bread and water for all their meals and they turned off the hot water when the students used too much. Where am I? None of our students have had experiences like this with their families! Everyone is really happy and when something is not right, our school moves us immediately. So Thelma’s account of this was interesting to say the least.
On the same note, I had a conversation with the amazing Josie today and she was appalled that Thelma asked me to share a room when the other man arrives. She’s going to work on moving me to another location before that happens. I have 2 weeks and then will be in another new home.
