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by John Putzer, Volunteer ESS 2005
It seemed like the bell rang extra loudly at 7:00 this morning, but they probably knew it'd be hard to get us out of bed after last night's disco. The hot water was working, so my roommate and I both had a chance for a quick shower before heading off to liturgy at 7:30 . This morning I did the Epistle reading, which was cool, but a bit scary since I'd never tried to chant a reading at a liturgy before. For breakfast we had that cheese-pudding-quiche stuff again; I'm kind of sick of it, but it fills you up, and the rolls were really good.
After assembly and announcements we went outside to the area of benches where my class group has been meeting. O ne of the seminarians opened us with a prayer and we jumped right into Scripture Study by r eading the Epistle to the Romans and the Gospel from Matthew which we'll hear at Liturgy tomorrow. After identifying new vocabulary, I asked them what they thought Paul meant by “the freedom of the children of God” and we launched into a really neat, half-hour discussion about freedom.
After this I began a grammar lesson reviewing articles (when to use one and when not to, d ifferences between definite and indefinite articles, etc.). It seemed to me that it was a little confusing to them at first, but I wrote out several demonstrative examples on the white board leaving a blank space in front of each noun and requiring the students to supply the proper article, if any, and after a half hour, most of the students seemed like they got it. With 25 minutes left before morning break, I decided to go over the worksheet assignment from the supplied lesson book. After break we continued our discussion of C.S. Lewis', The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe . Each student had an assigned page from the book which he or she was to have read and prepared for class today. They took turns explaining what happened on their respective pages so as to develop an understanding of the continuing plot. Then I wrote down all the unfamiliar words and we discussed their meanings. Then we went around the group each person reading a small excerpt from the text aloud. This whole process took about an hour.
With the remaining time, we played a vocabulary review game. I had words that we had learned on previous days written out on slips of paper. The students would take turns picking one of these slips and describing and defining the word in English. The other students would guess what the word was, and the student who guessed correctly would keep the slip of paper. At the end of class, I gave a bar of chocolate to the person who had accumulated the most slips of paper (who then, by the way, shared his chocolate with the rest of the students). I then collected the previous journal topic and assigned a page from the workbook and a journal topic on the students' reaction to the aftermath of the Orange Revolution : Was it worth the effort? Have you seen any of the change you had hoped for?
The Sixth Hour prayer service at noon was beautiful today--I love the new way that we sing the Kyrie Eleison! It's so moving... For reading class, we read another short fable. I think the students really like them because it is usually not too much to finish in one day, they are pretty interesting, and the have applicable life lessons to be learned. (They must like them because they seemed pretty alert, even though it was right after lunch!)
At 3:00 , regular classes were done so I ran down to the clearing where t he Praise and Worship elective has been meeting. It was really AMAZING t oday! I could really feel the students getting into the music, and it really felt like we were all praying together praising God! What a blessing it is to be able to come together from different Rites and be united through prayer--it's truly a beautiful thing.
However, I was absolutely EXHAUSTED after elective. I decided to take a short nap before c orrect ing my students' journals, and this t ook about an hour and a quarter. Then I spent the last half hour before V espers preparing tomorrow's lesson and reading the scripture we will be studying. Vespers tonight was longer (about an hour and a half) and in Ukrainian because tomorrow is a feast (alas not important enough to merit no class!), but it was absolutely beautiful. After supper there was a huge bonfire. We sang a lot of traditional American songs as well as some praise and worship songs. Some of the students also sang some Ukrainian melodies. I didn't stay at the fire too long, though--after about an hour I went in and helped some of the Basilian Brothers with their homework and then we played a Ukrainian card game called t he Fool together. I finally turned in around 11:30. Needless to say, it's been a long yet very fruitful day.
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