days in a blur...

days are just going in and out now in a blur of learning LIS and Italian... I have free lessons all day just observing the kids in class. I now try to go to the 4th grade Italian classes to improve my vocabulary, plus the teacher is really nice - today she gave me a bag of local pastries... mmm!! I had to stop myself 1/3 through the package!

Today during a freak thing where my cellphone just kept sending calls (well, I haven't figured out the shortcut for the keyboard lock!), I ran out of minutes. I know I know. Tomorrow I gotta ask around about shortcuts for locking the keyboard so it doesn't happen again! So, I had to find a tabacchi to buy minutes for the phone. Armed with very very limited sentence capability, I asked the kind lady who works at the desk downstairs where the tabacchi was, she gave me directions where, told me it'd be 5 minutes to walk... off I went, hoping I wouldn't get lost - I've managed to get myself lost pretty much everywhere I wanted to go, despite the maps that Daniele draws for me everyday. Thank God Biella is SMALL! :-D Imagine me getting lost in Roma??? I'd have run out of minutes a long time ago asking for directions! Luckily I didn't get lost and found the tabacchi. I was hoping for no line so that I wouldn't embarrass myself in front of too many people. Whew only 2 people. In my broken Italian I asked for minutes for my phone. The man behind the counter kindly helped me out, then asked, do you speak English? I said YES! haha. He said, my English é not very good... I said mio italiano, no... Only after reflection am I able to come up with a grammatically correct sentence, but not on the spot...!!! :-P

I'm surprised at the "statistics" of people who do know some English here in Biella. Doesn't mean I won't learn Italian... just surprised me that in such a town of this size that there's people who know English. I won't let Daniele or Simone sign ASL with me at all - Simone has to admonish Daniele every once in a while not to use ASL with me. hehe. Pretty much I'm doing fine with LIS - only sometimes in group situations I'm lost. But I'm proud of myself - last night at the interpreter meeting I was able to follow along with most of the conversation. :-D I can communicate with kids on a basic level, which I'm happy about. Talking with teachers on the other hand can be difficult, especially on a level that I want to communicate at (talking about my grant). :-/ Next week is the big meeting where the teachers will tell me what they want from me, and also I will be giving a workshop to teachers on how to use some technology. Eek. I will be VERY visual. :-D

Yesterday I had the unique privilege of watching the 4th grade English class. They were learning pronouns and appropriate "have" verbs (I have, you have, he/she has) and possessive pronouns (my, yours, his, her). In the beginning of the lesson they started with listening to a recording of someone saying the statements from the book, and the students had to repeat. It was cute. Very British English. I was very tempted to stand up and say everything in American English just to throw them off. ;-) There weren't any deaf children in that class (they were with the Italian language teacher instead), but all the kids know LIS anyway, and when a couple of kids were struggling with what word goes where, I'd put my hand down under the desk and spell the first letter, and the student would try to guess, then the other students would see, then would guess the word and then try to help the other students. It was fun. The teacher was pretty nice. Her English was basic, but she was able to tell me that she teaches English 3 days a week for the 4th graders and asked me to come back.

Tomorrow will be spent observing the middle school, which I'm looking forward to! :-)