Breakfast With My AM228 Students

As the Tourism Faculty that I used to serve full time no longer made French a compulsory subject in their syllabus, and the TESL Faculty had no new intake, my workload was going to be critical this semester. After I had talked to the vice director of campus about it, she kindly told my coordinator to deal with other programme coordinators for new "markets". As a result, the Public Administration Faculty agreed to begin offering French to their students this semester.

On the first day of this class, I arrived at the classroom on time. There was nobody inside. New students passed by to the next room where my colleague SB who taught Mandarin must be busy receiving students who kept going in, until all the seats were occupied and that late comers had to borrow chairs from my room! Being aware of the popularity of Mandarin and the market value of Arabic in Malaysia, I was prepared to have much less students. Since God was still keeping me at this working place, I knew He would open doors for me. After a simple prayer to thank God for the day, I just relaxed and read a book while waiting for my "clients".

More than twenty minutes were over when two students finally appeared. Actually they had randomly dropped in and were a bit surprised to find me alone. They asked me if the French language was difficult to learn. I answered that if they attended the classes seriously and regularly, there was no reason they could not perform. I let these two guys decide outside and continued my reading.

After a few minutes, both of them came in again. They were willing to take the challenge. So, I started teaching the introductory lesson as soon as they were seated. Some time later, SB made a sign to me outside. He was sending me a few more students who were interested in learning this European language. Then only I learned that the students had not been informed of French as a new optional foreign language during the briefing earlier.

Thus, the number of my students increased to ten. The following Tuesday, another boy joined in. I was very satisfied with the size of the class, the mixed gender and especially the fact that they were the ones who had made their choice instead of being assigned to be in my class, which was the case with my two other groups.

With these new students of the public administration degree programme, I managed to move them to organize a simple breakfast by telling them what my first batch of TESL students had done and showing them my blog entry about the meal they had wonderfully prepared last semester.

This morning, I brought tea bags, coffee powder, creamer, sugar, a parisienne (a kind of French loaf), a tea pot and my mug. The students were in charge of baguettes, another loaf of bread, butter, jam, mushroom soup in sachets, fruit juice, an electrical kettle and disposable dishes. To avoid the big crowd at the elevators, I always used the staircase. After climbing up to the thirteenth floor with an empty stomach, it was nice to have my favorite breakfast and sit with my students around the table who were initiated to the French culture and the related vocabulary. As they were from different main groups, they also took this occasion to chat with one another.

Our time spent on the food was longer than on the lesson. But they seemed to enjoy the moment together and already looked forward to the next meal together!

Will other groups follow? I will get the answer after the fasting month of Ramadhan.