I landed in Budapest at close to 11 in the morning on Monday, April 23 and about one and half hours later, fueled by only one and half hours of plane sleep, I was back in the Scheiber Sandor school teaching a group of grade 13 students.
I recognized several faces from last year and they immediately recognized me. Based on email exchanges that I had with my co-teacher Zsolt I focused this year on citizenship, largely in response to the political climate in Hungary right now. With that in mind, I preceded to read and discuss with them an article by Peter Singer that questions what responsibilities the citizen has to society. In short, what makes a good citizen.
After a break for lunch, the Beth Tfiloh teachers gave seminars on how democracy functions in America. I was assigned to teach about the system of checks and balances. Three groups of students rotated between three thirty minute sessions, so in the end I taught about America’s three branches of government for the same amount of time I had slept on the plane.
After the last presentation, a student named Martin approached me. He told me that he remembered a lesson that I taught him last year about the responsibilities of government. I use this particular lesson to start my unit on George Orwell’s novel 1984. Martin told me that he enjoyed the lesson so much that he had designed a video game based on it, though it wasn’t nice enough yet to share it with me. And that made the entire trip worthwhile, even with only an hour and half hours worth of plane sleep.
