Seventy-four Ducklings...A Lost Anecdote of Year One

I wrote this blog post last October and forgot about it until now. Enjoy!

If you knew me at all before I left for Tanzania, then you know how much I dislike birds. They have always freaked me out. I would avoid them at all costs and cry in the times when they were unavoidable. Well, it seems as though Tanzania is really changing me. Let me just say how much I love ducklings. In fact, I love them so much that I have 74 of them. Seventy-four of the cutest, most loving ducklings anyone could ask for.

 

Let me explain, last year, one of the vocabulary words for my Standard 3 English students was “duckling”. It is definitely the easiest vocabulary word they had all year and so every single student knew it without fail. A few weeks after giving it to them, I found a copy of The Ugly Duckling storybook in the library and figured it was more than appropriate for me to read it to them…it includes their favorite vocabulary word and it has a good lesson.

Near the end of the school year, I was reviewing with one of my classes, helping prepare them for the annual terminal exam they would be taking soon. I decided to use ducklings as the subject for all my sentences and questions for various topics….counting ducklings to practice using phrases like “more than” and “less than,” writing sentences using possessive pronouns…whose wings? The duckling’s wings…ITS wings, and drawing big ducklings and bigger ducklings as a means of practicing comparative adjectives. Well, being the biggest person in the class obviously, I drew the biggest duckling with the name “Mama Lina,” underneath (some students have taken to calling me this instead of teacher) and it stuck. From that moment forward, I had an inside joke with my favorite class of students. I am the Mama Duckling and I have 74 wonderful little ducklings. Then, as a classroom management tactic, whenever they got loud after that, I would say, “quack once if you can hear me,” and once they realized I was saying “quack” and not “clap,” they immediately began quacking at the top of their lungs (we may have also done the slow, soft to loud quacking as made famous by the Mighty Ducks.)

Later that day, when I saw my students walking down for tea break, they were making noise and walking in what I can only describe as an incredibly crooked line. So, I went out into the corridor and asked, “What kind of line in this? Ducklings don’t walk in a zigzag line; they walk one behind the other, in a neat little row!” Miraculously this did cause them to straighten up their line….but the best part is that that night at dinner as I was telling my community about this cute interaction, my community mate and co-worker Beth, exclaimed, “oooooh, so that’s why they were all quaking when I was walking upstairs!” It turns out, that even after I was out of sight and ear shot, my baby ducks continued to carry on our little inside joke.

So, now birds don’t seem so scary. My ducklings are great, though not always perfect.