This Picture Is Not Photoshopped

This week most of my English classes were rescheduled and moved to the McDonalds as a cultural field trip. Instead of doing regular lessons, I was to teach them hamburger, fries, chicken, ice cream and Coke. Yes, Coke and not soda.

I had my students color hand turkeys a few weeks, and I still have not heard the end of it. Hand turkeys aren’t in the textbook! That was twenty minutes wasted! The six-year-olds are going to fall behind! Doom and destruction will surely follow! But replacing almost a whole week of my scheduled classes with trips to McDonalds is introducing them to valuable American culture.

The trip itself was great fun. The kids were really excited to be out of school and eating McDonalds and getting balloons. I love my students and it was fun to do something outside school with them. We played some vocab games, much to the amusement of the other patrons and their cellphone cameras. If you’d like to see more pictures (translation: If you are my mother), check out my Facebook album.

I printed out some flashcards, stealing the graphics off the McDonalds site, which backfired on me. To my students, anything with the golden arches on it is called “MCDONALDS!!!” Fries in a McDonalds wrapper? MCDONALDS!!! Coke in a McDonalds cup? MCDONALDS!!!

I went on this trip three times this week. The first and third days went well, but the second day was a logistics nightmare. On Tuesday, the McD’s staff brought out huge trays of fries, drinks, cheeseburgers and chicken sandwiches, and we handed them out to the kids. On Wednesday, though, individual trays were made for each student, and some of them were missing some items. (Yes, I know there were only 4 items per tray, but some of them were incomplete.)