August was filled with introductions: ETA Lucy Faust was introduced to MAN Temanggung through new students, co-teachers, administrators, a local swim team, and a monkey that stopped by her room one day. After students practiced their introductions in English, the lessons learned in the classroom, linguistic and cultural, by Lucy and students alike, started to fly by.

One 11th grade class was already learning about conditionals and Lucy jumped in as they were learning the third and final type: “If I had not eaten so much martabak manis, I would have felt healthier.” To get back into the conditional mode, the class first gathered in a circle throwing a Bananagrams bag around the room to play a game where if the music stopped, the student had to complete the conditional sentence on the board, “If my friend invites me to the party, ______.” It was a hit. The game got the class excited to learn.

After practicing the new conditional type with a worksheet, students created three sentences, for each of the conditional types with illustrated. Lucy found her students to be incredibly creative and artistic. The best sentence she read was, “If I eat chocolate today, I will fight better tomorrow.”

Lucy Faust is currently teaching at  MAN Temanggung, Central Java