John Smith was bad!
October 30th, 2007 by MarkOne of the great things about teaching EFL is seeing the different responses of each class to the same material. My old Monday/Thursday class finished reading Pocahontas (the 45 page Oxford Bookworms version) a bit back, and they enjoyed it quite a bit. One student had a few difficulties with all the new words, and the Indian names in particular, but even she got into it by the end. The interesting thing with this class, though, was their reaction to the story.
Most classes talk about how they think it was great that Pocahontas lived with in Jamestown and learned English, or how it was exciting that she went to England, or how John Smith should have married her, or how the Indians should have killed the English settlers. Not this class, though. Nope. All they wanted to talk about was how bad John Smith was. And not for how he handled the Algonquin, either. Nope. He was veeeerry bad because he went back to England while nearly dying from an illness and didn’t send a letter to Pocahontas, who was only 14 and didn’t know how to read yet anyway. What an insensitive jerk!
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October 31st, 2007 at 8:42 am
The descendants of Pocohontashave their HQ 15 minutes away: the Powhatan Nation. I gave them a rose quartz arrowhead I found on my grandfather’s farm. They have a really interesting story of flying below the radar to co-exist with Europeans- they moved out of the Jamestown area to South Jersey and cooperated with the remnants of other Algoquin tribes to try to keep their culture alive. I think the name of the book with their story is Morrisville. I read it a while ago.