There have been moments that my students have come up with things that I never would have guessed that they would know. One day, we were talking about vitamins and I asked, “What is vitamin C?” A voice came from the back, “I think that is Ascorbic Acid…” Another time, we were outside practicing “This is,” and learning some new vocabulary. It was a fairly low level class, so were were learning words like brick, flower, grass, pipe, etc. I pointed to a column and asked them if they knew what it was. One of my students said, “I think that is the pediment.” I was pointing at the base if the column, so I shouldn’t have been surprised…
Today, someone asked me who Martin Luther was. I’m pretty sure he had only heard of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. but I figured the other one was important enough to talk about as well. But how to explain? I told them that at the time, there was only one Christian Church. Martin Luther thought that there were some things wrong with the church, and so he came up with ideas to reform the church. New churches sprang up based on his recommendations, and we now call those churches Protestant churches. The church that they broke away from we now know as the Catholic church. They seemed to understand well enough, but then Saif, a student in the class raised his hand. “Actually, there were two Christian churches before the reformation, the Catholic and the Orthodox churches…” I was totally blown away. He is the first Yemeni I have ever met that even knew there was a difference between the Catholic and the Orthodox churches, let alone know when they were formed. I had to agree that, yes, there were two churches by the time of the reformation, but that was more detail than the class needed to understand who Martin Luther was. You never know what people are going to know….