Views from a Serbian Teen English Student

Tatjana Petkovic, the Serbian National Franchisor, is proud of their unique new marketing tool: a one-page magazine highlighting the achievements of their teens who have something interesting to share about themselves— in English! 

 The first article is written by an 11-year-old Teen English student who demonstrates his impressive English fluency in writing, while treating us to a glimpse of what his life is like as a young Serbian teen.

My name is Relja Popović. I’m 11 years old and before I tell you about a week in my life, here’s a little bit about myself:

In my free time I like to play video games on my tablet and on the laptop. I also like drawing and reading comics. My favorite comics are “Marvel” comics and my favorite game is “League of Legends”. The funny thing is that everyone “shouted” at me to download the game and when I did it they were telling me it was “lame” and stupid. Now that you got to know me I will take you through a week in my life.

So it’s Monday. I wake up as usual and do my morning routine and get dressed. Then I often watch television. Until my sister wakes up, that is. Then she makes me change the channel where she watches HSPCA, ASPCA, Natural born hunter… I like to watch Disney channel and Disney XD, but my parents think it’s stupid. I don’t agree with them of course. PARENTS!!! I go to school at 13:30, not to miss the bus.

School is sometimes boring, sometimes fun. My first subject on Monday is English. Great! It’s like I have one subject less. What a nice beginning of a week. Then I have another one of my favorite subjects: History. It’s almost as no one else can talk but me because all the time I “spill” fun facts and some interesting things as well as really useful information for the class that my teacher forgets. Perhaps that’s why I’m going to the history competition.

Next up is the best class of them all: the break! We even have our routine: run out, buy lunch, run  back, use the time left to talk, walk around or squeeze through the fence and sit in the school park that  no one ever goes to because they think they can’t fit through the fence. So it’s Math. It’s writing, writing, writing and studying… but I know it and I’m going to the competition thing of a doohicky too… So next subject: Russian. We like it, but it’s hard and every time when we’re done, it feels like we need a trip to the emergency room because our fingers almost fell off. PE: Monday-we play football or handball, Tuesday-we run and do athletics, Wednesday-ping pong, whatever it is we end up tired. Serbian’s up next. It’s easy. We just do grammar and orthography… that’s it. There are two classes that I really like and they are Geography and drawing, painting and sculpting (they are given as one subject). We have a really “funky” Geography teacher. When kids start messing around and joking in class, most of the teachers would punish them… but not her. She just joins them and on top of that she takes us out for snowball fights and sometimes she hits some random kid with a snowball and sometimes she takes one to the face. On D.P.S (that’s what we call drawing, painting and sculpting) we do all sort of fun stuff like paper mache, sculpting with modeling clay and regular clay as well as a graffito (lead) technique of scratching out black paint (often done on walls).

In my free time, if I can call it that, because I almost have none (that is but Tuesday when I have nothing but school), Mondays and Thursdays I have English. The school of English: Helen Doron was a bull’s eye. I went to two English schools before it and when I started Helen Doron all I could say was: oki-doki. Now, I’m writing this in English! 

Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday I have basketball. I play in a club called “Cerak“. I can never wait enough for the weekend because that’s when I have school of comic and illustration “Đorđe Lobačev.“ Those are the best ten hours of the week. I enjoy it very much. An interesting thing to know is that the Sunday after finishing this article, I will be starring in a radio comic (we will tell our own comic over the radio). By the time this comes out it will probably be over. If not, turn on radio Belgrade 1 and listen to us.

It’s not easy being a teenager but you have to live with it.


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