new slang

Dictionary Breakthrough.  God bless the grandparents! 

 

about a week or so ago i was sitting in my room contemplating. yes, we all know, this usually gets me in trouble, but this time i was trying to figure out why it seems that everyday i have to go over the same things and they ask me the same questions as if its brand spankin' new material; then, i figured it out.  i was stuck in a time warp, very similar to bill murray in groundhog day.  wow, this was fantastic!  now i only had to figure out how to get myself out of it, and get them to learn something before i ejected myself out of this alter reality.   

 

my grandparents sent some moola to buy dictionaries and i had them in class by last thursday.  suddenly everyone started to catch on.  (maybe this particular strain of time warp is cured by books with lots of bi-lingual words in them.)  amazingly enough classes are going better.  i'm not sure if i'm getting my point across any better or if its the sole presence of the dictionaries but these students are actually learning.  (maybe i should let them take them home and sleep on them, see if osmosis could help even more.)  i was actually thinking at first that i would give them the dictionaries to take home with them but peter called me the day i got them and told me that if i did the chances of them keeping them were slim to none and that they would most likely turn around and sell them for some personal dough.  i didn't think that wouldn't be so cool so they have been permanently added to the library here at the school to be checked out for classes and studying, not for a personal back-pocket blue-light specials.  

 

this past weekend i gave them all homework, a lot of homework.  i figured with only a month left of classes and this apparent new intellectual breakthrough i wanted to take advantage of every waking moment. and now,  with last week's insurrection of the V-man, i started to check their work a bit more tenaciously.  this morning i was pleased to discover that every student but two had completed all of it.  the two that didn't, only come for the prestige of saying they studied english from an "american" teacher anyway, so its their fault if they don't learn, not mine.  now that the students are getting the hang of sentence structures and forming conversations i have the pleasure of reading some pretty funny creations.  

 

During one exercise, i had them using adjectives, Fernando wrote: "My brother is very sad, because his wife is very fat."  (so Mr. President is also a funny man)  Another student, while using "could" in a sentence asked, "Could we eat butt later?"  I think she meant to say, "Could we eat, but later."  (we're still working on punctuation...baby steps, remember, baby steps....)  Today we had the three casanova's write their sonnets on the board when i had the students give examples using their homework: "Could you give me a kiss?" and "Could she be with me this night?"  (who is hiding the shakespeare?) and the grand finale, with an example of the use of 'should have', "I lost my heart in her, I should have tried to hide it in her blue eyes."  (thank God my eyes are green.)   

 

one of the students (one of the two that takes this class for prestige purposes) asked, "If we pass the final exam, can we keep the dictionaries?"  (Hah, nice try buddy.)  I said, "Um, probably not, but study hard anyway."