I often forget about the funny stuff that happens in the classroom, and hardly anything filters through to anecdotes these days as things happen so often that most of it just fades from memory. This might be down to the fact that I’m almost always running around like a headless chicken, making photocopies and churning out lesson plans, but it might also be because the funny stuff that I recounted with such gusto on the phone at the start of the year has itself become fairly routine. So I’m going to try and remember some episodes from this week to demonstrate that my life isn’t all photocopies and grammar.
In the classroom:
There is a boy in one of my classes who sits at the back. When I ask ‘any volunteers?’ he waits a moment, shouts ‘choose me!’, then when I call on him he looks around and says ‘no volunteers.’ Drives me a bit crackers.
As a warm up I often use the telephone game (Chinese whispers for those back home, I changed the name to make it more politically correct.) Today the word I gave was ‘answer’. When it reached the board, it had become ‘question’. The girl at the front was pretty dismayed, but her ‘team mates’ cracked up at their own wit.
As a warm up in another class, I used a world map and asked for names of countries in English. When I pointed to China, the answer that I got was ‘Australia.’ Sometimes, there are no words.
A teacher that I work with sometimes doesn’t understand what I say, but before checking, he ploughs straight in and translates incorrectly into Japanese. When I pointed at Sweden on the map, the students weren’t getting it so I said ‘a hint – Ikea!’ He jumped in and said ‘yes! ‘I come from here,’ that’s what she said, so where is she from?’ Err.. I am not Swedish.
Similarly, I pointed to Sweden in a different class and gave the same hint when a different teacher charged forward and said ‘no! You are wrong!! It is not this country, it is Finland.’ When I quietly explained that I had said ‘Ikea’ and not ‘Nokia’, he allowed me to continue, but I have since decided to exclude Sweden from my quiz.
After doing an exercise on directions using a miniature map of Manhattan, one student was heard to say ‘what is Manhattan?’
Last term I did a lesson on travel, and explained that 新幹線 (しんかんせん) is translated as ‘bullet train’. The JTE was determined they should work out themselves what bullet meant, so drew a bullet on the board. It looked a bit obscure with no context, so he added a gun next to it.. a long thick tube shape with a stubby handle (do we say handle?) Anyway, this shape coupled with the proximity of the bullet the decoration of speedlines meant that when he stepped back we all realised that it looked like a giant ejaculating penis. Cue the most frantic board erasing I have ever seen in my life as the students and I collapsed in hysterics.
I’ll try to write random happenings like this when they occur, because I easily forget. I should read over them often though, this stuff really cheers me up when I’m having a bad day! Does any other job bring this kind of satisfaction?
In the classroom:
There is a boy in one of my classes who sits at the back. When I ask ‘any volunteers?’ he waits a moment, shouts ‘choose me!’, then when I call on him he looks around and says ‘no volunteers.’ Drives me a bit crackers.
As a warm up I often use the telephone game (Chinese whispers for those back home, I changed the name to make it more politically correct.) Today the word I gave was ‘answer’. When it reached the board, it had become ‘question’. The girl at the front was pretty dismayed, but her ‘team mates’ cracked up at their own wit.
As a warm up in another class, I used a world map and asked for names of countries in English. When I pointed to China, the answer that I got was ‘Australia.’ Sometimes, there are no words.
A teacher that I work with sometimes doesn’t understand what I say, but before checking, he ploughs straight in and translates incorrectly into Japanese. When I pointed at Sweden on the map, the students weren’t getting it so I said ‘a hint – Ikea!’ He jumped in and said ‘yes! ‘I come from here,’ that’s what she said, so where is she from?’ Err.. I am not Swedish.
Similarly, I pointed to Sweden in a different class and gave the same hint when a different teacher charged forward and said ‘no! You are wrong!! It is not this country, it is Finland.’ When I quietly explained that I had said ‘Ikea’ and not ‘Nokia’, he allowed me to continue, but I have since decided to exclude Sweden from my quiz.
After doing an exercise on directions using a miniature map of Manhattan, one student was heard to say ‘what is Manhattan?’
Last term I did a lesson on travel, and explained that 新幹線 (しんかんせん) is translated as ‘bullet train’. The JTE was determined they should work out themselves what bullet meant, so drew a bullet on the board. It looked a bit obscure with no context, so he added a gun next to it.. a long thick tube shape with a stubby handle (do we say handle?) Anyway, this shape coupled with the proximity of the bullet the decoration of speedlines meant that when he stepped back we all realised that it looked like a giant ejaculating penis. Cue the most frantic board erasing I have ever seen in my life as the students and I collapsed in hysterics.
I’ll try to write random happenings like this when they occur, because I easily forget. I should read over them often though, this stuff really cheers me up when I’m having a bad day! Does any other job bring this kind of satisfaction?
