Prepare to be disappointed. I am well aware that the title of this post is exciting, intriguing and full of promise. That was my plan though, draw you in and by the time you realise you've been duped it will be too late and you'll have already read half of my ramblings and decide to reluctantly finish. HA!
That's not to say that I will not be discussing grammar, of course I will. I always discuss grammar, at breakfast, in the pub and right here. Who doesn't love grammar? To be honest it is the magical mouse that I feel is a bit of con, somewhat of a deception even. There is no magical mouse you see, there never was really, he was just a normal mouse who died in the name of magic.
Oh I've definitely got you now...read on...
This tale came courtesy of a small boy called Alex. He is very young and very small, and in fairness to him those two things often go hand in hand. He is in a class with much older and taller students due to him being quite advanced for his age; the only thing is that his English is advanced but the rest of his personality is exactly as you would expect for a small boy of precious few years.
This leads to some bemused looks from the class when this highly confident kid launches into one of his excitable stories or begins to leap around the room as the teenage girls check their hair in their portable mirrors.
We were talking about animals. Again. If you have read my blog in the past you will know that animals and pets feature in class quite often and here I was getting tiny bits of information from my teenage students about what made a good pet. I thought I could wow them with my tale of how one student last year had a pet snail, yeah that would have these moody 14 year olds laughing; a snail as a pet...whatever next teacher?
Hailey just nods and says sagely "It's good idea".
Is it I asked. Why is a snail a good pet? What could possibly be a good idea about having a snail as a pet? To which she provided an answer so obvious I felt myself blush at my own stupidity.
Hailey: "The snail is not barking like a dog teacher. He always has the good behaviour."
Silly me. Of course! Snails don't bark, that's why they are great. But there are a lot of things snails don't do, in fact if we are going to praise snails for the things they don't do, then we could end up holding them in very high regard indeed.
I was and still am reluctant to give snails too much credit for their "good behaviour" as I don't feel it is down to discipline or resisting the temptation to run amock, smashing up local beauty spots. Call me cynical, but I think they are partly a bit lazy and partly a bit hampered by their lack of limbs.
To be honest if I ever found a snail that did bark then I think it would be a great pet. Arguably a barking snail would be one of the most brilliant things I can imagine.
So here you are, still none the wiser about the mouse, but with - and I think we can both agree on this - an unexpected bonus of a snail story.
Anyway, this talk of animals was too much for little Alex. He leapt from his chair and began to sort of jig in a circle, waving his hands about as he told us his story. Sometimes I will tell him to sit down, but this seemed like a time to let him jig, so jig he did.
Alex: "I had the mouse. For the pet teacher, the mouse. But he go away in the magic show. My brother do the magic show and mouse is gone ha ha ha."
Obviously he didn't actually say "ha ha ha" but he did laugh. He was breaking out into laughter constantly and kept repeating a sort of wooshing noise inbetween saying "magic show" and "mouse is gone".
I asked him to elaborate on how his magician of a brother made his pet mouse vanish and it wasn't the sort of magic I've grown accustomed to.
Alex gestured to the floor and outlined the mouse and then said "Mouse is here, and then the magic show..." and he leapt into the air and stamped down hard on the imaginary mouse made an explosion sound and then said "Woosh, mouse is gone, magic show".
I laughed. It's not even funny and it is certainly not magic. It is animal cruelty and if anything it was a murder show as opposed to a magic show, but everyone was laughing. Snail loving Hailey, the surly girls at the back who just comb their hair incessantly and me. United in mirth at a disgusting act of unprovoked cruelty and all because of how Alex told the tale. It was his mouse, and even he found it funny so cut me some slack.
I did however point out to the class that killing animals was wrong and that I expected Alex's brother to end up in jail when he was an adult, as these sorts of people usually do. Alex nodded and said "woosh".
For the rest of the lesson I could hear him sporadically mumbling "magic show" to himself and wooshing away with a deranged smile.
Perhaps he will end up in jail too, but how the time would fly if you were his cell mate. For tonights entertainment please welcome to the centre of the cell the famous magician Alex taught by his older brother who is on the secure wing for lifers. With Alex tonight we have his assistant for the evening a local cockroach who is in here for bad behaviour having ignored the standards set to him by Daegu's snail community.
All good animal based lessons must come to an end, that's just the way the world works, and I had to move on to serious subject matter.
The following lessons involved preparing students for their level up tests and a new section we are supposed to review with them on grammar. There is a problem here in that none of the English teachers really know anything about grammar. We never learn the rules in school and just pick it up, or don't pick it up and never have to worry about what infinitives are. I bet you think because I used infinitive as an example that I know what one is. Nope.
So I had to run them through some example questions which involved filling in a blank in a sentence with a word or a phrase from a choice of four options. Thankfully identifying which option was correct was very easy for me, what with being a native English speaker and all, but explaining why this was the case in terms of grammar rules was a little tricky. Luckily we had printed out explanations to give them
Here was one question. Fill in the blank with the correct term:
If you have ever stood next to a rushing river you___________ the water hammering away.
The correct choice was of course B) may have seen.
There were three incorrect options and an explanation for why they were wrong. One wrong answer was "saw" and another was "are seeing" and here is the explanation I was supposed to give for why these two were wrong...
"Since the present perfect tense in the dependent clause is used to express the subject's experience from the past to the present, the main verb in the main clause cannot be in the past tense or present progressive tense."
In the present perfect progressive tense of this independent clause; I haven't got a fucking clue what that means. Or is that present perfect with a gerund? What's a gerund again? I'm going to take this grammar sheet and woosh, magic show!
No comments:
Post a Comment