Here are a couple little anecdotes from the classroom I’d like to leave you with. First, I was teaching my class of twenty-something year old girls about animals, so I thought a writing exercise on farms might be a nice exercise. I had them write a description of what they thought a farmer’s daily life is like. The animals on Natalia’s farm were “a beef, a coward, and a pink”. It took me a little while, but after a few questions I realized that the farmer had a cow, a chicken, and a pig. It was one of those “bad dictionary days”. And then, in my class with the 18 year olds, I decided to have a fun day so we played Scrabble. The four of them had to make words in English and I had to play in Spanish. Xavi was having some trouble making a word with his letters so I leaned over and told him he could make the word “fun”. He didn’t know what “fun” meant, so like any good educator, I told him to look it up. After a few seconds of searching through the dictionary, Xavi looked up with a big smile on his face, said “ah yes” and started raising and lowering a fist in front of his midsection. Now, I don’t know how the average Spaniard defines “fun”, but this came as a bit of a surprise. I wanted to make sure I understood him correctly so I asked Xavi how you say “fan” in Spanish (dreading the answer). With a smile stretching from ear to ear he said, “una hincha”. I then realized, with a sigh of relief, that he had actually looked up the word “fan” in the dictionary and was waving a banner like at a football game. Ah, the joys of miscommunication.
Mar
31
1999
31
1999
