Much to what I can only imagine will be my grandmother’s horror, this week my textbooks taught both, “Sora is taller than me,” and “Do you get it? Yes, I got it.” It also gave a picture of a killer whale with the name ‘dolphin’ underneath. On top of that, my co-teacher attempted to teach the students such gems as, “Let’s go reading, Let’s go studying,” and “I’ll be second that.” Needless to say, I’ve been feeling a bit frustrated.
As a native speaker, my job is supposed to be to point out these problems, but sometimes that simply doesn’t work. I attempted to teach what “I’ll second that” means; but since my coworker had never heard of our meeting process before, she decided that it meant “I’ll be second to do that,” or “I’ll be second that.” Everyone was uncomfortable that I thought it had something to do with a process, that I thought ‘second’ was being used as a verb. Dumb foreigner. And to correct a book’s mistake about a dolphin or comparative statements is uncomfortable, too. I could tell them it was a killer whale, but I’m afraid I didn’t try going against “I got it,” or “Sora is taller than me.”
And there are other things I really shouldn’t try teaching. Like science or certain Western ‘beliefs’. Last week in our textbooks, there was a conversation between Tony and Sudong. Sudong had been in California, and he had grown a lot in the year that he had been away from Korea. Tony comments on this, and Sudong replies, “I did a lot of exercise.” Since the question for this section was in Korean, and my Korean teacher was out of the room (the crazy one), I did my best to talk to the students about the discrepancy between Tony’s observation and Sudong’s reply.
“Does exercise make you taller?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Come on, now, we all know exercise doesn’t make you taller.”
“Basketball.”
“Basketball doesn’t make you taller.”
“Swimming.”
“No, swimming won’t make you taller, either.”
“Korean people, Canada people – different.”
“No, all humans are the same.”
About this time, my co-teacher came back to the room. One of the students explained the problem to her in Korean. She replied, in Korean, “American’s don’t believe exercise will make you taller,” then, had them translate to me, “Koreans believe that exercise will make you taller.” Everyone in the room was amazed at how dumb the foreign teacher was.
I think, though, that Paul had one of the best misunderstandings with his co-teacher recently, and not in a classroom. We were taking care of our friends’ dog; at lunchtime one day, Paul told his co-teacher that he had to go home at lunchtime to feed the dog, to which his co-teacher replied, “You’re going home to eat the dog?”
3 comments:
yum!
I hate to tell you this Meg, but I've always felt that I am taller than Paul because I exercised so much more than him when we were younger!
Seriously, maybe if Paul spent less time reading books and more time playing, say, hockey, he'd have been taller than me.
Korean gymnast...much exercise, good form, not tall. Female Korean figure skaters, much exercise, not tall.
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