I'm Starting to Talk like Your Students

"Jack Nicholson" and the girl who always brings her drums everywhere. I actually hamg out with him a lot more that I like to admit!

My final semester at Aliarse is turning out to be pretty easy. I am teaching my fancy gerentes at Transelca, and a group at ITSA, a continuation of one of my last semesters’ classes. These are the more advanced students, and I suppose accordingly the curriculum has a sort of deconstructed quality to it. This is what I have to work with:

Module 6

Indirect questions

Question tag

Get used to/

accustomed to

be used to

Get + adjectives, get + prepositions get + past participle.

SECOND TERM

Phrasal verbs ( COME / GET / GO / PUT / TURN)

Linking words expressing:

Condition ( despite of / in spite of although / Thought )

Purpose: ( so that / in order that /

Cause and result: ( Because / because of / due to; for this reason, as a result, that’s why )

Adding, Emphasizing, Listing points: (also / Besides / finally / in addition / fist of all / what’s more / last but not least.)

Contrast : ( but / however, although / on the hand )

No books, no course packets, just this meager list. And the brilliant minds of my students and myself. My brilliant mind is bored by the prospect of a whole term of “get used to” and “....isn’t it?”, so I’m back to my old ways of inventing what I think we should learn. The problem is that I don’t usually know much about what I’m teaching until I start teaching it. Yesterday, I thought it might be useful for the students to learn phrases like “although”, “in case” and “as long as”. What a can of worms! I was calling them conjunctions, but I really don’t even know...and I forgot that in Spanish, you have to use the subjunctive with adverbial conjunctions. I think I just made a random vocabulary list, and tried to teach them as a grammar point. There was a little confusion. So much for ignoring the syllabus.

There are certain mistakes that all of the students, from my fanciest energy company gerente to my most timid electro-mechanics adolescent, make. Would, could, should and must get mixed up a lot, and my students always say things like, “It must be nice to go to the party tonight.” or “It should be scary to travel by yourself.” Then there are possessive determiners. It doesn’t matter is it’s my, her, their, our; to my student, everything is your. “Last night, I watched TV with my boyfriend at your house.” Or, “My mother is pregnant, and your stomach is getting really big!” I’m happy to be so involved in my student’s lives, but unfortunately, I hear this mistake so often that I’m starting to use it myself! Another one, which is kind of awkward in this unquestionably homophobic culture, is that the boys always say boyfriend instead of girlfriend. I don’t want to assume that the boy with perfectly painted eyebrows, a tight pink shirt and shining fingernails means girlfriend when he says, “Next year, I will marry my boyfriend.” I usually don’t correct them (the other boys will do that for me, between peals of hysteric laughter: “Yes, your boyfriend, marica, hahaha!!!!)...I’m trying to get them to consider the word “partner”, a word I myself have never really gotten comfortable with in my own life. But in this situation it could/should/must/would be useful.

A mysterious fire always elivens the bus ride home.