Literature Enrichment Is Sex Ed, Part 2
Nov. 22nd, 2006 03:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_pretentiousThe danger of teaching students who have small vocabularies is that they have no idea when they're asking about a word I shouldn't be explaining to them.
Most of my students are not native speakers of English, and the native speakers I do get who are in junior high or high school tend to have a lot of reading comprehension problems, so the issue has come up before. But today was a day of mortal embarrassment.
I'd assigned the ADD Brothers a paper about Chinua Achebe's short story "A Civil Peace." So far, so good. The anthology we're using has an excerpt from one of Achebe's essays as a supplement to the story and the author bio. It's a fine essay about thinking bilingually--something my students know far more about than I do. I'd read the excerpt a couple of weeks before, and forgotten a crucial detail.
Achebe's native language is Ibo, but he writes in English. People ask him, he says, what his true language is--the one he grew up with, or the one he works in. He has no answer for them. They press him. Which language does he think in? Both. Which language does he dream in? Both. And then, vexed, someone once asked him what language he had his orgasms in, to which Achebe replied that he did not know.
Now, which word do you suppose I forgot was in the essay? Yep. That word.
The ADD Brothers seem to have divvied the effects of ADD neatly between them. The Hyperfocused One was hyperfocused on some other aspect of the text, and so missed the word altogether. Thank goodness. But the Twitchy One, oh, the Twitchy One is drawn inexorably to the awkward questions. "What is an orgasm?" he asked. He sounded the word out, painstakingly.
I passed him the dictionary and said, "I'd completely forgotten that word was in there. It's a word people ought to know, but bear in mind that if I'd remembered it was in there, I wouldn't have assigned the essay excerpt."
He did catch on that this meant we weren't going to be discussing the word. Alas, he didn't realize that this meant the dictionary was going to give him a definition that was best read silently.
I've trained the ADD Brothers to read dictionary entries aloud, so I can help them with pronunciation and notice when they come up against a word in the definition that they don't recognize. My dictionary has a long, clinical, detailed definition for the word in question. He read it right through to the end of the etymology, just like I taught him to do with unfamiliar words.
Meanwhile, his hyperfocused brother was pacing in the living room, his mind altogether elsewhere, completely oblivious to my mortal embarrassment. His mother was in the dining room, setting the table, and never looked up. I wished, for the millionth time, that she spoke enough English for me to ask her how evasive she would prefer that I be when this kind of question comes up.
The Twitchy One shrugged and got back to the question at hand about how Achebe uses dialect.
I really hope those kids are getting in Mandarin more of the information they need to survive their teens than they seem to be getting in English, because passing them the dictionary is as much as I can do for them. It may be more than I should do.
In other news, the word count crested 30K today.
Deficit's back under 5K. I'll be wrangling the wrelatives over the holiday, but I won't have to wrangle with students, so maybe I can hope to shave a little off the deficit before I come home.
Most of my students are not native speakers of English, and the native speakers I do get who are in junior high or high school tend to have a lot of reading comprehension problems, so the issue has come up before. But today was a day of mortal embarrassment.
I'd assigned the ADD Brothers a paper about Chinua Achebe's short story "A Civil Peace." So far, so good. The anthology we're using has an excerpt from one of Achebe's essays as a supplement to the story and the author bio. It's a fine essay about thinking bilingually--something my students know far more about than I do. I'd read the excerpt a couple of weeks before, and forgotten a crucial detail.
Achebe's native language is Ibo, but he writes in English. People ask him, he says, what his true language is--the one he grew up with, or the one he works in. He has no answer for them. They press him. Which language does he think in? Both. Which language does he dream in? Both. And then, vexed, someone once asked him what language he had his orgasms in, to which Achebe replied that he did not know.
Now, which word do you suppose I forgot was in the essay? Yep. That word.
The ADD Brothers seem to have divvied the effects of ADD neatly between them. The Hyperfocused One was hyperfocused on some other aspect of the text, and so missed the word altogether. Thank goodness. But the Twitchy One, oh, the Twitchy One is drawn inexorably to the awkward questions. "What is an orgasm?" he asked. He sounded the word out, painstakingly.
I passed him the dictionary and said, "I'd completely forgotten that word was in there. It's a word people ought to know, but bear in mind that if I'd remembered it was in there, I wouldn't have assigned the essay excerpt."
He did catch on that this meant we weren't going to be discussing the word. Alas, he didn't realize that this meant the dictionary was going to give him a definition that was best read silently.
I've trained the ADD Brothers to read dictionary entries aloud, so I can help them with pronunciation and notice when they come up against a word in the definition that they don't recognize. My dictionary has a long, clinical, detailed definition for the word in question. He read it right through to the end of the etymology, just like I taught him to do with unfamiliar words.
Meanwhile, his hyperfocused brother was pacing in the living room, his mind altogether elsewhere, completely oblivious to my mortal embarrassment. His mother was in the dining room, setting the table, and never looked up. I wished, for the millionth time, that she spoke enough English for me to ask her how evasive she would prefer that I be when this kind of question comes up.
The Twitchy One shrugged and got back to the question at hand about how Achebe uses dialect.
I really hope those kids are getting in Mandarin more of the information they need to survive their teens than they seem to be getting in English, because passing them the dictionary is as much as I can do for them. It may be more than I should do.
In other news, the word count crested 30K today.
| |
30,117 / 50,000 (60.2%) |
Deficit's back under 5K. I'll be wrangling the wrelatives over the holiday, but I won't have to wrangle with students, so maybe I can hope to shave a little off the deficit before I come home.
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no subject
Date: 2006-11-22 02:50 pm (UTC)Aren't kids precious? They will ALWAYS decide to explore the one thing you don't want them to notice.
Congrats on the next "wordcount milestone". I'm sure you'll make the 50,000 again this year!
no subject
Date: 2006-11-22 05:13 pm (UTC)Ah, too funny.
no subject
Date: 2006-11-22 07:25 pm (UTC)We loved Honors English in high school. Especially Dante. We had such fun with the Inferno, because our teacher was an old, prim, bespectacled schoolmarm type, and we loved to watch her turn red when we asked her to explain passages with bad words in them, or sexual situations. >:-)
no subject
Date: 2006-11-22 09:00 pm (UTC)