Thursday, November 3, 2011

Martians come from Mars and my daddy was abducted by aliens.

What? Those are two things that I learned while in chemistry class with the 2nd years. Here are some other things that happened today.
  • I taught my 2nd years the difference between 'space shuttle', 'space station' and 'space ship', and why you probably shouldn't say that you saw a space ship in the sky. How we started discussing this in the middle of a chemistry class I'm really not sure, but it was definitely more relevant to the students than knowing how to convert centimeters to kilometers...
    • The teacher told me that the dad of one her students a few years ago had said he was ABDUCTED BY ALIENS. The whole time she was telling me this story (in broken English) I thought she was confusing her words, and wasn't actually trying to say that. Nope. True Story.

  • Then in the 3rd level class I thought that a girl told me I had a 'very beautiful collar bone'.........................................................She actually said a spanish word that meant necklace, so don't ask me how I automatically translated that to mean collar bone. I said awkwardly, wow thank you no one has ever said that before, and walked away feeling a little weirded out. Of course 2 seconds later I realized that I was the weird one and that she had just commented on my necklace. More moments like this are sure to follow when I have to get up at 7:30 each morning and rely on 2 cups of coffee just to get me through the morning....STAY TUNED!
  • Then I was asked why American rap songs say 'for ya' instead of of 'for you'. I explained that it's kind of the same thing as here in Spain, when people drop the s or just drop the entire end of a word, like ha luego, má o meno, gracia. Americans like to say as few syllables and spend as little time pronouncing the individual words, kind of like Spaniards do when they smoosh all their words together. She understood that. 
  • I also fessed up to the 3rd years that I can speak and understand Spanish perfectly well. I tried the whole playing dumb thing for a month, but I could only take so long of them asking me why I didn't speak Spanish and saying "but Eli speaks so well!" before I had to come clean. All the kids that I told looked excited, like I had told them a special secret of some kind. 
  • And then I fell completely in love with my 3 kids that I teach for an hour a week. I feel like a thief charging 25euro to "teach" them for an hour, when i would happily do it for free. But hey, I'm not gonna complain :)

3 comments:

  1. I just want you to know, that I love reading your blog. And I loved the alien abduction picture!

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  2. Good, thanks! :) And I drew that picture on the board when I was explaining space ships and abductions. It was pretty epic.

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  3. My favorite way to shorten words in Spanish is dropping the d - "Me ha da(d)o" "Vamos a estar cansa(d)os". It makes saying everything so much easier!

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