Option 1: Don’t show up.

My oral English classes are doing presentations this week. I told them to talk about a foreign country they’d like to visit or live in, and I offered extra credit if they could find a country I’d never heard of. The speeches haven’t exactly been inspiring. Mostly it’s been students blatant lyplagarizing travel books and Wikipedia, staring down at the podium and asking me if they can speak Chinese (No. It’s an English class). But at the end of class Monday, a student told me I needed to add two groups to my list next week, when we’re finishing things up. Four students weren’t in class this week, or last week when I made sure everyone had a group and a country.

“Where are they?” I asked.

“In dormitory,” he said.

“Why?”

“They are sleepy.”

“Why are they sleepy?”

“They play basketball.”

Basketball, it seems, has so worn them out that they’ve missed class for the past two weeks (we only meet once a week). “Tell them this is their midterm,” I said to their messenger, who slinked away.

Option 2: Forget it’s an English class

Here’s a simple assignment: Choose a city you’d like to visit and plan a trip there. Pick any city in the world. Write down what you’re taking, how long you’ll stay and why you want to go. Easy, right?

So why is it when I ask you where you’re going, you stare at me as if I just told you to calculate the diminishing gravitational pull between the Earth and a launching space shuttle, accounting for changes in relative mass from spent fuel. Now, if you’d studied a day in your life, you might be able to understand the question, “Where are you going?” This is an English class. I’m speaking English. You should consider learning English.

Option 3: Do what you did last year, when you failed.

Twice in the last two weeks, I’ve had students come into my classes asking to join, saying they failed last year and need to retake the course. Now, this isn’t a problem, really, as 41 students isn’t any more impossible to teach 90 minutes a week than 40 students. There’s just one thing that puzzles me:

It’s week 10 in the semester. My graduate courses have eight weeks left. If we had material for this class (we don’t, really) we’d be half way through it. And you, my newest lollygagger, have no way have knowing that, because you’ve been somewhere else for the past two and a half months. Could this be why you failed last year?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 11:12 pm and is filed under the Dalian life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.