lathophobic aphasia: Been there, done it, bought the, etc....

Monday, 3 November 2008

Been there, done it, bought the, etc....

I am paid by the hour and cannot afford to be ill. I had a 'flu jab on Saturday morning, so as to be safe this year from anything other than Bird Flu. A week off could cost me six hundred pounds. How nice, though, sometimes, to enjoy ill-health: some brief, trivial but incapacitating illness would beat teaching, just occasionally. To stay in bed of a dark, wet morning with a big mug of tea and read - one could bear the discomfort of fever cheerfully. I mean, how many more times do you want to discuss food with lower intermediates as I did today:

'Turkey food is wery deliss-use, with madge fresh frewit and wedge-tables, and good for our healty.'

Heard that one before, more than once. Dozens of times, in fact. We got onto booze.

'I drean a loddoff alcohol'' said Luis (Ecuador)

'How much?' I ask, sensing a kindred spirit.

'A loddoff. Two bierce a day.'

'Two bierce a day?' says Cecilia (Ecuador) incredulously. 'Jew drean two bierce a day???

'Yeah'

'Salodda bierce!'

Two beers a day hardly registers on my scale. I would feel deprived on such a regime. I keep quiet. I also keep quiet, with more difficulty, when my Algerian students, who are lovely, have a good snigger at the idea of lesbian and gay civil partnerships.

It is not the students' fault, obviously. It's just that ELT can so often feel like a recurring dream, the same conversations, the same prejudices cropping up over and over.

How about this for an intro to lesson #1? 'Right, before any one of you raises any of these issues:

Dogs are intelligent animals and they only bite if they are raised by arseholes.
I'm unmarried 'cos I'm a pouf. I like blokes, but probably not you, so relax.
I drink like a fish.
I'm English but I'm a pretty good cook.
I believe consenting adults should enjoy guilt-free sex with any number of partners and in any combination of sexes, so long as I only get the men.
I know Allah will provide milk, honey and wine in the next world, but why wait? I can get all that from Sainsbury's tonight.

So let's move on, shall we? Please turn to page two.'

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: Can we have lesson #2 today please ?? ROFL

Mac; 4 November 2008 at 08:25

Quite.

''When the Washington Post telephoned me on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa, I felt at once that this was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humour, the individual and the defence of free expression''

"Nothing optional - from homosexuality to adultery - is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate."

''The four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics.'

Christopher Hitchens

“It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvellous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.”

Richard P. Feynman

''Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts. Also, it is probably due to our lack of small talk, a lack that extroverts often mistake for disdain. We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours. "Introverts," writes a perceptive fellow named Thomas P. Crouser, "are driven to distraction by the semi-internal dialogue extroverts tend to conduct. Introverts don't outwardly complain, instead roll their eyes and silently curse the darkness." Just so.''

Jonathan Rauch

''One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about human beings was their habit of continually stating and repeating the obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen
down a thirty-foot well, are you alright? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn't know about.''

Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

''The human species, Dinah sometimes thinks, is stark staring mad. People have no sooner got themselves born than they start to imagine the gods want them to flatten their heads, or perforate their genitals, or arrange themselves into hierarchies based on the colour of their skins. The gods require them to avoid eating hoofs, or to walk backwards in certain sacred presences, or to hang up cats in clay pots and light fires underneath them. The gods like them to slaughter birds and make incisions in their own skulls. The gods have put the banana on this earth so that the human species can apprehend that fruit as a miraculous revelation of the Holy Trinity. It has to do with their singular ability to think and dream in symbols. This is what makes the species so vicious. It's also what makes them great poets.''

Barbara Trapido 'Frankie and Stankie'.