The most hilarious thing happened the other day.

Well, actually it was a couple weeks ago, but the hilarity factor prevails so I deemed it a tale worth telling. One of my students, who goes by the English name of Aaron, had learned a new word that he wanted to tell me about. A high level student with rather good English and a knack for discovering preferably bizarre lexical items, he announced his findings at the beginning of a Saturday afternoon conversation class where a group of 10 or so students plus me just sit in the lounge and have a chat. So Aaron comes up to me and says, “Nana, I have a new word!”
I says, “Great, what is it?”
He goes, “E.D. Do you know what that is?”
“E.D.? Never heard of that- what's it supposed to be?”

Without so much as a flinch but visibly proud, he says, “Erectile dysfunction. I found it on a medical website.”

While I was sitting there with my mouth open trying to figure out just how this guy keeps coming up with this stuff, Aaron proceeded to tell the rest of the group about his discovery, producing a few giggles and more open mouths.

So much for part one of the story. Now part two involves our only senior student, a gentleman well beyond fifty who calls himself Uncle Liu. The former owner of a couple of companies, Uncle Liu is wealthy in wisdom, experience, and the desire to express himself. A very nice guy, just sometimes a bit hard to handle in class with all his questions and remarks.

Having attended Saturday's conversation class, on Sunday Uncle Liu happened to meet for the first time a colleague of mine. This teacher hails from South Africa and is called Edmund, or Ed for short. (Can you guess what happened?)

The polite and chatty fellow that he is, Uncle Liu introduced himself and asked my colleague for his name. Ed, of course, said, “Ed.” Like all Chinese students, Uncle Liu went, “How to spell?”

“E. D.”

A couple minutes later, a very confused Edmund comes into the office and says, “Guys, in your classes, was there anything said about an erection or something?”

Priceless. Absolutely.

Bis dann,

Nadine

By the way, my flat is still there and intact after Friday's “Thanksgiving” party. About 25 or so people managed to cram into my place and consumed mountains of Chinese food (and my very own Greek salad) as well as a good bit of beer and mulled wine. And to the reader who asked (thank for your interest!)- on Friday I opted for a card-stroke-drinking game, but we have played Truth or Dare Jenga many times at the school. In fact, I've had to propose marriage to a colleague of mine after managing to collapse that evil, shaky tower. Just your every day business at EF, really.

I'm having a bit of fun with this lesson.

One of the culturally-focussed classes this week is on drinking culture. There's some comparison between Chinese and Western drinking (yes, they do drink- a lot!), and some language practice on how you can ask people to go for a drink. As it happens most weeks, however, the materials people have managed to drain the lesson of everything that is interesting or fun about the topic and made it into 50 minutes of boring conversation and irrelevant readings without even explaining different drinks that we have in the West.

I therefore decided to completely redo the lesson and created an entirely Powerpoint presentation myself. This one is a lot more relevant to everyday situations and much more fun to teach (unless you're someone who prefers to talk about the downsides of alcohol consumption, which neither my nor the original lesson touch upon). I'm explaining different types of drinks and measurements, drinking idioms, and, with the help of another beer-loving colleague, have managed to dedicate an entire slide to synonyms for the word drunk. There's not much exercise or anything to it, it just presents you with about twenty words and expressions that all mean pissed, or hammered, or off your face. Tell you the truth, I was a bit nervous going into the lesson yesterday as I wasn't sure how the class would react to being presented with a slide full of rude language. And guess what- they loved it! Never have I seen twenty-five English learners write faster and with more enthusiasm. The final activity in the class is to create a story using a selection of rather random pictures (including one of my colleague drunk) and all the new language to crate a story about drinking. Worked just as well as the rest of the lesson, which means the effort has paid off and it's been successful so far.

Which is why I'd like to expand on that synonyms slide. Your input would be very welcome and much appreciated- do you know any interesting words or phrases to say drunk? if you do, please send them in!

Prost!

Nadine