Dog, cat, cow...

The local TV station often shows reruns of popular sitcoms, and a few days ago I was watching an episode of Fraiser. In the episode, Niles is trying to teach a hopeless Daphne how to play the piano and having little luck-- after a few lessons, Roz is able to play a song while Daphne can't even handle a simple scale. He assured Daphne that he would continue teaching her as long as it took. "You're a lot nicer then my last piano teacher," she tells him.

Niles is shocked. "You've taken lessons before?"

Daphne goes on to talk about her old teacher, a master of piano, who instructed her every day for fifteen years. He eventually killed himself, she says, right after one of their lessons. She said that she was the last one to see him alive.

I know just how that piano teacher felt.

I had an exercise with my class to teach them relative clauses. Since the examples all focused around relationships ("I like guys who are smart"), which doesn't translate well into a society where mothers pick their future daughter-in-laws, I decided to let the students pick their own topics. I handed out pieces of papers and told them to write a noun on it. The students were baffled.

"What do we do, teacher?"

Write anything, I told them. Any thing. After 16 pairs of eyes continued to stare at me blankly I said: ""You can write anything you want... dog, cat, cow, whatever."

Happy, the students dropped their heads and started to write. After a moment I walked around to check their progress. Dog, dog, cat, dog, cat, cat, cow...

"No, no, no," I said. Write your own word!" I collected the paper and asked them to try again, and this time not to use cat, dog, or cow. "If I was doing this in Arabic," I told them, "I would write something like kitab (book) or qalam (pen)."

They started to write and I went around the room again. Book, pen, pen, book, pen...

Thank God this is my last day.