Nicknames

I have a student whose Korean name is “Kwan.” Those who know some Korean might recognize that his name also doubles as the Korean word for “coffin.” So, during introductions the other night, he told us his nickname was “Coffin.” Stunned by the sheer tackiness of such a nickname (what’s next, students named Embalming Fluid, Autopsy, and Mortician?) I told him that that was a terrible nickname and refused to use it in class. We are, after all, adults in a classroom, not kids on romper room.

For teachers out there, how do you deal with goofy nicknames? Are you willing to call a student Captain Rub-a-dub if that’s what he claims his nickname is? I’ve had to suffer through a whole host of dumb nicknames, such as Orange, Zipperman, Bigfoot, and now Coffin. I refuse to say, “How was your weekend, Coffin?” to another person.

Another reason I dislike nicknames, even more legitimate ones, is because some students don’t invest a lot of value in them. I  remember a few years ago I had a student who I liked quite a bit who had some regular English nickname. After her month with me was up, I was curious about how her follow-up class was so I asked her new teacher about this student. “Who?” the eacher asked. I gave her name and described her again. “Oh, her.” Apparently, she takes a new English nickname with every teacher, making the time I invested in learning her “name” a total waste. It was meaningless to her.

Preference Bingo

I’m going to write about some of the games I’ve used in class that work pretty well. The first game I’m going to write about is called Preference Bingo.

Start by reviewing comparatives with your students. I then give them the pattern, “What do you prefer, A or B? I prefer X, because…” Encourage your students to use comparatives when comparing the two items. For example,

Teacher: What do you prefer, Burger King or McDonald’s?

Student: I prefer McDonald’s, because the food is cheaper.

Once comparatives and the basic patter are covered, you can move on to the game. Hand out a 5×5 bingo grid to your students (I make the middle square a freebie, but that’s optional). Now, the teacher should go through a list of 24 (or 25) “What do you prefer…?” questions, such as the one above. For example:

•   What do you prefer, male teachers or female teachers?
• Which actor do you prefer, Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise?
• What do you prefer, going to the beach or going to the mountains?

This list of questions should be prepared ahead of time.

As the questions are asked, the students should write their own answer in any space on their bingo grid. When all the questions are asked, each student should have his or her own unique bingo board with their own personal answers, and the game moves on to its next phase.

Now, the teacher will go through the same answers again, but this time ask each question to an individual student.  The student will answer, but should try to explain his answer as described above (”I think X is better because it is better/cheaper/nicer, etc.). That student, and every other student with the same answer, can check off that square. Go around the room asking the questions to individual students until someone has bingo and wins the game (I usually play it out to the end just for fun).

If you have any leftover time, you can use some of the questions as discussion topics, such as male teachers vs. female teachers (which is a good topic; I’ve found that men tend to prefer women and vice-versa).

It’s a good activity that helps students with comparatives and gives them a chance to get to know the other students better. I highly recommend it.

Doing the bare minimum…

One of the several types of frustrating students to work with as a teacher is the “bare minimum” student. This student will do nothing more than what is exactly required of him or her and will often race through a handout or activity without the slightest thought of follow-up questions or tweaking the activity to better fit his or her own circumstances.

Case in point, today in a low-level class we were practicing polite requests, such as “Could you take a message, please?” One of the supporting activities was to take a scenario and design a dialog around it, and one of these scenarios involved asking a neighbor to turn down his loud music. A pair of students decided on this scenario and went to work.

They finished quite a bit earlier than the rest so I asked what they had come up with. Here’s what they had written:

A) Could you turn the music down?

B) OK.

Granted, it was a low level class, but nevertheless, I found their work to be pretty shoddy. So I encouraged them to expand on it with some sort of set-up that explained why the loud noise was troublesome. To my surprise, their final work was quite good, with one student explaining that he was trying to study for a test but couldn’t because of the music.

I suppose a “bare minimum” teacher would have been satisfied with what they had written, but I expect better from my students.

Factoid of the Day

I found this bit of data to be quite interesting.

According to Geoffrey Nunberg in his new book, Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show (link to the right), a search of Google Groups posting reveals that “you liberals” is more common than “you conservatives” by a 7 to 1 margin.

 Now, I have my own biases when it comes to interpreting this nugget of info, so I’ll keep my speculation to myself. But if someone with more of a disinterested stance on American politics wishes to take a crack at explaining the disaparity, please go right ahead.

And on a totally seperate note, my use of “factoid” above, while perfectly acceptable today, is actually a misuse of the word in light of its original usage. Originally, it meant “something resembling a fact, but not quite factual,” along the same lines as a humanoid resembling a human, but still not quite human. But at some point, some sources, (probably TV news) began using it to indicate a “trivial but true fact,” which I do believe is now its commonly accepted meaning.

-able vs. -ible

Every now and then I’ll stumble across an English question that leaves me wondering. For example, just today, I wrote “flexable” down on a memo, but then saw it later written (correctly) as “flexible.” So this made me curious… why do we write “breakable,” “understandable,” and “teachable,” but not “flexable?”

Well, after a bit of googling, I found this and this. And yes, like a lot of English, there is no hard and fast rule to make sense of it. 

Big Words

Marmot's Hole contributor Richardson gets five bonus points for using the sesquipedalian word floccinaucinihilipilification in a context outside of a discussion of sesquipedalian words:

Your floccinaucinihilipilification of Republican handling of the economy is a bit silly considering, you know, the actual context of what’s been going on in the world.

Good job!

Asphalt

While gaming with four Canadians at my home this afternoon, they began talking about something called "ashphalt.' Not speaking Canuck-ese, this American was wondering if they were, in fact, speaking of asphalt, the stuff they use in road construction. It turns out that yes, that's what they meant. Apparently, it's one of the few differences between Canadian and American English, one which I was unaware of.

I also learned today that their country has its own holidays. Isn't that fascinating?

Fun with English

In my never-ending quest to be a better teacher, I've been reading a lot of books on English over the past few weeks. Here are a few fun blurbs I'd like to share:

• How would you complete this sentence: Sam likes to spling. Yesterday he…. According to research done by a couple of linguists, 80% of the respondents in a study completed that sentence with he splang or he splung. Why the tendency towards an irregular form?
• There are exactly seven nouns in English that get their plural form by changing the vowel sound. Six of them are common (man/men, woman/women, mouse/mice, goose/geese, tooth/teeth, and foot/feet), but the last one less so. What is it?
• To illustrate that it is OK to end a sentence with a preposition, despite what some obnoxious people might insist, the writers of Sleeping Dogs don't Lay quote a boy who is about to receive a bedtime lesson on Australia from his mother. Asks the child, "What did you bring that book that I wanted to be read out of from about Down Under up for?"

The first two bullet points are from Steven Pinker's Words and Rules.