There are some things I just don't know

[spacealien_vamp]

For my first period class this morning, I saw my team teacher head out of the faculty room a couple minutes early, so I knew we had class. As soon as the bell rang, I walked to the seminar room. Door locked. No teacher. No students.

I went downstairs to the language lab, in case he had moved class there (which he's done before). No teacher. No students.

I checked the seminar room again, in case someone had gone up the exterior staircase and entered on the fourth floor. No dice. Finally, as I was about to head back to the faculty room, a student came to fetch me. Seems we were having the lesson in their homeroom classroom.

I say again: Thanks for telling me.

My guest lesson went all right. When we got to the Apples to Apples part, they got the hang of it rather quickly. So quickly, in fact, that after a couple rounds, they started getting into the snarky aspect of it. That is, they would choose words for the humor value rather than the literal meaning. Example: A team is supposed to judge which noun most closely matches the adjective "tall." Given the choice between "mountain" and "pizza," they discard "mountain" as too obvious and choose "pizza" instead. The little stinkers. (Gee, they play just like native speakers.)

I will now list yet another challenge of being an ALT: being asked to explain something that one does not actually know. Today in one class the students were given fragments of newspaper headlines and asked to complete them. My team teacher says to me...

Teacher: Tell them the rules.
Me: ...?
Teacher: Tell them the rules.
Me: ...Rules?
Teacher: Such as, they have to write in present tense.
Me: ...That's a rule?

I took an entire year of journalism in high school and was the co-editor of the school paper another year, and I never knew headlines had rules. I think we just kind of went by what sounded good.

Afterward, a person from the International Exchange group stopped by to ask me some questions about translating a letter from the Lenawee Intermediate School District. I was able to set her straight about LISD not being synonymous with "Lenawee Middle Schools," but I couldn't for the life of me tell her what the exact Japanese translation would be. I just don't have that kind of vocabulary. ^_^;

Comments

[spacealien-vamp.livejournal.com]

That's pretty enlightening. The content guidelines are kind of common sense, but some of the things (like using a comma instead of "and") I've seen but would never have thought of myself.