Friday, October 08, 2004

Very quickly, before I have to go teach phonology and pronunciation:

Phonology class is kind of the bane of my existence. On the one hand, I teach the same lesson four times a week, which is no small advantage, as Wavelet and Jedno can attest. On the other hand, I share the lesson with my esteemed colleague, the head of our department: she gives a (boring) lecture on the theoretical aspects of phonology for 45 minutes, and I waltz in with my native speaker charm and do 45 minutes of practical exercises. Which basically means I'm making up half of a university course from scratch. This was totally kicking my ass; I mean, once you've let them run through a bunch of tongue twisters once, they're going to get a little fed-up if you try it on them again. Luckily, I found an awesome little book that I can rip off without compunction. Plagiarism is a way of life for me.

Moreover, phonology class provided me with a bona fide Precious Moment:

This was during the first part of the lesson, while my esteemed and extremely stuffy colleague was teaching. She was trying to get the class to give her examples of the differences between British English and American English. One bright young lad, completely without guile as far as I could tell, came up with a wonderful example, which he said loud and clear:
"In American English they say can't and in British English they say cunt."

And I believe they do, on occasion.

My colleague is either a very good actor or she totally missed it, because she didn't bat an eye. I, on the other hand, was dying, seriously, but I managed to maintain, for the sake of my future employment.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Bona fide indeed.
HA!!
-Jedno

8/10/04 05:28  

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