Minty Fresh

Julie had a couple of things she needed from the grocery store. She really didn’t have time to go, but she decided to squeeze in the trip anyways. She rushed through the grocery store.

Only later –once she got home- did she notice her mistake. She thought she was buying mint-flavored toothpaste. It wasn’t.

It was green tea.

But hey, we’re here for new experiences right. We both gave it a try. I mean how bad could it be, right?

Got to be honest. It was foul.

Nothing like walking around with that refreshing green tea flavor in your mouth all morning.

It ranks right up there with Annika’s infamous green-bean popsicle incident of September 2009.

Of nouns and adverbs

I know only one language. I really, really wish I could speak a second language, but my innate sense for languages is even more poorly developed than my sense of rhythm. I have tremendous respect for anybody has who speaks more than one language.

For those of us who grew up speaking English as our first language, many of the rules of language are simply caught and don’t need to be taught. In all my years of teaching in The States, I never had to teach a lesson on ‘fewer’ verses ‘’less.’ No, no, Johnny. It’s not ‘fewer money’, its ‘less money’. ‘Fewer coins, but less money.’ Confusing, I know.

My colleague Fabian Tan speaks four languages: English, Mandarin, Malay, and Cantonese. As a Chinese boy growing up in Singapore he had to master English in order to get into college in The States. The difficulty of learning English for non-native speakers was driven home afresh for me during a recent conversation I had with Fabian. I don’t how we got on the topic, but we ended up talking about the order of adjectives. Despite the fact that I am English teacher, I had never really put much thought into adjective order.

But when you put together a string of two or more adjectives, there are rules governing their order. You successfully follow the rules every day even though you probably aren’t even aware that there are rules. For example, as a native English speaker you would never say “red big car.” It is always, “big red car” because one of the eight rules is "size before color."

Come up with some sample sentences that use multiple adjectives and see if you can deduce the rules. Go.

Okay, okay, I’ll save you the trouble. Courtesy of Fabian, the sequence governing adjective order are:

1) determiners (the, several)
2) judgments (lovely, boring)
3) size (big, tiny)
4) shape (round, square)
5) age (ancient, new)
6) color (red, chartreus)
7) origin (British, Sumerian)
8) material (silk, copper)

Without looking back at the rules, put these three adjective together in front of the noun. Brown. Big. Old. Book.

Did the order you put them in conform to the rules? Of course they did.

Can you image being a fourteen-year-old boy growing up in Malaysian and in between worrying about that new zit on your cheek and figuring out how to strike up a conversation with that cute girl in third period algebra without sounding like the biggest doofus in your class, you have to now memorize the eight rules governing the sequence of adjectives.

No wonder I’ve never picked up a second language, I am too busy still trying to figure out the first one. Hats off to all my Chinese friends and students who speak English way better than I could ever hope to speak Cantonese.

Hats off to my Chinese friends and students who speak English way better than I do.

Iconic and Ironic

In conjunction with the book my students and I are reading for English class, I had a lesson planned on irony. It also happened to be a free dress day at school –no uniforms. I was introducing irony and struggling to get my students to understand the concept. “No, no; rain on your wedding day is not an example of irony, that’s just an example of bad luck.”

Then I looked up and noticed Julian’s hoody. Emblazoned across the entire sweatshirt were images of Che Guevara.

“Okay boys and girls, here we have an excellent example of irony. Who can tell me who Ernesto “Che” Guevara was?”

Che Guevara was an Argentina-born medical school dropout who went on to become one of South and Central America’s foremost communist revolutionaries in the 1950s and 60s. He rose through the ranks to become one of Fidel Catro’s key henchmen.

He also happens to be one of Argentina’s greatest exports. In every open air market we go to in Southeast Asia, I see his image on t-shirts, mugs, wrist bands, hats, and banners. Judging by the availability of t-shirts, Che is more popular than Obamao and Bob Marley combined.

Che Guevara was a committed, ideological communist. In other words, he couldn’t have been more anti-capitalist. As a die-hard communist, he was against free markets and he was certainly against personal profit. If Che Guevara knew that people ranging from souvenir vendor to large corporate retailers were making millions off of the sale of cheap t-shirts sporting his visage, he would roll over in his grave. Che stood against a lot of things, but first and foremost, I think that he would be against the working class using its labor to produce low quality, mass-produced t-shirts intended to be sold for profit.

So middle class students –whether in Hong Kong or the suburbs of Chicago- wearing overpriced designer Che-shirts purchased at the mega mall? That boys and girls, is a textbook example of irony.

In order to sport Che chic wear, a kid needs to either be ignorant of twentieth-century history or he needs to have a really sophisticated, subtle sense of irony. Which most middle schoolers don’t have. Sarcasm? Yes. Sophisticated, subtle sense of irony, not so much.

Okay, okay, true confession, I didn’t actually use my student’s Che hoodie as an in-class example of irony. I would never want to do anything to embarrass a student in front of his or her classmates. But oh how I was tempted.

A perfect example of the exact concept I was trying to teach my students was sitting right there in front of me and I couldn’t use it.

How ironic.

-Jack

[Picture and entry posted with permission]

Rehabilitation

As the father of two daughters, I do what I can to keep them from being unduly burdened by the troubles of a fallen world. But in this media-saturated world we live in, this is nearly impossible.

Yesterday was Wednesday, which around here means one thing: afterschool Scrabble Club. It’s a middle school club, but Elise likes to come even though she is only in fifth grade.

I had a rack with nothing but consonants, but I managed to find a spot for “rehab.” Rehab –of course- is short for “rehabilitation” so I wasn’t 100% sure "rehab" would be acceptable as a stand-alone word.

Because I’m an English teacher and my daughter is eleven, when Elise and I play Scrabble together, I will frequently self-challenge which means that if I am unsure whether a word I played is legit, I will challenge it. If it’s not a word, I will pull it from the board and skip a turn.

I said to Elise “If ‘rehab’ is in the dictionary, it means to fix up a house or to make repairs.” Well, that’s what I meant to say. But between reaching for the dictionary and trying to figure out if “rehab” would be before or after “reiterate” in the dictionary, my comment kind of came out one word at a time and not very coherently.

As a result, Elise beat me to the punch, “I know. Rehab. Like Demi Lovato.”

Demi Lovato is the teen singer/songwriter and former star of the Disney show “Sonny with a Chance.” Ms. Lovato got her big break as one of the kids on the Barney show. Last November, Demi Lovato entered rehab for unspecified reasons.Yeah, sweetie. Rehab. Like that.

In a perfect world, an eleven-year-old wouldn’t need to know what “rehab” means. Unless of course, she was helping her daddy remodel the upstairs bathroom.By the way, I looked it up in the Official Scrabble Dictionary: it’s an acceptable play.

The definition it gives?

To remodel.

The Unkown Unknowns

We knew that we were probably only going to be here for two years. That was the deal from the get go. But ever since we had to formally declare that we would not be renewing our contracts, I have found myself hit with little bouts of sadness.

The other day we went out to dinner with some friends to a Thai restaurant in Tai Wai which is kind of major hub here in the New Territories. The twist was, it was in the eastern part of Tai Wai. I have literally been to and through Tai Wai dozens and dozens of times and I didn’t even know that there was an eastern section to Tai Wai. Here was this huge section of Hong Kong just three MTR stops away that until last weekend was completely unexplored.

We have this little park that’s five minutes our house. I thought that we had explored it pretty thoroughly over the last eighteen months. We played tennis on the courts, explores the “extreme" bike course, and walked its many paths. But somehow we completely missed this sculpture which is designed to look like a giant Chinese chess board.

How many other great little corners of Hong Kong was I missing? How many things am I going to leave undone when I get on that plane in July.

By the time July 30 rolls around I will have been out of the States for two years. I thought I was ready to go back. But now –on occasion- I find myself in a panic. So little time left and so much left to see and do. It’s not the things that I know I want and need to do yet before I leave, it the things that I am not even aware of that make me anxious.

I Should Know this by now

Two tips from the world of teaching:

1) The slowest test-taker will almost always take twice as long to complete her test as the fastest test taker. So when the first student turns his test in at the 21-minute mark, you have about 21 more minutes until the last student is done.

2) If you write on the whiteboard with a permanent marker –which if you teach long enough, you will inevitably do- there is a simple solution. Scribble over it with a standard white board marker. Wipe. The permanent marker will magically be wiped away.

BuBut you, dear reader, already knew all this didn’t you?