The other day I had a funny incident with my adult learner. It is not only its specificity and comic value that I decided to share it for, but also because it felt to me to be a general manifestation of our globalized society. So here's the thing. The class was focused on the practice of prepositions and numbers. At some point I introduced an exercise in which the particular linguistic units were embedded in a list of sentences referring to one person. After identifying the numbers and the prepositions in the phrases, she had to guess the subject of the sentences. The first set was about a notorious Hungarian celebrity, known for accidentally shooting himself to death and for earning the honorable title of the world's ugliest woman. The second set of sentences referred to one of the learner's acquaintances, someone she used to meet several times a week and just saw a couple of days before.
Can you guess how it went? She immediately knew the first one. With the second, however, she was seriously struggling. I had to confirm several times that she did know this person.
Were the questions wrong?* Or does she know a person she never met better than someone she played, laughed, cried with? Or is she not the exception but the rule, because we tend to spend more time, paying more attention to Twitter and Facebook than to our neighbor, sister, mother?
* Actually, I even made a mistake in the first description, as Zámbó Jimmy died, not, like I wrote, around 2004, but in 2001. But still, she was not misled.
* Actually, I even made a mistake in the first description, as Zámbó Jimmy died, not, like I wrote, around 2004, but in 2001. But still, she was not misled.
Na írok akkor ide ehhez a szép bacsihoz :) mi ez a blog írás most? És jól láttam, hogy tanitasz? Ezt nem is tudtam...
ReplyDeleteHa tudom, hogy ilyen macerás írni ide akkor nem tettem volna. Már tudom miért adsz ezért szaloncukit:)
ReplyDeleteJudit, dear, you are so special for my heart. Thank you for making the effort to share your deep insight with us. :-)
ReplyDeleteSo what have we learnt? The uglier you are the more people remember you or perhaps that Zsófi was never in the news in relation to a cock. Nice design by the way!
ReplyDeleteYes, all those. For me the lesson was that we are shallow and in the middle of this info boom we miss out on important things, those just next to us. Yesterday as I was traveling on a packed subway, I looked around and no one was there to make eye contact with. Everyone was sucked into their phones, for gaming, texting, surfing, or whatever, as long as it was virtual -- that is, safe.
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