So lots of rather comical things happened in school today, many of them only comical after the fact. I somehow came in possession of a newfound and completely invalid sense of confidence in my Japanese abilities to the point where I decided to test them out in class . I'm sure many of you can sense where this is going. I wrote a sentence that said "when I went to India, I ate a lot of curry" and completely confused the words for "when" and "where" in Japanese and ended up writing the word for "where" underneath the English word "when." Whoops. So, due to misplaced overconfidence I ended up confusing the kids instead of educating them.
In another class, I just had to laugh at the ridiculously long time it takes to say the shortest sentence in English. I said "Mario went to Italy to eat pizza" and the kid translating it in Japanese sounded like he was reciting a Tolstoy novel or the Gettysburg Address. Actually, the Gettysburg Address is not so long as I now well know since a student is memorizing it for the upcoming speech contest.
Last hilarious, and I mean seriously hilarious moment was in one of my classes where the students were learning to write about what someone else likes or does not like. So the activity instructed that they talk to the other students and ask them what they do and do not like and then write three sentences with the results. So, as I paced up and down the room checking students' work as they wrote, I noticed a frequent recurrent mistake. When students meant to write "I like math," they often wrote "I like meth." It took every ounce of my self control not to make a horrendously unattractive snort laugh noise and politely correct them instead.
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