“English Club” Shenanigans

A few funny and noteworthy things have happened in “English Club” this week. I’m still hesitant to call it that, because of my harboring secret ambitions that it’s still going to turn into the Reproductive Health class that I so want to teach. However, as evidenced from our past 5 meetings, it is clearly an English Club right now with our games and writing and speaking exercises so I guess I will let the name stay…for now. In quotations.

But now, I’d like to present to you the first in a series of posts titled “English Club” Shenanigans:

I passed around a sheet the other day with Name, Grade, and Phone Number written at the top to get a grasp on how many students were coming to these sessions. I get the list back with 24 names, some with phone numbers, some without (not everyone can afford phones). One kid had gone above that, however, and written, under the Phone Number column, “I am not Telephon.” Noted.

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Today I divided the club into groups of four or five to do a writing exercise where each person starts writing a story for a few minutes and passes the paper on to the next person who also writes for a few minutes, so on and so forth, to create a coherent amalgamation of a story. A group of snickering 12th grade boys (Tiger amongst them) came up with this gem:

“Have a men love a girl. but she don’t loved him. he feld hot happy when a girl refused that not love him. and then he went to drank a lot of wind wine and smoke and then he said, drink for drank drink not drank drink for wat. and then that girl came to met him. She want to say she love him but she saw him like this she say good bye.”

By the way, “drunk for drank drink not drank drink for wat” is a misspelt version of a popular Khmer saying, “Drink for drunk, drink not drunk, drink for what?” Otherwise known as, the only reason to drink is to get pissed drunk. Luckily, at the bottom of this story, there was a carefully hand-written disclaimer: ”This story is not good for us to imited him.”

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For homework after Monday’s session, I had my students write their own stories after I told them my childhood favorite of “Rumpelstiltskin.” I got back a variety cleverly crafted stories including one about two poor farmers’ children who get adopted into a rich family so they got to go to University and one about a brave hunter’s son who was betrayed by the king’s officer when going to the palace to ask for help because his father had died. But there was one that particularly caught my eye–a solid 5 8×11 pages, back and front, of blue ink that started with:

“Once upon a time, many centuries ago, a poor family lived in a  hilly area of the north of Persia. They had only one son who looked after their few sheep. His name was Ios….”

Something tells me that this 10th grader might not have written the entire grammatically correct story himself.

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Add all of this to the fact that people still whisper “I love you” whenever Tiger speaks (in reference to the first disastrous play of “Telephone”), causing everyone to burst into laughter, I’d have to say that this is easily the highlight of my experience here so far. Easily.