Thursday, April 15, 2004
possibly memorizing for a future line reading.
today one of my students got a call from her mom. she looked at her cell phone, the consternation rose in her face, and she said, "ho, snap. 's my mom." i'd never heard a snap before.
i know it's a joke that we speak different languages, but today i had to ask my girl veronica four times to repeat a story about her friend desiree and how she said behind her back that her (veronica's) boyfriend was ugly. it isn't just that the kids i work with have an accent. whole different sets of words are left out and meant to be unspoken but understood, and there's something weird about tenses i haven't grasped yet. when the kids talk with each other, they can keep track of strings of four or five pronouns with unclear antecedents but i have to stop them every fifteen seconds to ask which "she" we're talking about now.
and they can't understand me, either. it works both ways. i never would have guessed. sometimes i feel like we'd do better with a translator.
i know it's a joke that we speak different languages, but today i had to ask my girl veronica four times to repeat a story about her friend desiree and how she said behind her back that her (veronica's) boyfriend was ugly. it isn't just that the kids i work with have an accent. whole different sets of words are left out and meant to be unspoken but understood, and there's something weird about tenses i haven't grasped yet. when the kids talk with each other, they can keep track of strings of four or five pronouns with unclear antecedents but i have to stop them every fifteen seconds to ask which "she" we're talking about now.
and they can't understand me, either. it works both ways. i never would have guessed. sometimes i feel like we'd do better with a translator.
