Holy Crap

I am writing this now as an escape from my duties at work. I have been asked to edit and grade one student's Australia Home Stay Journal. Usually this activity takes me about fifteen minutes to finish. I have been working on this two-page atrocity for nearly 4 hours, on and off. I have to take a fifteen minute break after every sentence to stave off the insanity and the mounting berserker-rage that grasps for ground in my mind caused by the severe lack of understanding of grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

I knew it was going to be a long day when I read the first line:

The day, Having thought of Australia for the time being "Time when the homestay is done approaches. Unpleasant", thing.

I had to start a second page just for rewriting the edits. I am fairly certain that this student just plugged his/her ideas into an internet translator and copied them word for word without ever rereading it. That's fine. I have done that before. But these kids are 17-18 years old and have been studying English for more than four years. They should be able to create a simple sentence with the vocabulary they know or can learn from a dictionary. It takes me so long to edit these types of papers because I do not have even the slightest clue what this person is trying to convey to the reader. I could just rewrite the whole essay for him/her and get on with my life, but I want to try to faithful to the context and intent. grrr.

In one of my many timeouts I meandered over to Howstuffworks.com and had a mini-debate about religion and science. This was my contribution to the article:

I certainly don’t claim to “have it all figured out” but I am secure enough, through reasoning and intellectual pursuit, to know that religions are man-made concepts used to control people; to tell them what to think and what to do.

And upon historical reflection it is clear to see (to me) that religions have been the sources and the causes of some of the most horrific events in history, all in the name of god(s). Any flawless, lawful, and good God that lets its believers kill and be killed in its name, is a sociopath. Which is why I always favored the Greek/Roman Pantheon. Their gods were flawed, petty and realistic. They were actually useful in explaining the chaos of the real world. Of course, Greek and Roman mythology became ridiculous once we learned scientific reasons for the causation myths. Once we found out that the fall and winter seasons on earth were caused by the earth’s orbit around the sun and not because Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, was perpetually sad in the fall and winter because her daughter, Persephone, had to spend 6 months in the Underworld with Hades, we stopped believing in the story.

What I am saying is, once we find scientific explanations for the stories in the bible we can stop believing in the myths and move on and develop as a species. The universe wasn’t created in 6 days, it evolved for over 13 billion years. That is a scientific fact as best as we can determine today. Maybe in 2000 years humans will have a better understanding of the universe (I hope) and will look back on our science today as primitive and nonsensical myth stories. In the pursuit of truth and knowledge I hope we can stop living in the past and push forward to live in the present. I fear the only way we are going to survive as a species is if we stop killing each other over these ridiculously outdated myth stories.

What is the Best Way to Teach a Japanese Student About Breast-Feeding?

Answer: Sounds and body language.

A teacher asked me to help a student prepare for his university exams today. He wanted me to read a passage to the student and ask him questions about the passage in English to test his listening comprehension. And because I am an all-a-round brilliant teacher, I figured that this would not be an issue. Seeing as I have done this very activity with many students before, I decided not to prep any material and just go into the tutoring session blind. It was at this point, when I first looked at the passages that I was to read, that I noticed that the first difficult vocabulary word was "breast-fed." Why in Atheismos' great, green Earth did this teacher choose this passage. I will speculate as to that reasoning at the end of this story.

Have you ever tried to explain a concept that is obviously such a normal and everyday thing that even language does not seem to be enough for the description. It's like trying to define religion to someone who does not speak the same language. Well, this is how I felt when attempting to explain breast-feeding. It was completely obvious to me that the breast feeds something, usually offspring of some species, preferably some genus of homoerectus (cromagnon, homosapien, primate, European). My apparent lack of words and use of body language and sounds to illustrate this concept was hysterical to the student and the teacher. It was only then that I noticed that I was miming holding a baby up to my chest and making suckling sounds with my mouth. I feel this was one of my more triumphant moments in Japan. The student immediately understood what I was attempting to say. Success.

Later in the same article, the topic of diarrhea was mentioned. I think everyone will agree with me that the topics of babies and breast-feeding are inexorably linked to the inevitable result, baby diarrhea. For the record, I am a huge proponent of scatological humor. I think it is one of the more underestimated comic motifs. As such, I decided to teach this young man and this old man some American slang that they most likely have experienced first hand. The Runs. Yet another challenging concept to explain to a non-native speaker. Both the teacher and the student looked puzzled at me when I mimed the international sign for, "holy crap, I have to crap." Which is a horribly pained and mortified facial expression coupled with a determined trot and a futile grabbing of the stomach. It took them both a moment to understand what I was attempting to teach them, and they both nodded in appreciation (presumably accepting my acting skills) and in painful, most likely first hand, understanding. The rest of this tutoring session continued on the subject of breast-feeding and its apparent IQ benefits. To be honest, I think the reason my teacher chose this article was merely for the entertainment value of seeing me explain breast-feeding, diarrhea, and various other less comical medical conditions.

At the end of a rather entertaining day, I was editing some essays for the third year students. One of my students, who I know rather well because she is in several of my classes, asked me to check her essay. To be honest, I was not expecting much from her, which is horrible of me to think. But my time with her in class has taught me that although she tries very hard, the quality of her work is usually rather low. To my surprise, her essay was quite fantastic. She wrote about how most people take happiness for granted and do not take the time to look around them and find happiness everywhere. Something very profound from an 18 year old with presumably no future plan other than marrying her 30-something boyfriend. There was one line in her short treatise which caught my eye, she wrote, "Because happiness is often overlooked, and due to my recent fight with my boyfriend, I have decided to be free and expose myself to everyone, all the time." Presumably, she was referring to being open to new things and new people. But her insistence of the use of the word "expose" shocked me and made me chuckle. I eventually composed myself long enough to explain (again with hand motions and body language) the difference between "exposing oneself" and "remaining open to new things." I am almost certain that she understood the difference yet still wanted to use the word "expose." What could I have done? At least she did not say, "I want to expose myself and so on to everyone all the time." I think that would have been a bit over the top.