I love it when I have to explain strange words in class. It's always an exercise in lateral thinking. I'm going to be a heck of a "Taboo" player when I get back to America. Today's reading in my 11th class had such classics as "compost," "repository," and the always fun "stray." "Stray" is a good time because it always brings up stray dogs and the fact that they're picked up by animal control on sight in America. My students universally think this is the strangest thing they've ever heard.
Strays here live on the street until a city adopts a "clean-up" program and the population falls for a while. Silistra has quite a few strays that I've seen regularly for the past two years. One of the interesting things holding back a strong animal control program here is the cultural angst about euthanasia. Animals are rarely put to sleep here, so slimming down an oversupply at an animal shelter would seem horribly inhumane. I usually explain that Americans get by this inhumane problem by ignoring it and prefering it to half-dead, lame dogs wandering the sidewalks.
Then came compost. My only real experience in the word "compost" comes from "compost heaps." So I explained it like this:
"Well, some environmentally, um, sound Americans--and I guess Europeans, too--like to throw all their organic garbage in a big pile in the backyard. So they'll throw banana peels, orange peels, things like that on the pile, and then bacteria get at the food, and it breaks down, and after a while you have fertilizer. (Do we know "fertilizer?" Good.) That's the compost."
And people do this in their backyards?
"Well, most of the time they leave the pile in a shed, or something, so the smell isn't too bad. Oh, and most people don't throw meat or dairy on the pile. That's just bad. Anyway, it's environmentally-friendly."
Huh.
And we moved on. The best times come when I have to resort to drawing things on the board. That's high comedy for all involved, although I've gotten much better at quickly drawing whatever thing I mean to show. I'm awfully good at drawing America at this point, for those times when I need to show the students where certain places in the country are.
Anyway, it's all fun. Which I need this week, because as bad as the "can we go early"s usually are, they're worse now, when all the students think it's their right to leave. At least vacation was just officially lengthened. It's running until the 10th now, extended from the fourth. That made everybody at the school very very happy. Very.
Posted by Rob at December 20, 2004 04:07 PM