Week 3

Hello everyone!

How are you doing?

Everyone did a very good job this week. I also cannot believe that we laughed so much during English class. I especially enjoyed the role-play on Monday.  The topic for Monday was choosing which people would be useful in order to start a new civilization. Each person had some good points and some faults.

The possible survivors were:

1.  A 32-year old male carpenter that was manic/depressive.
2. A married male artist that was 30 years old. His wife was #3.
3. A 29-year old female singer. She was married to the artist and pregnant.
4. A one-armed female nurse that was 26 years old.
5. A male doctor that was homosexual and 27 years old.
6. A female biologist that was 22 but couldn’t have children.
7. A racist male farmer that was 40 years old.
8. A 25-year old Catholic nun.
9. A policeman that was 37 years old.
10. A 25-year old woman that was also a drug addict and a teacher.
11. An aggressive male soldier that was 30.
12. A 50-year old clever politician.
13. An alcoholic engineer that was 33 and a woman.

The pros/cons of each person stimulated a lot of debate and caused a lot of disagreement. After spending a long time discussing each person’s good/bad points we then did a role play and each student explained why they should survive. This was fantastic!

On Thursday, we continued with a similar idea and imagined that we did such great job choosing the survivors that the humanity survived. It was a few generations later and the island had over 150 people on it. We imagined that everyone was going to be on a committee to decide the rules, laws, and customs of the island. At first, we brainstormed questions that needed to be answered. I was very impressed with the questions.

A great deal of new/interesting words came up while thinking of questions.
Some of these words were:

soil
currency
infrastructure
elect
unanimous
barter
conservative
liberal

In the second hour of class we pretended to be one of 6 characters while discussing the questions that everyone thought up during the first hour. The conversations were great–both funny and serious. Mostly everyone talked a lot.

Again, lots of words came up. They were:

unemployment
prevent
incarcerate
monogamy
polygamy
commit
committee
a pill
the pill

At the end of class I  talked about some  key errors that I heard.  Here are some errors from today’s class:

This island has small people. >>> This island only has a few people.
Small people means that the people are short… not the amount of people.

We should prohibit eating the pill. >>> We should prohibit taking the pill.
In English, we don’t usually eat medicine (it tastes terrible).

He is a grandfather.  or He is an old man.
If he is a grandfather he has grandchildren. When we talk about being a grandfather we are talking about family relationship. Otherwise, we would talk about his age. Just like ajashi does not mean really mean uncle.

Are you agree with me? >>> Do you agree with me?
I am not agree your opinion. >>> I do not agree with your opinion.

I also talked for about a minute about “wanna.” My advice about this word is just to be careful. Try to not overgeneralize and use it in the wrong cases.  The examples from today were:

He wanna be a king.  >>> He wants to be king. 

I wanna freedom.  >>> I wanna have freedom. / I wanna be free. 

At the end of class I also mentioned some good things that I heard in class today.  Actually, I heard many good things, but some were:

For me, ….. (instead of IN MY CASE)
Do you think so?
Well,….
Oh my goodness!
When it comes to ___, ….

It was a really great job by everyone. Have a great weekend and I will talk to you next week. Please feel free to leave a comment or question about anything. Take care!