I made myself a lesson plan on the back of a wet napkin, or receipt or something. That in itself is all you need to know. What teacher does that? What the hell is my problem? I could be doing so much more, but I guess it’s not in my makeup. Nor are wearing shoes or a shirt to class. Right here dude! Although I shed them before class as a courtesy to my students, I routinely show up wearing dark backups for the backups to my backup Kaenon Polarized sunglasses. Yes, the Ipod is typically on shuffle, though today I had Michael Franti going extra loud. I had my ratty pocket dictionary. Earplugs of course. I brought money for a Collectivo in case the run back was going to fall under the hot sun. Today I also brought the only pen I own. I was hoping new ideas would pop into my mind during my decompression session. I had decided the emphasis today should be centered on the vowels, and that all five of them, and sometimes six, can be pronounced four or five different ways. Maybe even more. Ten ways, I don’t know. Where’s a video camera when you need one? What a total fucking nightmare!
Who made me the teach? I learned English on ESPN and Seinfeld. How do you say ‘lacking a syllabus’ in Spanish? My Spanish is only So So, and English has a million freakin’ rules and exceptions. English is beginning to make less and less sense even to me. English is all about memorizing the weerd weard weird spellings of complicated wurdz that lack simple guts and semi-genuine latin derivatives. En Espanol, A is Ah. E is Eh. I is Ee. O is Oh. U is Ooh. Clockwork. Perhaps there are exceptions, I just don’t know them. In English, the pronunciation of just the vowels are littered with confusion. It almost takes two E’s(EE) these days in English to get the E sound? Hug a Tree and See. Much easier if it were Tre, but then it would probably be breaking some kind of English rule where an E that follows an R is pronounced Eh. It should be spelled Trie or Trea, or better yet, Chre. And what about The Big A? How do you explain the different pronunciations of the letter A in words like Name, Car, Apple, and Uh Merrick Uh. Oh, and what about all these English words that end in E? Silent but Deadlee.
Once again, for the third Sunday in a row, I had my back against a wall.
