Kibitzing

I had perhaps my most interesting class yet last night. At school they've begun a new sort of course offering--adults classes that meet at least twice every day and for which students can more or less show up whenever they want to. Different teachers handle the classes on different days or at different times, which means that continuity breaks down a bit, and most of the time (to judge by the class notes most teachers leave) teachers do whatever they want, sticking only loosely to the course curriculum. It means that I'm freed up to do just about anything I think is interesting (and that students are prepared for this), which makes it a bit more interesting to teach.

After Monday and Tuesday's class both got hijacked by questions like "Is it true that most people in the US don't marry or have children?," "As an American, do you think you're better than black people, or is that an inappropriate question?," "How do you say, ' [insert food name for which there is no Western equivalent],' in English?" I decided I couldn't take another class without extra materials. Since students are always asking me about food in America (which they assume is all hamburgers and hot dogs), I started hunting for some American menus and soon ran into the menu from Chicago's Eleven City Diner. I figured this would be a good way to show what food in America is like and maybe break down the idea of a McDonald's and KFC nation.

I knew the menu would be a hard read; Nersey had mentioned that Jia struggled to read menus while stateside, and her English is better by several degrees than most of the students in the level I'm teaching. I also knew it would be worthwhile if the students would only put the effort into it. I put together a glossary of about forty or so words I knew wouldn't show up in the Chinese-English dictionaries--things like "shmear" and "mayo" and "side car." I also geared myself up for the class to be an absolute flop. Despite my concerns, the class went over extremely well.

In total, I had four students show up, and all of them seemed to think that this was an incredibly valuable lesson, even if it was miserably difficult. We only managed to get through the first page of the menu and into a few of the words from the glossary. It didn't occur to me while looking at it, but Rubin's short dedication uses a good number of abstract expressions; it took a long while to explain how a restaurant can be a "cornerstone" when a cornerstone is part of a building or how you could "rekindle" feelings without understanding the idea of feeling being like a fire inside a person's chest. With the exception of "diner" and "delicatessen,"* my students knew nearly all the words they were reading; they just didn't understand what it said or why there'd be such a thing in a menu. It took about an hour and a half to get through Rubin's writing, but once we'd worked our way through it, two students concluded that it was "beautiful," like "poetry." My students may be light-years away from remarking, "Oy, this mentsh is a real dikhter," but somehow they manage to get a lot more emotion out of two short paragraphs than most people back home probably would. I imagine getting a chance to peek into part of another culture (and especially into part of it that is maybe just behind the surface and not often seen) and understand it makes such a little thing a larger experience than it could ever be for a native.

* These two new words led to a good bit of pilpl. One student's dictionary defined "diner" as "a restaurant that serves exotic, foreign foods" and "delicatessen" as "meat from foreign countries." It wasn't easy to convince them that diners mostly serve familiar homestyle food and that most delicatessens are neighborhood shops that serve a lot of local foods. I think it's a fair bet those definitions were written by Chinese rather than waiguoren; after all, what's more exotic a foreign food to the average Chinese than a double-decker pastrami sandwich?