Extra credit

Today I observed an English class taught by a Chinese teacher. Cindy, the teacher, used PowerPoint to introduce a unit on poems -- the first example was "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." She discussed rhyme, rhythm and different types of poetry, including sonnets and limericks. One limerick was about a woman from Corfu who wanted to visit Peru, but was too large to get on any train or airplane. Cindy went on to explain (it sounds mean, but she's actually such a nice person) that in America all the bathrooms have special stalls with railings for all the overweight Westerners. Then the class, which had about 50 students, listened to a dialogue twice before the 40-minute period ended.

After class Cindy asked me if I had any suggestions for her, as if I'd been teaching for five years rather than five weeks. I should have been asking her for advice. She showed me the textbook and explained that she's required to teach grammatical terms like noun clause and appositive, even though she doesn't think the students benefit much from it. I told her I had no idea what appositive meant. (I've since looked it up; for anyone who's curious, an appositive is a noun or pronoun that further explains or identifies another noun. For example, in the sentence "My dog Tiki has had a tick problem recently," "Tiki" is an appositive that further identifies "dog." Another example: "The sixth largest state in the nation, Arizona joined the union in 1912" -- "the sixth largest state in the nation" is an appositive. Isn't learning fun? Maybe I should replace China Fun Facts with English Grammar Fun Facts.)

China Fun Fact: If you think the four tones make Mandarin hard to learn, Cantonese has nine.