Naughty

Today I got the urge to do something naughty, but I didn't do it. Actually, I didn't do it because I didn't have a marker pen in my bag, but never mind that. I'd prefer to think I had a fit of responsible maturity and decided to behave myself.

What happened is that I spent Sunday marking students' homework. In this homework, they were writing advice. They looked at a picture of a fat slob with dirty hair and grotty clothes slouched in front of a TV eating junk food and smoking, and gave the person advice about how to clean up their act. This was to practice the forms I think you should... and Why don't you...? and so on.

Most of the students wrote,

Why don't you quit smorking?

- EVEN THOUGH it is spelt correctly in the textbook. For some reason this is a word they often insist on spelling wrongly.

So today, as I walked through the sparsely populated campus early in the morning, the naughty thing I wanted to do was to add an r to all the NO SMOKING posters I saw. Actually there are only two or three that are written in English as well as Japanese, but I really, really wanted to add that r. It would give my students an excuse for getting it wrong. It would be a retrospective excuse, but still, a retrospective excuse is better than no excuse at all, surely.








(I'm working there again tomorrow. I wonder if I have a marker pen around here somewhere?)