Near the end of the semester, in the teachers' room at lunchtime, one of the guys asked everybody a question.
"Imagine you are running a race," he said. "You pass the person who is in second place. What position are you in now?"
One of the people who got it wrong reacted by getting astonishingly angry.
"Say the question again?" she said, and when he repeated it, she said, "YOU WORDED IT DIFFERENTLY LAST TIME. YOU'RE TRYING TO CONFUSE ME!"
Then she gave the same wrong answer she'd given the first time. The guy who'd asked the question caught my eye, and we both laughed. She got madder, and kept insisting she was right. Somehow, this question really hit a nerve with her. I had never seen her so worked up.
Other people were asking,
"So what's the answer, then?"
He pointed at me.
"You were the only person to get it right away," he said, and I tried not to look smug. At the same time, I was relieved. I had been trying to figure out why everyone had a different answer from mine. I'd been thinking I'd made some sort of embarrassing mistake, but couldn't figure out what it was.
At home I tried the question on The Man. He answered it wrongly, and when I laughed, he made me say the question again. Then he got mad.
"YOU SAID IT DIFFERENTLY BEFORE!" he said. "YOU'RE CONFUSING ME!"
What an interesting little question!
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- Badaunt
- I'm from NZ, and now live in Japan, teaching English to reluctant university students. Email me: badaunt at gmail.com
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Links for language teachers
I have noticed that I get a lot of hits from people searching "present simple" and "ESL," and assume that this is language teachers looking for ideas or lesson plans. The following links are good places to start.
ESL Lounge Here you will find lesson plans organised by level. A fantastically useful site for busy teachers, and easy to navigate.
British Council Here lesson plans are organized by topic. There are more teaching activities in the 'downloads' section.
The Internet TESL Journal
They have not updated this page for a while, but there is still a lot you might find useful.
Humanising Language Teaching
This is an online journal, good for ideas, inspiration, and especially good towards the end of semester when you're feeling not quite human.
Dave's ESL Cafe
Almost too much to wade through, but a very useful resource. Lots of links to other sources.
Karin's ESL PartyLand
This is a page specifically dealing with teaching simple present and present progressive. I have not tried any of these, but there are a lot of ideas here, and they look good. At the very least you will be inspired.
Good luck!
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5 comments:
What is the answer? I would say second place. My first inclination was to say first place, but after giving it a moment's thought I realized it woudl be second place.
I got caught in that trap some time ago, and now I know the answer...lol
I'm always cautious when people ask questions like that because you know straight off that it's some sort of trick!
Carrie, of COURSE you are right! But I didn't hear you throw a tantrum when you were wrong on your first guess. :-) You're supposed to have a wee hissy fit.
Kenju: Ah, but did you get it right the first time?
Torrygirl: I didn't actually think it was a trick question, which was a bit odd, I've since realized. Or rather, I thought it was and that I must have got it wrong.
Perhaps it's because I'm so sickeningly obedient. He said, "Imagine you're in a race..." and that's exactly what I did. I imagined the two runners ahead of me, and I imagined passing the one in second, and now I was in second, yay! and all I had to do now was to pass the runner in first! So when most people were saying, "First," then I was frantically trying to figure out what the trick was and how they got that answer and how I got it wrong.
But I suspect that most people think something like, "The person in front of the person in second is in first place," which is logical and correct, except that the person in second stops being in second the moment you pass them...
It's a fun question to ask people, though. So far everybody I have asked has got it wrong except one, who got it wrong first but quickly corrected herself.
I wonder if people who answer correctly are more visually oriented, as that is a simple question if you had formed a picture of the race in your head as you imagined it.
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