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Sometimes, baseball is awesome for teaching
Today we had a lesson on suffixes. It was the class that I only have one student in, and he LOVES talking about sports (especially Urawa Reds and Hanshin Tigers), so I try to work that in.
The targets were that -er and -ist usually mean people (writer, artist), -ful and -less and -able usually mean adjectives (helpful, spotless), -tion is a noun (relaxation), and things like that.
So I was like "Well, what do you call all the people on the baseball and soccer teams?"
We went through pitch-er, catch-er, field-er, keep-er, defend-er, etc. Then I wrote up on the whiteboard,
"Kei Igawa is a powerful thrower, so deception is useless for him. He might be valuable to a team as a lefty specialist pitcher, though even that is questionable."
I asked my student to come up with all of the suffixes and root words. Then I asked him what the sentence meant. He thought for a minute and said, "You think Kei Igawa is not very good."
I'm sure there was a better reaction than cracking up, but it really was all I could come up with to do.
Also, he saw my new calendars and was like "Why is Nashida your new manager? He isn't even a Fighters OB." I was like "Your guess is as good as mine." He said, "Maybe it is because the Swallows got Takada."
In another class, one of my students went to Kyushu for the weekend for a wedding, and he brought back omiyage! Yay. He was like, "Can you read this?" showing me the box of 博多通りもん. I said "Yeah, 'Hakata toorimon'..." to which the students were all like, "Oooooh." and then I continued, "...what on earth does that mean?" They all laughed. Apparently it means "white bean manjuu" or something. I don't think anyone cared. Yummy omiyage is yummy.
Sometime in the last week the Kawaguchi ekimae arcade moved their Pop'n'Music machines to the back of the arcade near the other Bemani. However, being as they're actually with the stupid little-girl-fashion-card games which are noisy as all fuck, it's now nigh impossible to actually hear the Pop'n machines. This sucks. On the other hand, nobody is playing them anymore, so I could pretty much play as much as I wanted to for the hour I was there. I actually got about 2/3 or more through Murmur Twins Hyper (the level 28 one) as an extra stage! I'll get there eventually.
The targets were that -er and -ist usually mean people (writer, artist), -ful and -less and -able usually mean adjectives (helpful, spotless), -tion is a noun (relaxation), and things like that.
So I was like "Well, what do you call all the people on the baseball and soccer teams?"
We went through pitch-er, catch-er, field-er, keep-er, defend-er, etc. Then I wrote up on the whiteboard,
"Kei Igawa is a powerful thrower, so deception is useless for him. He might be valuable to a team as a lefty specialist pitcher, though even that is questionable."
I asked my student to come up with all of the suffixes and root words. Then I asked him what the sentence meant. He thought for a minute and said, "You think Kei Igawa is not very good."
I'm sure there was a better reaction than cracking up, but it really was all I could come up with to do.
Also, he saw my new calendars and was like "Why is Nashida your new manager? He isn't even a Fighters OB." I was like "Your guess is as good as mine." He said, "Maybe it is because the Swallows got Takada."
In another class, one of my students went to Kyushu for the weekend for a wedding, and he brought back omiyage! Yay. He was like, "Can you read this?" showing me the box of 博多通りもん. I said "Yeah, 'Hakata toorimon'..." to which the students were all like, "Oooooh." and then I continued, "...what on earth does that mean?" They all laughed. Apparently it means "white bean manjuu" or something. I don't think anyone cared. Yummy omiyage is yummy.
Sometime in the last week the Kawaguchi ekimae arcade moved their Pop'n'Music machines to the back of the arcade near the other Bemani. However, being as they're actually with the stupid little-girl-fashion-card games which are noisy as all fuck, it's now nigh impossible to actually hear the Pop'n machines. This sucks. On the other hand, nobody is playing them anymore, so I could pretty much play as much as I wanted to for the hour I was there. I actually got about 2/3 or more through Murmur Twins Hyper (the level 28 one) as an extra stage! I'll get there eventually.