Fresh

The other day, after reading what seemed like a thousand fairy tale picture books that I very wisely assigned French 3 (which has by far more students than any other level I teach), I gave my students some general feedback about what I read--things like don't forget accent marks, stay consistently in the past tense, and...please don't use Google Translate.

The last comment took up the most time of my feedback. My main piece of evidence was the massive quantities of grammar in the books they wrote that they have never in fact learned. I told them how I don't think Google Translate is evil or anything, but you need to know how it works and its limitations, and you need to consider your objectives when you choose a tool. For example, if your objective is to learn French, maybe the best tool isn't a translator that you just drop the story you wrote in English into.

(One student had this very ornately written story that I don't even think he wrote in English. I challenged him on it, and he fought back until I asked him to just tell me what a couple sentences of the book actually meant. And he couldn't.)

As part of trying to make my point about Google Translate, I showed them a video that put the lyrics of the theme song of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air into it over and over. I figured, being from the 80's, my students wouldn't be too familiar with this, so I played them the video of the actual thing first.

Boy was I wrong. I swear half of every class I showed this to sang along. Someone said that they were watching the show that morning as they got ready for school. One girl commented about how much she liked Will Smith's style in the show.

Of course. Of course they don't know how to tell time on an analog clock or have their own email addresses, but they know The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

"You will."

Since I started teaching, I've thought about how I should write down some of the funny things that happen at work. If I'm going to start, I might as well share them.


The other day, a student told me how he has me for English next year. I looked at him, a little puzzled, and said, "I don't teach English."

"You will," he said. "You will."

***

I first heard about the artist Lorde on NPR--and, because of this, assumed her and her song "Royals" were pretty obscure. I loved the song, and I couldn't resist playing it during class the next day (even though it's not in French), prefacing it with something like, "I just found out about this new artist..." My students laughed at me right away and explained that the song had been in heavy rotation on the radio for quite awhile. I try to get my students to sing in French, and in this same class, there is a table with a couple of guys who really do sing. They sing loud and exaggerated and enjoy the humor of it (and of other situations). It's this same group of boys who, since the "Royals" day, will regularly sing the chorus of the song to me in falsetto.