The above title was written by a mystery student in one of my classrooms this week. I believe it's a quote from The Matrix. The fact that it was written doesn't surprise me. The fact that the grammar and spelling are all correct does surprise me considerably. I thought I would have exhausted the humor of my students' occasional overenthusiastic ineptitude, but I was wrong. Really wrong. The following are just from this week alone.
"In the morning I like hearing the sound of beards in the tree."
"Sheeps cross the sea."
"We acros the ocean by shit."
I don't want to bore you with too many, but there are plenty more. I gave a warm-up this week of distinguishing between homophones--words that sound alike. For Ukrainians, the short i sound is very hard to make, as in birthday, ship, liver, and so on. There's no equivalent sound in Russian or Ukrainian (or many other languages, actually, it's a very English sound). So a lot of Ukrainians pronounce it "ee," hear that sound reinforced by everyone else they're around, and assume they're speaking correctly. As a result, many Ukrainians will tell you proudly that they leave in Ukraine, that you can take a river cruise in Kiev on a sheep, the sounds of beards in the trees is a beautiful sign of spring, and that their beersday (th is also hard) is coming up soon, will you come to the party?
I would be lying if I said I didn't assign this task partly to have a good chuckle at my students' expense, but the accent is something that needs work. It's usually fine because of context (no one reasonable would ever assume you're going to ride a sheep across a body of water), but they should at least be aware that it's pronounced "it," not "eat."
Anyway, I survived winter 2012--the two weeks that it lasted. The temperature plummeted at the start of this month, to subzero (in Farenheit) highs for over a week. It so happened that I submitted an online comment to BBC News about the cold snap in Eastern Europe and was contacted by BBC reporters about twenty times in the following week. My friend Caroline called them "BBC, aka needy girlfriend." But the cold abated, and now it's getting above freezing every day. I even dare to go out without a hat. The season now is not really winter or spring, but распутица (rasputitsa). It's basically the time preceding and following snowfall where everything is muddy and slushy. But spring is coming once again. Or so I hope.
On March 3, I'm putting on a sort of mini-camp for my students at school. I have about nine people--seven volunteers, a Ukrainian teacher, and a British teacher--coming in to help with it, and about 40 students signed up for it. I daresay I'm even excited about it. But what I'm really excited about is my work for Camp Republic II this summer. I'm writing the game that will dominate the camp schedule, and it centers around the political struggle in the Roman Republic following Caesar's assassination. If you know anything about me, you should probably know that Roman history is one of my few true passions in life, and that late Republican history is my favorite part of the whole. If only Caesar (the dog) could be here in July for the camp. He would make a swell mascot.
