***
A couple of years ago, a student was trying to explain how to cook a certain dish. “Put in some meat, potato, chili powder, blah, blah, blah…and rabbit.”Shocked, I said, “Radish?”
“No, rabbit.”
“Are you sure?” As in Bugs Bunny?
After some frantic searching in his electronic dictionary, he clarified.
“Ah no. Carrot.”
***
My first chongks for each day is a diligent-looking fellow with round dark-rimmed glasses.
From the very start, I had a feeling he was “attentive to details” because once I told him,” Let me figure out your homework, give me some time to photocopy it and I’ll give it to you at four.”
And at four, he walked over to me and asked, “Where is it?”
I kind of got caught up with other important things like keeping myself updated with office gossip and lazing around with a cup of coffee that I completely forgot about what I had promised him.
So I gave him an old picture book of sorts and I gave him instructions. “Write sentences.”
He said, “on which pictures?”
I was going to say “on anyone of them” but that would give me away so I gave him a stern look and said “On all of them.” (This is exactly the kind of thing that makes them go, “Oh, good tutor.” Go figure.)
And then he said, “Just one sentence?”
I said, “yes.”
“Any kind of sentence?”
“Yes.”
Before the class ended this morning, we went through the same drill. I gave him 5 sentence patterns. “Write one sentence for each sentence pattern. That’s your homework.”
He said, “Follow this pattern?”
“Yes, write one for each sentence pattern”
“Just one sentence?” Then he started pointing at each pattern saying,”one sentence? one sentence? one sentence? one sentence? one sentence?”
“Yes, one.”
“Total 5?”
“Yes,” I told him but I was dying to say “No, ten” just to mess him up a little and laugh my nasty head off but I decided against it. He thinks I'm nice and I don't wanna break his heart.
***
The last story is a really old one. I had this funny adorable student once whom I got into an argument with over a sentence. He penned down on his notebook the following, “I make water.” Accustomed to such errors in usage, I corrected him sincerely, “Bill, you don't make water.” You can fetch a pail of water but make it you cannot. At that point, he launched a series of arguments to prove that his sentence was correct. I cant remember what he said. Moreover, I cant imagine how one person can so passionately argue the veracity of “I make water” but anyway, I ended the discussion with a drawing of a man holding his arms up the sky. In one hand, i wrote the letter “H” and on the other, “O2.” And then I drew a lightning bolt between the man’s arms. On the man’s shirt I wrote the name: “God.” Below, the following words, “He makes water.”
***
A few months later, the same student and I got into another argument about the word “people” being uncountable. It’s not. It’s plural. But since the definition of uncountable nouns is that they are nouns that can’t be counted (like air and water), he snapped –in his opinion, quite cleverly– at me, “You can count how many people world? How many? Huh? How many?”
No, Bill. I cant. Neither can I come up with the total number of birds, fish, dogs, trees, apples, pencils, cars, bicycles, bags, houses, buses… You know what? Let’s just stop counting altogether. They’re all uncountable.
I hereby declare all nouns uncountable.
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