Bizarre Teaching Moment #9: Now In Widescreen!
~Today's bizarre teaching moment comes courtesy of one of a four-student class of children in the 9-10 year old range. The lesson was how to express the ownership of an object; for example, the question "What's this?", followed by, "It's David's bike." as an example answer. As part of the lesson, I asked the students about Christmas presents.
Christmas, I should explain, is extremely popular in Japan (more on that in a later post). I asked my students what presents they had previously received for Christmas, and what they wanted. I was expecting them to name toys, sports equipment, dolls, and the like. This being Japan, I should have known better.
Two of the grade-school girls immediately responded with "Wii!" But the truly bizarre answer came from the lone male student, who rattled of a long list of high-tech goods, ending with "Plasma TV!"
I stared at him, incredulous.
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"Widescreen!" he added, earnestly.
[On a vaguely-related note, here's a quick tip if you're thinking of buying a TV in the near future. Please understand that the advertised size of the TV in inches is misleading: rather than measuring horizontal or vertical size, the stated measurement is actually the diagonal length of the viewing screen.
As you may recall from math class, the hypotenuse of a right triangle is the longest side...meaning that the actual viewing area of a TV is less than what you might think it is from the ads, especially with the new 16:9 HDTVs.]
After that student's "consumer-oriented" answer, I had them draw pictures of presents for the other students in the class (not for themselves!). While they drew the pictures, I had them query each other with the question and answer pattern. Here are some of the more amusing drawings they came up with:
Folks, it doesn't get much cuter than that. ~Oyasumi!
1 Comments:
What a great teaching tool idea! What will you name your tiger? RP?
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