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.

"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:

^ A shinkansen super-express bullet train, *slightly* more expensive than a plasma TV. This is actually "Shinkansen-kun", a character from the same people that concocted Hello Kitty.

^ For those of you that don't do your banking in Zurich, the above backpack is a slightly more sensibly-priced holiday gift, now in an attractive red shade.

^ The aforementioned Nintendo Wii, complete with the motion-sensitive controller on the left.

^ ...a duck?? Maybe this is the Aflac duck, bringing you life insurance for Christmas. Joy.

^ One of the best drawings. You know you want a pet "monnki" for the holidays! This one even comes with a banana, so you can't really lose. [Memo to self: work on proper spelling in this class]

^ One of the students became distressed when she realized that the worksheets I'd made the class didn't have any boxes with my name on them. To remedy this, she turned over the page and drew a new Christmas box on the back for me. The katakana above the picture reads "Tiger".

Folks, it doesn't get much cuter than that. ~Oyasumi!