"Your of where you are?"

Not so long ago, I used to teach English at a private school somewhere in the Mar Menor area. Like every summer, tons of students failing English at secondary and high school enrolled for an intensive one-month or two-month English course with the hope of passing their exams in September. But the truth be told, most of these students were rather lazy and unmotivated.

When it comes to studying in the summer, it is insane to believe that a child can do any satisfactory progress at these schools. At the end of the day, it is their parents' naivety that takes these students there, isn't it?. Parents believe in miracles, and they trust and have faith in the teacher, whom they consider their children's saviour. Strange as it sounds, we all have felt like Gods sometime, haven't we?

Anyway, one summer I had quite a bunch of detestable pupils, one of them being probably the worst I've ever had. He actually looked like a member of the mob: he lacked motivation, he did drugs and he had spent the last few years in a boarding school for troublesome kids. His only interests were drugs, messing about... and sex.

One day, I discovered he had just started a relation with an English girl. For that reason, he had prepared some 'quick notes' all by himself, just in case he 'scored'. However, he admitted that they had turned out to be completely useless, as the girls he had been trying to flirt with could not understand a single word he said. I asked him for those notes, and kept them forever in my wooden box, as I found them absolutely hilarious.

What the poor thing had done was using a cheesy dictionary to look up the words in Spanish without caring about any alternative meanings, grammar, syntax, etc.

And this was the sad result...

Click on the image to enlarge.

Click on the image to enlarge

22-08-07