Hey kids, don’t be *that* kid

Today I want to ramble on talk about sick days and the woes of grading (aka, don’t be *that* kid).

Sick Days:
So over the weekend I finally succumbed to the stomach virus (j’ai chopé la gastro) that has been recently present in Dijon and in my host family.  Apparently my host family shares everything, including illnesses, because this is the second sickness I’ve caught from them (by my best guess).  I say “from” them because I see them getting sick, think, “whew, I need to make sure I’m wash my hands compulsively, because I’m lucky that’s not me right now!” and then get sick 3-4 days later.  Woo.  But maybe it’s not from the fam at all, who knows.

Anyway, gastros tend to be 24-hour sicknesses, and this was no exception.  In hindsight I could feel it coming on (the tripe, with its weird-smelling sauce, was especially unsettling), but to be honest it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

That said… when a sickness hits you Sunday evening and is pretty much gone before Monday’s dinner, how do you convince people that you were actually sick if they didn’t see you in those critical 18 hours (most of which were spent trying to sleep)?  I’m not one to cry wolf, and I was apparently still slightly pale today – I was certainly still tired – so it didn’t appear that I was making it up.  And I wasn’t.  But the thought crossed my mind: what if people were skeptical that I’d actually been sick?
Luckily I didn’t have to deal with this, and I hope you do not either.

Grading, a language teacher’s stress/anti-stress:
At Carnot, Kirsty and I often see teachers grading copies (homework exercises) that the students have recently turned it.  Oftentimes, the stack of papers “to grade” is very tall, in the multiple inches range.  Understandably, the profs sometimes get overwhelmed.  Also understandably, the students aren’t perfect.  That’s why they’re in class, to learn!

However, when a student doesn’t try or didn’t focus well, it is immediately obvious and the results are horrendous.  So in addition to having tons of papers to grade, these papers are often disappointing and/or frustrating, aka stressful.  One teacher, Fabienne, has repeatedly said that grading her copies messes with her English, because after you see sentences like “I live in Dijon since eight years” for hours upon end, you start to second guess your own English.

Therefore we now come to the anti-stress aka  humor part of this blog post: in order to keep sane, said teachers have to look at the silver lining, which is that some of the sentences the students come up with are hilarious.  I shudder to think what kind of fun my French teachers had with my own “copies”/homework, but there’s no sense worrying about it now.

In particular, we (Fabienne, Kirsty and I) found the following example quite funny: a  student wrote a sentence in which she wanted to use the word “fruitful.”  Instead, however, she used “to bear fruit.” Given the phrase "bear fruit" and our punchy mood, this image is what my mind jumped to straight away:

Er... yum?  Or ow?

…and to illustrate why this was not the correct phrase/word, Fabienne let me draw that on the girl's paper.  Yup.

So please, people, whenever you take a language class, please engage your brain during homework so that you make fewer mistakes, because a) it’s kinder toward your teachers, b) it’s kinder toward your grade and c) it prevents your teachers from laughing at you as much.