Love this response to the blog entry at: whatchmacalit.wordpress/2013/03/29/hello-world/ and response: Submitted on 2013/07/03 at 8:25 am Your story of one student asking another about Malaysia reminded me of a time when I was about 11 years old and trying to make conversation with international students coming over to dinner from Knox College, where my Dad was an English professor. A Malaysian student sitting next to me at was smoking a cigarette and I asked him, “Do they have cigarettes in Malaysia?” He responded rather impatiently, “Of course! We are not monkeys in trees!” Fast forward a few years to age 16 when I lived in Italy and attended a local high school (not international except for me and my sister). Riding a bus with some students, one of them asked in Italian, “Do they have buses in America?” What the …? Had they not watched a single American movie in set in a city? I assumed they were just making conversation and my answer was “Si, ma non con arranciata:” (Yes, but not with orange juice.) I was trying to say “yes, but they’re not orange,” as every public bus, wastebasket, and mailbox in Florence was orange. Either way, the whole conversation was inane. All year long well-meaning students in my class would come up and say “Tell me about America.” I found that very annoying, both because the question was so broad and because I’d been attending school with them every day and would have appreciated some help in entering into conversations about the day-to-day stuff. As entertaining as it was to be asked “Have you seen Marilyn Monroe?” or to translate lyrics for them such as the song “She’s a man-eater,” it was actually my philosophy teacher who did the best job at framing questions that elicited useful dialogue (imagine that–we should expect no less from a philosophy teacher). I gave presentations to the class that revealed bits of America they might not have seen in the movies. I described Halloween where kids go from door to door (di casa in casa) for candy, and walk-a-thons, where people pledge to donate money to a charity based on how many miles you walk, such as a dollar a mile. I sweated out the translations with my Italian tutor, memorized my script word for word, and under Signora Cantelli’s watchful eye I delivered these oral presentations on exam days because i was in no way prepared to take a philosophy exam and she didn’t want me to to sit idle. My fellow students were extremely enthusiastic and urged me to take as long as possible at the front of the class, because it reduced the amount of time left over to call on them for the “interrogazione” –their term for an oral exam. Fast forward a few decades and I just submitted an application to be a maker at the Rome Maker Faire, doing storytelling with automated doll houses and the Goldilocks Home Security System, so the cultural exchange continues. Perhaps I should bring my Halloween candy dish with candy that flops around when you reach for it. After all, I worked pretty hard on that Italian “interrogazione” about Halloween. Might still be able to do that from memory. Di casa in casa…31 di ottobre…
Posted on: Thu, 04 Jul 2013 02:34:37 +0000
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