Last Saturday, I had my first volunteer class session. You see, despite my evil exterior, I am a huge softie at heart despite all of my bitching about bad drivers, hayseeds, jackoff Conservatives, and soccer moms. What I've decided to do is to teach Introductory English to immigrants. This is a completely volunteer operation in that the students come because they want to. We don't force them to come. It's not some court ordered English classes. It's not a requirement for a job.
These guys come because they want to learn English.
We don't charge them any money. Their only expense is the price of books, which is reasonable at something like $20. If you want to see the American Dream at work, I urge you to start volunteering at some class like this.
But the scary thing is that groups of non-English speaking adults are relying on ME to teach them English. How fucking crazy is that? I'm possibly responsible for someone's job and life prospects. Talk about pressure!!
Hopefully they learn some great slang from me though! Thanks to a suggestion from Chelle, I'll teach them the variations of the word "sweet" from Clueless! to Dude, Where's My Car?.
6 comments:
oh man, this is great...we need more Americans saying dude.
actually, you have inspired me to write a post (uh, within the week, hopefully) about a kind of similar thing I did regarding language
Beautiful! I so love this! Look at this way: you are helping people to learn the slang of our American culture. Otherwise they'd be helpless. :D
Three cheers for you teaching English! And don't forget to cover the finer points of "walking abortion" from the post after this one.
Lindsay-
I think it's a matter of national security!
Chelle-
At least they'll know what we mean when they hear "That's just how we roll" and understand that words like "bad" or "wicked" have positive connotations as well.
Andi-
Noted. Let's just hope that they aren't right-wing evangelists who would get offended even by the phrase "abortion".
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