Saturday, February 19, 2011

“I’m being taken over by a fear.”

Correcting the short essay portion of tests is always slightly surreal. There invariably is a student who answers, “I’m fine thank you and you” no matter what the question is, as perhaps the only thing they are confident that they remember how to spell. This time, the question was, “What do you want to become?” and amid answers to do with the usual athletes, singers and policemen, there was the following:

My dream is winter

I don’t watch TV last night.

I am little the father

live Thursday February

near the stishes shots

is the dog likes.

Three days ago my family and I

went to the earth is

becoming too dirty?

 

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the level my third years are at.

A first-year student, meanwhile, who can’t even spell bed, wrote “diabetic” correctly on the board in yellow chalk. When I asked, boggled, where he’d learned that, he shrugged and said, “the dictionary.”

3 comments:

brother newman said...

a monk sips morning tea

it's quiet

the chrysanthemum's flowering
Basho

Anonymous said...

come, come whoever you are,
wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving
it doesn't matter. ours is not a caravan of despair.

come even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. come, yet again, come come.

RUMI

brother newman said...

come, come whoever you are,
wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving
it doesn't matter. ours is not a caravan of despair.

come even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. come, yet again, come come.

RUMI