Due to my schedule I am unable to have a normal conversation partner so instead of just speaking with one person I get to attend an IEP class every Wednesday and speak with many different people. Each week I choose a different group to join. I help them with their assignment and talk with them about all sorts of things.
This week I was with two girls from China named Crystal and Meeko. We introduced ourselves and started working on the current assignment. They had to listen to a one minute clip of someone speaking and analyze it for any slang, colloquialisms, or speech slurs. They had chosen a scene from Twilight where Bella’s mother is talking to Bella about her relationship with Edward.
This assignment was especially interesting to me because I find that we, as humans, rarely take notice of how we butcher our own languages. Actually paying attention to all of the endings that were dropped, letters that were added, or words that were shoved together really made me think about how difficult it must be to learn a language in a classroom where you are only taught the language in its perfect form.
It was Meeko’s turn to type so Crystal and I talked about ourselves. She is from Guangzhou, which is crazy because by dad was just there on a business trip. The 2010 Expo is currently there so we talked about that for a while. She went before she left for America and I had been to the one in Hannover in 2000 and seen my dad’s pictures for this current one.
We also talked about what was the most difficult thing about learning English. She said that she found reading the most challenging and I completely agreed with her. I told her about my experience with reading in German and how it wasn’t until this past summer that reading became as fun for me in German as it was in English. I gave her some tips on how to try and enjoy reading more.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”
OMG! “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” was probably the best short story that I have read in this class. Although a little long, I was engaged the entire time that I was reading it. There were such strong emotional undercurrents in everything that they talked about or did. It was also fascinating to watch the different power plays and how the power shifted over time. It really illustrated the relationship between power, the courage to use that power, and the resulting happiness.
Margot is such a bitch (pardon my French). She thinks so little of her husband and recently she has thought even worse of him because he was not “man enough” in her eyes to kill a lion. She is constantly making jibes at his masculinity. When I first read the story, I thought Margot was crying because she was sad for the lion that her husband had hunted but the more that I learned about her, the more I came to believe that she was crying less for the lion and more for herself and her husband’s shame. Margot constantly refers back to the fact that Francis could not shoot the lion. It is even worse because she witnessed his shame and insists on coming with him on their next few hunts to continue observing. She constantly pushes her boundaries but in the end she goes too far. During the hunt of the buffalo she starts to feel her husband becoming more confident and begins to believe that he will leave her (the fact that they cannot leave each other due to different reasons is also a common topic of conversation throughout the piece) so she ends up shooting him as he shoots the last buffalo. After this, the power shifts drastically. Wilson (the professional hunter with whom she recently slept with and just witnessed this “accident”) starts to tell her what to do and she is compliant. It even goes to the point that he praises her, as if she is a child, for saying please.
I also found it slightly disturbing but still fascinating how Hemingway entered the reader into the mind of the animal just as they were dying. The juxtaposition between Margot’s haughtiness, Francis’s cowardice, Wilson’s pride, and the animal’s pain heightened the stakes and took the reader through an amazing rollercoaster. It also brought a lack of humanity to the piece. The story had a major theme of power and it portrayed humans in a very callous light. It constantly referred to the fact the humans knew nothing of the animal’s pain. This also relates to their interactions between each other.
Margot is such a bitch (pardon my French). She thinks so little of her husband and recently she has thought even worse of him because he was not “man enough” in her eyes to kill a lion. She is constantly making jibes at his masculinity. When I first read the story, I thought Margot was crying because she was sad for the lion that her husband had hunted but the more that I learned about her, the more I came to believe that she was crying less for the lion and more for herself and her husband’s shame. Margot constantly refers back to the fact that Francis could not shoot the lion. It is even worse because she witnessed his shame and insists on coming with him on their next few hunts to continue observing. She constantly pushes her boundaries but in the end she goes too far. During the hunt of the buffalo she starts to feel her husband becoming more confident and begins to believe that he will leave her (the fact that they cannot leave each other due to different reasons is also a common topic of conversation throughout the piece) so she ends up shooting him as he shoots the last buffalo. After this, the power shifts drastically. Wilson (the professional hunter with whom she recently slept with and just witnessed this “accident”) starts to tell her what to do and she is compliant. It even goes to the point that he praises her, as if she is a child, for saying please.
I also found it slightly disturbing but still fascinating how Hemingway entered the reader into the mind of the animal just as they were dying. The juxtaposition between Margot’s haughtiness, Francis’s cowardice, Wilson’s pride, and the animal’s pain heightened the stakes and took the reader through an amazing rollercoaster. It also brought a lack of humanity to the piece. The story had a major theme of power and it portrayed humans in a very callous light. It constantly referred to the fact the humans knew nothing of the animal’s pain. This also relates to their interactions between each other.
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