Get up on the wrong side of the bed

It’s funny how much you can learn when you’re trying to make sure your colloquial phrases are right for a story. I was looking up “right side of the bed” in Russian, and ran into a piece on what happens when you step out of bed onto your right or left foot. Turns out that Russians think your day will go badly if you step onto your left foot first.

I started a class with the two paragraphs that explain that information, and then used Jenny’s starter story:

“_______ wakes up and breaks his bed. He is frustrated and throws his glasses on the floor. Now the glasses are broken. He breaks them by accident. He picks them up.

He goes outside and drops his scarf. He is frustrated and throws his glasses on the ground. He breaks the glasses, but it is an accident. Now the glasses are broken again, and wet. He picks up the scarf. The scarf is not broken. But it is not dry.

He walks in the street and an apple falls on his toe. He gets frustrated and throws his glasses on the ground. He breaks them again, but it is an accident. Now they are broken, wet, and dirty. A beautiful woman sees the glasses and picks them up. She gives them to him. She is frustrated because he can’t see how beautiful she is.”

We had the funniest time in two classes of parents! I’d forgotten how much I can laugh at a story. Our class-driven stories are often not too funny. Instead they’re pretty weird. But these stories were hysterical. In one class, the thing a woman broke was her dresser, so she kept throwing it down and breaking it again. Her arms (one of them was broken) were so full of dresser pieces at the end that she missed seeing Antonio Banderas admiring her.

I didn’t get as far with my kids, but now I have plenty to go on and know what to fix in the teaching process. We’ll be able to tell that story, to practice the rest of the vocabulary we’ll need for the video story, and I think the timing is going to be perfect in all three classes for the final. Or not…but at least I’m feeling more prepared.

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