03 October 2007

election plus

it happened.

it's still happening.

too bad i can't comment on the weird stuff i heard about.

guess we'll have to wait 47 days for the tell all.

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in other news, i'm teaching from Foer's Everything is Illuminated in my American literature class. I was explaining to my students that one of the narrators, Alex, uses words that he obviously found in a thesaurus. Therefore, he says things, and uses words, that a native speaker wouldn't normally use in certain situations.

one of my students raised his hand and said, "you mean, he tries to use non-famous words?"

"Exactly," I said. "Non-famous words or, as I like to call them, uncommon words."

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my students, today like every day, told me how much better the ukrainian school system is than the american school system. this discussion came as we were talking about the FLEX (Future Leaders Exchange) testing that's coming up in L'viv. Winners of the competition study in Americ for an academic year.

During the conversation, one particularly clever student asked if homework was assigned in America.

"Yes," I said. "And if you don't do it, your grade lowers. But you have homework here too, so it shouldn't be a big deal."

"Yes, we have it," the student said. "But we don't do it."

And now i'm wavering...which system is harder?

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