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September 01, 2005
What did you do this summer?
This week in class I’ve been playing Two Truths and a Lie in groups of three to five with my new students. This game involves telling your group three stories, two of which are true and one of which is a lie. The other group members then ask questions about the details of the stories, and vote on which one they think is false.
The stories we’ve been telling are about what we did over summer vacation.
After this morning’s class was done playing the game in their groups, I had to have one of my students share her story with the whole class. As I was circulating the class monitoring the activity, I had overheard Tracy. These were her three stories:
Story 1: Because we had to do social practice*, I went to a clothes factory and worked there with my mother.
Story 2: My grandfather became ill and went to the hospital, so I had to help him take care of his sheep. It was a large group of sheep, maybe there were thirty of them. Every morning I had to take the sheep to a land in the river, by boat. In the evening I brought them home again.
Story 3: I became a home teacher for a boy who was the son of my father's friend. I taught him English. [Home tutoring is the most common “part-time job” Chinese students find to earn a little money.]
I had the class vote; a few said Story 1 was the lie; the rest said it was Story 2. But no, it was Story 3.
“So you really took 30 sheep on a boat across the river every morning?” I clarified.
“Yes,” Tracy answered. “My grandmother helped me.”
You’ll be glad to know her grandfather recovered and can now care for his own sheep. Tracy the Erstwhile Shepherdess has returned to being an English major at Jiangsu University.
*See last entry, Exhibit B
| By huzzlecoo | 05:52 PM
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