Like today, in the middle of these 400 tests. I am responsible for the "oral communication" classes at my school, so each semester I make a listening exam. For about 30 minutes I talk into a tape recorder, and on test day play the tape for students to answer questions about pronunciation, imaginary diary entries, and sentence dictations. Without question, dictation is the most difficult section. And today it's what made me crack up.
One of my past lessons was about music and emotions, so I thought it would be a "fun" topic for the exam. I was also responsible for weaving in a random set of vocabulary words, totally unrelated words like "drawer" and "headache." So in the dictation about listening to new CDs, students were supposed to write,
"I'm sorry, but right now I have a headache" as one of the answers. Here is a list of the words / phrases I got in place of "I have a headache."
- headwig
- head deck
- I have aholic
- an egg
- ahead one egg
- headcake
- head dick
and my two personal favorites:
- headquake
- head-leak
"Head-leak" is the one that really had me rolling. When you're plugging along grading papers and your eye is trained to recognize the correct answer quickly, the deviations can be quite surprising -- especially when they are real words.
Not quite as funny, but in place of the song title "Tears in Heaven," there was
- Devil Haven
- Tires in Heaven
Now, as a teacher my job is certainly not to make fun of the students or display their innocent "incompetence" all over the web. (That is definitely not my point.) Overall the students did a great job! But I had to share part of what being a language teacher is all about.
No comments:
Post a Comment