A Lighter Point of Teaching Grammar

My role as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant ('assistant' should read 'professor' in most cases), should be to help people with conversational English and American cultural studies. As I explained long ago, however, my sudden re-posting to Moscow changed my teaching responsibilities to fit my new university's needs, and now I am teaching English grammar to agricultural professors. In other words, I am spending hours teaching myself my own grammar and then passing it on to these professors.

This tends to be a difficult and often quite boring task, especially since these individuals are not by and large excited about being forced by the university to learn English, especially at this stage in their careers. And grammar is...well, grammar. It's difficult to teach. It's often very boring. And it involves a lot of monotonous exercises to ensure that word order and verb conjugations are followed according to the numerous rules and their even more numerous exceptions.

But today I had a good laugh while working on a 'Present Tense Verb Practice' worksheet I designed for my students. After asking them to formulate a question in the present continuous tense using a word prompt and provide an answer to this question, I found myself nearly on the floor laughing while most of the professors stared at me awkwardly. Here's what happened.

The prompt: Why / they / to sit / on the floor

Question: Why are they sitting on the floor?

Answer: They are sitting on the floor because they are Japanese.

Maybe you had to be there? But if you could have heard how the young woman struggled to pronounce her answer and the very serious look on her face, it would have tickled you, too.