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Teaching Story

One thing I probably didn't do enough of while tutoring in Italy was to actually tell stories about tutoring in Italy. Of course there are plenty of posts about where we went and what we did in those places, but not much about the actual teaching, save the vespa disaster.

Shortly after we arrived in Italy we started making flyers to advertise our services, and we proceeded to post them around the city (near schools, mostly). We received a few bites from these, including one from a woman named Flaminia*. She wanted to meet me to talk about a few things and she had specific questions in her attempt to learn English.

I agreed to meet her at a bookstore which held a cafe in the basement and we began talking about what might be a good way to get her started with the language. She very quickly began asking me specific questions that I was completely unprepared for: Things like "how is my pronunciation?" or "When these 2 letters go together, how do I make that sound?" or "What does 'you f***ed me over' mean?"

She then went on to a full list of questions about the phrases "f*ck you over," "you f*cked me over," "f*ck over you," and any other combination of F, over, and you that you could ever imagine.

Basically, the only thing she wanted to know in English was how to get into a really vulgar argument about who F'ed who and how one of them was "over" the other one in the process. I was able to get into detail about how, technically, you could literally be "over someone" by being above them, but how you could also be "over someone emotionally" by not caring about them anymore, and then had to say that you "f*ck someone over" by putting them in a bad situation with very little help.

After a full hour of this, she was satisfied and had to go on to her next appointment in life, but we agreed to meet again the following week.

We spent another hour talking about how to "f*ck someone up."

That was our last meeting together. I think she has a pretty solid grasp on English at this point.

*Name changed, not that it matters.

And now that it's Friday, here are some fun links of things I've enjoyed or written this week...

From RobotButt: Chingy's Excellent Rap Lyrics and Baby Sad About Something.

An incredible story about a 150 year old dildo in New England.

From here on this blog, a silly short story, Day 1 in Rome, and that one time I ate ants.

Happy Friday. Ta.
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