ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing ktravula – a travelogue! blog archives for the day Saturday, October 17th, 2009.

A Food With No Name

Whenever I sit and stare at an empty page like tonight, my mind wanders to the the many things I could be blogging about besides the adventures of class and teaching. Earlier today I tried without luck to write a poem about the foods I eat with names I can’t pronounce. I failed. The reason for that, in my opinion, is that I was hungry. I had the image I wanted to portray in my head, but my stomach hurt a little from not having eating in the morning so I couldn’t get my words out in the particular order of my choice. Feeling deflated, I went out and got myself some really nice microwave-ready food which was ready to eat in less than ten minutes. But by the time I got well fed and satiated, the muse had left. I was left only with desires of different kind so I went into Facebook to stare at pictures instead. When poet Maya Angelou came to SIUe in early October, one of the poems she read was called The Health-Food Diner, a satirical response to a particular occasion when she was stopped from smoking in a public restaurant. In the absence of a own lyrical response to my particular situation at the moment, I will leave you with Maya Angelou’s words. It’s certainly one of her funniest poems.

The Health-Food Diner 

No sprouted wheat and soya shootsIMG_0469
And Brussels in a cake,
Carrot straw and spinach raw,
(Today, I need a steak).

Not thick brown rice and rice pilaw
Or mushrooms creamed on toast,
Turnips mashed and parsnips hashed,
(I'm dreaming of a roast).

Health-food folks around the world
Are thinned by anxious zeal,
They look for help in seafood kelp
(I count on breaded veal).

No smoking signs, raw mustard greens,
Zucchini by the ton,
Uncooked kale and bodies frail
Are sure to make me run

to

Loins of pork and chicken thighs
And standing rib, so prime,
Pork chops brown and fresh ground round
(I crave them all the time).

Irish stews and boiled corned beef
and hot dogs by the scores,
or any place that saves a space
For smoking carnivores.

	-- Maya Angelou
Culled from http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/383.html

A Food With No Name was published on October 17th, 2009, with the tags , , , under the Soliloquy category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.

On the Mid-Term Test

IMG_0571The test of students’ progress is not always as tricky if one is lucky to have listened to the students beforehand and to have understood what they are used to and what they are not. In most cases, as long as the teacher knows that his purpose in the test is not just to surprise and attack but to monitor his own progress, there would be less tears and heartbreaks when the day is over.

A few days before our mid-term test, I had given the students a list of areas to focus on, as well as how exactly to answer specific type of questions. There should be no one-word answers to questions requiring full sentence responses. There would be extra credit points for those who put the correct tone marks where necessary. There would be questions on personal introduction, identifying objects, numbers and greetings. And lastly, they should go over virtually everything we had learnt in class. After all, it was supposed to be a test of ability as well as hard work.

Beside the thirty questions that covered all we had learnt in class, there were also five extra-credit questions meant to help whomever needed it to get their grades up, and the questions there included “Kíni orúkọ olùkọ rẹ?”, “What is your adopted Yoruba name, and its meaning”, “Who is the author of the class novel ‘A Mouth Sweeter Than Salt’”, “Where was Suzanne Wenger originally from?” and “What’s the word for ‘zero’ in Yoruba?.

I have now finished marking  (or scoring/grading in American English) the tests, and beside an overwhelming joy at how good they performed, I have made a few prominent observations:

  • That none of them remembered my surname. It must have either been too long to remember.
  • That many of them spelt “Good Afternoon” as “kassan” instead of “kaasan”. I’ve now told them that Yoruba does not have consonant clusters. That’s why when the word “brother” enters the language, it is pronounced as bùrọdá.
  • That only a few of them knew the name of the author of the class novel. A few more remembered only the first name and not the surname, while a few knew the surname but couldn’t spell it.
  • That everyone remembered the Yoruba word for “zero”.IMG_0573
  • That some of the students studied beyond what they were taught in class. A case in point: even though I didn’t ask for plurals, a student responded to a question on identifying pens as “èyí ni awọn gègé.” (trans: here are some pens). I found that very impressive, and she was rewarded extra for it.
  • That almost a quarter of the class didn’t remember their adopted Yoruba names, and half of those who did had forgotten the meaning. It was sure that they were not expecting to be asked about this in the exam.
  • That some students would just NOT read the instructions on the exam question paper no matter how many times they’re told to do so, and notwithstanding the same instruction having been previously stressed again in the exam review materials.
  • That there is always one student in class who would not perform well no matter how much help the teacher gives. S/he is either just lazy, or dull. The problem is, they are the ones who do not speak up when they don’t understand, for fear of being too prominent, when they should ordinarily be the most vocal.

I have my work cut out for me for the next half of the term.

On the Mid-Term Test was published on October 17th, 2009, with the tags , , , , , under the Academic, Observations category. There are currently 3 comments on this article so far.