Caught off Guard

Today I was tasked with beginning a unit in the most annoying textbook ever, a series called "American Adventures." As if the global indoctrination of American corporate culture weren't enough, it's been standardized and integrated now into textbooks for teenagers. It's not altogether terrible--I usually end up flying through the unbelievably thin lesson materials to find more real-to-life examples, a handy excuse for playing music videos and newscasts, or other pop culture clips, always repeating to myself, "at least it's not Disney."

So yesterday we began a unit titled, "News and Views." I hadn't been keeping up on the news lately, so I asked a newsgeek friend of mine what was happening in the states. He looked kind of tired, and shrugged, saying he'd been falling behind lately. So I looked up the New York Times, and without helping myself, exclaimed loudly to a classroom of Vietnamese teenagers, "Holy f***ing Christ it's 9/11."

I am a terrible American.

But-- in the course of preparing a listening activity for them, I rediscovered StoryCorps, a mobile band of oral historians that travel the country and record little anecdotes of American life. I'd become very interested in their project a few years ago, when they were data-collecting, but I'd forgotten they existed. Stumbling across their project yesterday was pretty exciting, and made a great springboard for listening to different voices. They've animated their stories now, which helps students immensely in understanding a normal-paced, diversely-accented language:

http://storycorps.org/animation/

What I did was play a couple of retellings from New Yorkers about 9/11, and had them write down words or phrases that they recognized The stories themselves were tremendously sad, though I think the real-life pathos was largely lost on the students. But it was a way for me to get my news fix, while giving them one hell of a listening activity.

Afterwards, I switched to this story instead. Y'know, to lighten the mood. They've got an assignment to bring me a weird news story (written in English) for next week's class. Let's see if they do--they're teenagers, after all. The only news they really care about is whether or not Justin Bieber is engaged, or which girls will be at the mall later.

I guess the point of this whole little anecdote is that I forgot about 9/11, which confuses more than perplexes me. I'm confused that it is September, for example, because it's 90 degrees outside, and no trees are changing color. There are no Labor Day BBQs, no commercials for back to school sales (none in languages I understand anyways), no general feeling of change in the air. The only thing that's different is that there are more tourists, I suppose, which equals more cyclos hawking you while you sit in a cafe eating breakfast. It's one thing I'm settling myself in for missing the most: change of seasons.


In the end, though, I expect I'll get over this. Especially when I see y'all's Facebook status updates come January.