Occasional Tales

Do you really mean you don’t understand? PreAL α’s Learner Diaries (which I wasn’t really expecting at all) this week made several references to the listening practice which I’ve been giving students every Friday in recent weeks. The comments are either that it’s boring or they fell asleep. New flash! Listening is practical not entertaining, you idiots. I give the PreAL classes listening on a Friday partly because that’s my worst day of the week and I prefer to let someone else take the strain, and partly because they need the practice. I’m not giving them listening because I’m being capricious or lazy, but they do seem to be confused about the purpose of the classes. PreAL α seem particularly confused, but they also strike me as being a particularly arrogant group of little emperors and empresses. I’ll be returning both classes’ exams tomorrow, but with injunctions about seeing me in the office next week if they have further questions about the answers, which I know w...

The Who’s That of Listening Exams. Sailing photography: Best photos from Lauty Grace Answers from other students keep mentioning New York for some peculiar reason. I’m imagining that Lauty Grace is a photographer of some sort who gets into various scrapes each week by photographing something she shouldn’t or her camera photographs the future and she has to rescue someone from the fate she has recorded or < insert idea here >. I see that “CD action” is back as a fairly frequent answer and yet in spite of it being obviously nonsensical, it doesn’t appear to concern the little darlings unduly. I’ve now hit a batch of papers where it appears they were all busy sharing answers. As I said in the previous entry, these practice tests might be informal, but it’s a waste of their time if they’re just going to copy each other. I would post this if Freegate could get through to the server. The new version is having no more luck connecting than the old one had.

Windserfing [sic!] A not unexpected answer in today’s practice listening test. It was probably practised in the Middle Ages, but fell out of fashion with the arrival of the Renaissance. And I see that once again, Kit Evans is on top of Mars taking photographs. At the age of 16 she “discovered the school to develop film”. And did you know that forests “prevent dessert spread too far”? Or that one of the problems with wind turbines is their high pay? (The former is slightly embarrassing because the question includes the word “desert” and asks for two other things which a forest does.) There’s also some magical plum tree which yields 37km 2 of fruit. 10. (d) Why are companies interested in using wind turbines? Student’s answer: avoid fax. Possibly good advice, and obviously copied since the following paper had the same answer. Although these practice tests are informal, I’ve asked them not to do this sort of thing, but there’s that innate imperial inability not to chea...