We had the regional Olympiad on Friday and Satuday. Saturday finds me sitting with six other teachers behind a desk, spending eight hours listening to students giving their answers to speaking tasks, one after the other. So in walks this student, male, age 17, very angry. Why is he angry? I don't know. He draws a speaking task from the overturned slips of paper in front of him. The task: give your opinions about beauty contests.
In English, he says they are foolish. Anyone associated with them is foolish. There are more important problems in the world, like crime and pollution. He does not understand why there are beauty contests.
Then a teacher asks him: if you had a female friend who wanted to be in a beauty contest, what would you tell her?
His answer: "She should do it. All girls should be beautiful."
"But you said that beauty contests are foolish," I told him.
"Well, girls are foolish," he said. "All girls are brainless."
He said it with a straight face and meant it. Of course, this produced an uproar from the five female teachers arranged in front of him.
"Are we brainless?" asked one.
"No," he said, "because you are not girls. You are women."
"And how did we become not brainless?" asked another teacher. "How do we change from brainless to not brainless?"
And he answered, again perfectly serious: "I don't know. I am not a doctor. I am not a scientist."
Despite his decent English, he got slammed in his scores. Which wasn't the only unfair scoring: they actually scored lower another guy to make sure a previous girl would win. I protested, but no one listened to me. "She got second place last year and deserves to win this year," they said.
Actually, translating that story into Ukrainian to tell Diana required learning a dozen new words (like "beauty contest" concorse kresavy). Actually, telling her stories in Ukrainian (even though she is perfectly capable of understanding them in English) might be one of the better ways to work on my Ukrainian.
I have been having problems getting the pics and video online. I think it might be on the American end, though. Oklahoma City Public Schools doesn't know this, but they are still hosting me and sometimes there computers don't want to upload files.
The pics on the blog itself are hosted by Geocities, but there are too many pics from Lviv to host it there. So, for now, here are some pics from playing pool last night. Steve was supposed to play with us and work on getting to know Ksoosha a little better, but he got held up in Kyiv and Ksoosha left before he returned. He was not too happy about that.
Yours truly
Miss Diana with pool cue
Diana and Ksoosha
Ksoosha taking a shot