It’s widely understood
that holidays are difficult when you are far from family, but we did our best
to make the most of our situation this year. We decided to spend most of
the week talking about Thanksgiving in our classes, and we developed several
different lesson plans that all centered around Thanksgiving.
With our listening and
conversation classes we watched “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.” We
watched “The Great Pumpkin” for Halloween and the students really enjoyed it, so
we figured they’d appreciate an encore. And they did. It was more
entertaining watching the students than the movie at times. There’s one
scene where Snoopy sets the table and perfectly executes a difficult “bishop’s
hat” napkin fold with a simple flick of his wrist. The students in the
hospitality majors literally squealed with delight when he did that. We
guess they’ve had to do that before.
Our English Honors
classes have been working on a unit about “happy endings,” so we took one hour
of the writing classes to have them think of bad things and spin them in a
positive way that they could be thankful for. As you can imagine,
responses varied from inspirational to bizarre. Here are some of their
thoughts:
- I am grateful my sister ate my cake so I don’t get fat.
- I am grateful for gross meals because it means I have food to eat.
- I am grateful for arguments with my mom because it means I have a family.
- I am grateful my dad blames things on me because it means I still have a dad.
- I am thankful for the broken TV because it makes me more hard working.
- I am thankful for missing the bus because it makes me meet the handsome boy at the next bus.
- I am thankful for those stupid guys because it means I am not the stupidest person.
- I am thankful for a dirty bathroom because it makes me know how to clean it.
- I am thankful for the runny nose because I can have such a charming voice.
- I am thankful for the broken car because it makes me see some beautiful view.
- I am grateful for the crying baby because it reminds me I am not alone.
- I am grateful for the drillmasters becaue it means someone noticed me.**
- I am very thankful for Hulk because he bit Rocky away. ***
- I am thankful for I can run because it means I don’t have paralysis.
- I am grateful I don’t have much money, so I could enjoy anything in life.
- I am grateful for bad friends because they let me know what kinds of people shouldn’t be friends.
I suppose Lauren and I could
do a similar exercise and express our thankfulness for being far away from family
because it reminds us how much we really do love and miss and need our
families, or our gratitude for living in a place where we struggle to
communicate with others because it forces us to speak more openly with one
another and strengthens the bonds of our relationship.
We did a small art
assignment, the classic turkey hand, with some of our other students and made
them write four things they are thankful for: one small thing for the pinky;
one person they love for the ring finger; one thing they own for the middle
finger; and something they think, feel or believe for the pointer finger. Again, we received a wide range of
responses from our students. We
picked a few of our favorite turkeys—or at least a few of the strangest—and put
them up for your enjoyment.
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| This is supposedly Bane, the bad guy from the latest Batman movie. He obviously dislikes bats and takes steroids. |
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| Hopefully you all ate turkeys at least this big for Thanksgiving. Not because it's important to eat the traditional food, but because it's important to prevent these Goliath Turkeys from taking over the planet. Not all of them are amiable like this one. |
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| Angry Birds: what every adolescent discreetly plays under the table while their great uncle chronicles his medical history. |
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| The 'hamsa' turkey. It tastes delicious and protects you from evil. |
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| I don't know what to say about this mutant bird, other than I know it is wearing thong underwear (and now you know that too, and you probably don't want to know that. Oh well. Sorry). I know that because I made the student erase what they had originally drawn. This is what we ended up with. I have no idea. |
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| I thing I want to become bread master too. |
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| Chowder is one of my favorite students and it is in no small way because of her amazing name. |
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| Everything about this Turkey is beautiful. Except maybe the excrement. |
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| This turkey has caught on to Chic-fil-A's clever advertising techniques. Not the homophobic ones, you know, the ones where the cows ask to live and suggest chiken as an alternative. |
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| Short answer: not really. Better answer: I sure hope so. |
These activities
kept us busy all week, but they didn’t diminish our excitement in the
least. If anything, they amplified
our eagerness. When four thirty
finally rolled around on Thursday afternoon, we booked it home and began making
our meal. We described the whole
thing in some videos, so I won’t waste space on written explanation. Suffice it to say: We ate good.
After dinner, we
watched the “Seinfeld” Thanksgiving special and The Blindside.
Watching the latter seemed appropriate because it has scenes of the
family at Thanksgiving, and there’s a good deal of football in the movie. I doubt there are very many people
reading this who have not seen the movie, but if you haven’t, you may want to
head to your favorite Redbox or internet piracy website**** and procure a copy
for the evening. It’s good fun for
the whole family. Here's the trailer in case you've never seen it:
In the end, it was a
great day. We did miss our
families, but we know that you love us and we feel your love, even from
afar. We love you too. We are so thankful for your love and
support. We will leave you with
the indelible words of Linus van Pelt:
In the
year 1621, the Pilgrims held their first Thanksgiving feast. They invited the
great Indian chief Massasoit, who brought ninety of his brave Indians and a great
abundance of food. Governor William Bradford and Captain Miles Standish were
honored guests. Elder William Brewster, who was a minister, said a prayer that
went something like this: 'We thank God for our homes and our food and our
safety in a new land. We thank God for the opportunity to create a new world
for freedom and justice.’*****
* I have been reading a lot of
work by David Foster Wallace lately, and am paying homage to the late, great
writer in this blog post. Please
forgive my neurotic use of footnotes.
** Our school has a strong
military presence and several guards, or drillmasters, patrol the hallways
during class time looking for students who are breaking school rules (cell
phone use, sleeping, being loud). You don’t want to be noticed by the
guards, obviously.**b
**b Lauren had an unfortunate
dealing with a guard who didn’t approve of her approach to classroom
management. Lauren was allowing group work, and students were talking to
one another while completing their assignment. This notoriously bitchy**c guard interrupted her class to reprimand the students (completely ignorant of
what the assignment was, I might add) for being off task. Apparently,
she’d have had a word with Lauren too if she were more confident in her English
abilities. After leaving Lauren’s class she phoned Steve, our office
director, and told him that foreign teachers should not be allowed to teach
third year students because we can’t handle them. And there’s more! She
went to the discipline office and filed a formal complaint against Lauren, so
Lauren had to explain why her students were misbehaving even though they
weren’t. Lauren’s classy answer was, I encourage my students to work
together and talk in their conversation classes. It’s incredibly annoying
to have these military marionettes monitoring our every move.
<sarcasm>I’m sure it does a lot to foster free thinking and free
expression in our students. I know the students love it.</sarcasm>
**c Lauren feels it is important to clarify that this adjective is taken directly from our Taiwanese co-workers, and that she would never refer to someone using that term. Rob doesn't feel apologetic, or a need to explain himself, for using adjectives, especially when they apply.
*** Your guess is as good as
ours to the meaning of this enigmatic statement. My best research suggests it may be referring to a scene in Rocky III where the boxer named
Thunderlips (played by Terry Bollea, AKA Hulk Hogan) has a dirty fight with the
title character, Rocky, played by Sylvester Stallone. There are a few problems with this theory, however. For one, Rocky didn’t lose the match,
it was declared a draw. Secondly,
this movie is now thirty years old and came out at least thirteen years before
this student was even born. There
was also an episode of “The Incredible Hulk” TV show where the Hulk’s alter
ego, Bruce Banner (under the pseudonym, David Benson), is mugged by a couple of
thugs and subsequently rescued by a man named Rocky (who is coincidentally a
boxer). This theory seems even
less probable than the first though due to the show’s even older age and far
less widely distributed release, and obviously because Rocky actually saved the
Hulk in this instance.
**** I’m sure my lawyer
brothers would advise the Redbox alternative, even though I know at least one
of them has proclivities for certain Russian websites. ****b
****b If anyone reading this
is in any way affiliated with the MPAA, I would like to publicly state that I do
not endorse internet piracy. I was simply acknowledging its existence,
ease and affordability.
***** Historians suggest
Brewster’s invocation is apocryphal.
Nevertheless, it embodies much of the American spirit which permeates
the holiday.
