Language, School

The week just passed was enrolment week, when campus is rapidly shaken awake from its summer torpor. Even though the week’s events don’t in theory have a direct impact on my daily responsibilities, it’s been hard not to feel by proxy the stress of my colleagues. A particular kind of brittle cheer seeps through the floors and walls and imbues us all; our attention spans are a little shorter and our laughter a little louder and triggered by not much at all.

For the first time in my working life at preparatory programmes I am not facing a semester mad with contact hours, thanks both to some fairly assertive negotiating at my last development and review meeting and to the serendipity of a small research project coming under our auspices about now. For one day a week, I am being paid to do research, even if is literature reviews in a field not directly my own. I did not think I would ever achieve such a balance of first-semester hours, especially as colleagues around me add up their own personal tally and cry out aloud at the number.

Our outgoing students graduated on Friday. This on-site graduation ceremony is sometimes a dull affair, staff tired and frazzled from enrolment (and sweating in our heavy academic gowns) and friends and family of graduands thinly spread. This time, however, the lecture theatre was all but full and there was a lot of multicultural noise: singing, cheering, hollering. This is how we like it. One of my kiwi former students gave a speech in which she addressed her Japanese and Saudi classmates in their own languages. The latter was, I think, particularly touching for the extended families who had gathered, not least among whom were many young mothers in hijab and their children. It may be, however, that I’m just projecting, since it was I who had a tear in my eye at the speech’s conclusion.

As new students join the programmes, particularly those at the earlier stages of their study of English for Academic Purposes, broken variants of English are inevitably audible up and down our corridor. It is part of my duty to my students, I think, that I don’t report here those variations inadvertently humorous. Instead, I offer this entry from My Dad is a Fob of two men mutually lost in translation:

Of Mice and Men

My Dad (who doesn’t speak any English) and my boyfriend (Caucasian [sic]) have been attempting to chat online, with the help of some terrible translation websites. Suddenly, both of them simultaneously IM me.

Boyfriend: I’m trying to tell your dad that our friend Kelly has mice in her house and joked about borrowing our cat. I think I said it wrong…

Dad: Why is your boyfriend trying to sell me your cat?