The End.
I'm in Barcelona now, teaching statistics to Catalan undergraduates. In Spanish. Joder.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Those kids have no idea whatsoever of what went on at Stalingrad
If it's a class taught by me, it's almost certain that at some point I will end up standing there in front of everyone, my head in my hands, saying something like "What the hell am I doing?" It happens in English, so it was bound to happen in Spanish. I was trying to say that something was statistically significantly different from something else, which in Spanish is estadísticamente significativamente diferente. They're not hard words, really. I know them and they don't have hard sounds like rolled r's or anything. They're cognates, for fuck's sake. But significativamente is just so fucking long that I kept getting lost in it. I said joder and a few of them laughed and I started over but then I still kept fucking it up. So I put my head in my hands and had a little millisecond-long nervous breakdown and then I started saying important instead of significant and the kid who looks like the bully from A Christmas Story except that he's always smiling gave me a big "Way to go, champ"-type smile and we all moved on.
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