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.

The End.

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