My daughters are teaching me how to embed YouTube clips. They've shown me how to do this before, but I'm not the world's swiftest learner, and to be honest, they're not always the world's most patient teachers, but boy, have they made great strides: no one has yelled at me once and we've spent a good fifteen minutes on it! And lucky me: I've been able to let my pesky WIP sit for a few hours. And I have found yet another way to procrastinate, so I can give the FreeRice site a little break.
As a teacher of basic English, the decisions I have to make are sometimes heartbreaking. By giving -- or withholding -- a point or two, I can either mess up someone's summer plans or make them the world's happiest kid. Although the results are the main thing, sometimes there are other factors that come into play: how hard the kid tried, whether or not s/he has a part-time job, how good the student's attendance was -- and, damn it -- punctuality.
It's not easy. Most of the material I have to grade is of a very basic level. Here is just a little taste:
My Best Friend (Serhat)
I'm happy to meet Onur. Because He is friendly always. He is shy boy but also He is extrovert. sometimes I feel myself alone. Always I want together. I hope we don't leave never and I hope our friendship are going to until endless.
My Best Friend (Mehmet)
My Best Friend Ahmet is quite and friendly boy. He is liked by everybody. Because he He is gentleman. Sometimes His working too much and everybody is liking him. His family is quite poor. But his family is gentleman. He is quite fat. But everybody look his by ripe person.
Which one of those two would, in your opinion, rate the higher points? Would it really not matter to you if you knew that one of the students came from a very poor family and had to work at a part-time job? As it happens, both of these students are boys, but what if you knew that one was a girl whose parents refused to pay for her university education?
Do you see the kind of dilemmas I am faced with here?
Now, for what it is worth, here are two clips of the performances of two talented young men. After listening to these several times, I thank God that I teach bonehead English and don't work as a musical critic.
Haochen Zhang of China
Nobuyuki Tsujii of Japan
If any of my readers can tell me definitively which one of these musicians is better -- and why -- I will be enormously grateful.
