A couple of weeks ago … or was it more recent than that? Whatever – Recently, I was teaching a unit on ‘Movies’ and I happened to look at this girl’s book as I was wandering round the classroom. In describing the setting of The Lord of the Rings she’d written that it took place in the Netherlands. Which gave me the opportunity to draw a map of Middle Earth on the board.
This week I’ve been teaching interjections (and other devices such as onomatopoeia and alliteration) to a number of classes. I have one quite fun class of elementary school students. They’re pretty bright and good at English so they’ve been lumbered with the advanced level ‘add-on’ classes – involving all sorts of literary techniques.
I wrote up a few examples of interjections – ‘Oh!’, ‘Argh!’, ‘Great!’ etc. One of the boys, Brian (about seven to nine years old – I find it difficult to tell, but this class is one of my youngest), suggested ‘Shit!’ as another interjection. I told him that was a ‘bad word’ and he shouldn’t say it. ‘Really?’ he said, ‘Worse than “Fuck you”?’
