ESL Teacher

I mentioned one of my favourite ESL tense review memory games a while ago, and now that the Christmas season is upon us I’m reminded of one of the funniest times I’ve had playing this game.

I was teaching a Cambridge preparation course in Bratislava, Slovakia, and we had a two-week break over the Christmas and New Year season. At our first lesson back, I wanted to ease them slowly back into the idea of studying and I had them all stand up in a circle in the middle of the room (an almost empty room, as this school provided chairs but no desks!).

The instructions were for them to tell us something they did in the holidays, so it was really just a basic past tense review, as well as being a good warm-up and welcome back to school. The main rule was their sentence should use a verb that hadn’t yet been used, and when they repeated the sentences of the students who came before them they couldn’t make a mistake or hesitate longer than three seconds, or they would have to sit down. And the last student standing would win.

The first couple of students told fairly normal things, as far as I can remember. Then we got to Martin, a smiley computer programmer. After reciting the sentences of those before him, he added, “I killed a carp with a hammer.” Carp is a traditional Christmas food in Slovakia and families like to buy a fresh (living) one, have it swim in the bath tub for a few days and then prepare it for Christmas. Martin’s job was to kill theirs and he’d used a hammer. Eek. Of course, I then had to hear this gruesome sentence repeated over and over as each student added their own sentence. “Martin killed a carp with a hammer” (giggle, giggle). It made me squirm so badly to picture poor carp, but everybody else was just laughing so much that even I ended up joining in.

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