Teaching project: week 6

The school where I'm teaching has a significant population of international students, mostly from China, and it seemed to me that the day before Thanksgiving vacation would be an excellent time to give these kids the floor. So last week I sent the teachers dual-language copies of three poems by Cold Mountain (Han Shan), which they then shared ahead of time with the Chinese-speaking students, who would get extra credit for their participation in this lesson.

Yesterday, a teacher emailed me to say that one student had pointed out to her that the poems were in classic Chinese rather than modern Chinese so that direct translation would be challenging for them. In response I came into class today armed with my battery of language-evolution examples. On the board I wrote three lines: one from Beowulf, one from The Canterbury Tales, and one from Romeo and Juliet. After reading each of these lines in the original, I drew the students into a quick chat about the shift from what, to us, seems unreadable, to what seems familiar yet strange, to what seems like regular formal English. (By the way, this is a great way to ease your students' fears of Shakespeare. By the time we got to the R&J line, the kids were completely cool about him.)

My goal here was to prepare the students to turn to Chinese poems that, for our international students, were the equivalent of Chaucer: familiar yet strange. What I did not expect was the graceful interposition of a ninth grader from China, who stood up in front of the class and read a poem that all the international students recognized from their schooldays at home. (Because I neglected to stick the photocopy into my bag, I can't at the moment tell you what it was called, but I will rectify this mistake shortly.) After her American friend read a translation of the poem, the Chinese student discussed some of the differences between the two versions: rhyme scheme came up, as did shifts in mood and character. The moment was quite lovely.

Then we turned to the Cold Mountain poems. I asked English-speaking students to read them (I used translations by Red Pine [Bill Porter], which I am not finding on the Internet, but I can email them to you if you're interested), and then asked the Chinese-speaking students to talk a bit about the original. They were shy, mostly because they are uneasy about their English. But they did point out that the English versions worked to keep the tone and mood rather than the exact wording, except for a single line, which was translated verbatim. To prompt their talk, I asked a question about punctuation in Chinese, but mostly I didn't want to put too much pressure on them. My real intent was to spend some public time respecting their knowledge and their heritage. One of the downsides of the immersion approach to learning English is that the international students don't have many classroom opportunities to celebrate their own language, and that seems sad to me.

Now I told the class that they were going to be translators themselves, and I asked them to turn to the next poem in their packet: "Elg" by Jan Erik Vold . . . in the original Norwegian. This is an excellent choice for a fake translation because it looks simultaneously bizarre and familiar. Working in pairs or groups, the kids immediately fell into silliness. They had so much fun with this, and they approached it in different ways. Some played with online translators; some peeked at the existing English translation as a starting point; some just jumped straight into bizarreness. At the end of the class almost every single group read their poems aloud--such a big difference from last week's lethargy. We heard about Las Vegas, hairy elves, fairy godmothers, barking, and Target. The teachers and I couldn't have been happier.

I gave them no homework over the holiday but told them that next week we're going to break into small groups and spend some up-close time with each other's workshop poems.

For links to the previous weeks' activities, go here.