Diaries Magazine

From Iceland With Love

Posted on the 28 June 2011 by Dmroughton
So I have these three students, two current and one former, who all have another class together currently; they have laid claim to a pseudo-lounge area upstairs in my building where they congregate to study for their next class after mine lets out.
Current Student A routinely comes by my office for feedback on her rough drafts. (Incidentally, her hard work is totally paying off with As on papers.) Today, right on cue, she came by the office and asked if I had time to look at her paper, but wanting to distance myself from a fresh stack of papers I should have been grading, I went down to the pseudo-lounge area to review her paper and to give some punctuation pointers to Current Student B, who had asked for help with commas.
During the course of reviewing Current Student A's paper, I was peripherally involved in Current Student B's conversation with Former Student.
I should interject here that Current Student B is originally from Iceland, and by her own admission, often gets tongue tied somewhere between translating in her head and words falling out of her mouth, resulting in a not quite right phraseology.
For example, in the conversation in which I was peripherally involved, I found out that she offered some great advice to the teacher of the previously mentioned, shared class. Apparently, he had also gotten tongue tied in class one day and blurred his words together and blamed it, in part, on having the class so intently hanging on his words - not an open admission of nervousness but certainly symptomatic of it. So Current Student B tried to offer the advice that I' m sure almost all students who have to give oral presentations have heard, "Picture your audience with no clothes on."
Except this is how her Icelandic tongue produced the advice: "I want to picture you with no clothes on."
I found this rather hysterical, given that the incident had happened in the middle of my teacher friend's class - in other words, it happened to him and not me.
So after my little chuckle, I finished reviewing Current Student A's paper and asked Current Student B if she wanted me to review hers:
"Do you want me to do yours now?"
"Do you want to do mine?"
"Well, I have a few minutes, so if you want me to, I can."
At this exact moment, my supervisor came out of his laboratory classroom which is five feet from this little sitting area where we were discussing the students' papers.
In response to my last statement, Little Miss Iceland, very happy to have extra help, almost shouted:
"I want you to want mine!"
And that was my karma for the day.

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