I really love most of my students. In general, they are either intelligent and highly educated (my adult students tend to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, and that sort of thing) or intelligent and on their way to becoming highly educated (I also teach teenagers. Er, and two year olds.). The vast majority of them are very motivated to learn English, which makes my job much easier. Luckily for me, most of them are very excited to learn about American culture, too, which makes my job much more fun. Especially since the books we use are exclusively British, so I get to be the ultimate authority on all things American.
Of course, Halloween was yesterday, so last week I spent some time with each of my 9 classes talking about our glorious, be-candied holiday. I started each lesson by hinting heavily at Halloween, and asking my students what was special about this weekend. Every class got it. My next step was to ask them to tell me what they knew about Halloween. This is where it got interesting.
I didn’t know what to expect. I remember when i was in fifth grade, we had a new girl in our class from England. Around the beginning of October, we realized she didn’t know what we did for Halloween. She only had a vague concept of what Halloween was. This DID NOT COMPUTE in our eleven year old heads. But that was before the internet was widely available, and we were still so young. I didn’t know if my students would be similarly in the dark.
A sampling of answers I got:
“You wear suit of the bad thing.”
“Children go from place to place and say ‘Curse or candy!’.”
“The deads are alive.”
“Mouses fly.”
“Dance party!”
“Fires in orange vegetable.”
Overall, most of the answers were pretty accurate, factually. I taught a little bit of grammar, like the somewhat tricky phrase “dress up as___”, taught them to say “trick or treat!” in the proper, singsong-y way, and did some vocabulary builders, but they pretty much had the basics. (By the way, “mouses fly” was a reference to bats/vampires. In Russian, bat=flying mouse. This is true for Batman, too. He is Flying Mouse Man here.) But it seemed to me that at least three quarters of my students were somehow missing the spirit of Halloween. I started feeling a weird protectiveness about a holiday I’ve never even particularly enjoyed. I started thinking to myself: It’s magical! Every child’s favorite holiday! What other day can you be whatever, whoever you want, AND have people give you candy for it? PERFECT. Where else but America? U.S.A. U.S.A.!!!!!!
I have since calmed down. I’m still not really sure what caused this nostalgia attack for Halloweens I never really even had (I grew up far away from most of my friends, trick-or-treating was always just me and my dad, and over quickly), but I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that my classes associated Halloween mainly with drinking and dancing, the way College Halloween™ is. College Halloween™ is a completely different beast altogether, and it made me kind of sad to see that that’s the version that holds up to exporting. I much prefer the candy, magic, and possibility-filled Halloween of your average 8 year old.
Then again, when one of my favorite students, a 16 year old musician, left my class on Friday night and said “You have heppy Helloveen!” I couldn’t stay bitter. My students are kind of the best. Plus, the smattering of Halloween-themed parties at clubs around the city combined with the somewhat description-defying nature of Russian fashion (edgy? garish? free-form?) gave my friend and I a great game to play on the metro last night: Halloween, or everyday? We could never say for sure, except for the guy with the light-up, rainbow colored sword. Well, maybe not even him, actually…
OH WOW. THOSE ANSWERS ARE FULL OF WIN.
I WANT “SUIT OF THE BAD THING” TATTOOED ON ME SOMEWHERE…OR AT THE VERY LEAST, IT SHOULD BE A BAND NAME.
ALSO, “FIRES IN ORANGE VEGETABLE” SERIOUSLY MADE ME LOL. REALLY THOUGH, SO TRUE. THE TERM JACK-O-LANTERN IS FAR TOO FANCY FOR WHAT IT REALLY IS.