Saturday, March 5, 2011

University classes

Classes are going fine.  My graduate class has 15 students who seem engaged and willing to contribute to our discussions, even though its more challenging to do so in English for most of them.  My undergrad class is very small, and I won't be able to do the in-class simulations that I had hoped to do, but we are getting into the material in that class too.

I never realized, until I started to lecturing to people whose first language is not English, how many idioms I use in my daily speech.  Trying to explain the Prisoner's Dilemma...the two prisoners are pressured to "rat on each other" oops.. "to sell the other one out" no... "tell the police that the other guy is guilty".  Its pretty obvious when I use phrases that are unfamiliar - students immediately get kind of confused looks on their faces and I know I need to find a different way to say things.

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