Five a day....aaaaarrrggghhhhhhh!

If I ever have another conversation about healthy eating it will be about a century too soon. Yes, it's that time of year again, the time when my ESOL learners are busily trying to pass their speaking and listening exams and the subject is, as it usually is, healthy eating. This year, unusually, I have two tutor groups. That's thirty six students in total and each exam has two near identical tasks and each task has to be first completed and then listened to again for marking. That's seventy two times I have had to hear essentially the same conversation, albeit performed with widely varying levels of achievement. Even allowing for a few no shows and some help from my co-tutor on one of the courses it's still considerably more about healthy eating than most people could take without losing their sanity.

Of course there are moments of humour. Two of my afternoon students, for example, were afflicted with fits of the giggles at the very thought that someone my shape could be doing a role play as the leader of a Healthy Eating workshop. Their exams had to be stopped until they had managed to compose themselves. They are allowed to prepare their topic for about forty minutes before the actual speaking starts and this leads to some quite surreal conversations. One student, for example, had prepared a couple of questions that he wanted to get in and he was determined to ask them whether they fit the conversation or not, so the conversation began with

ME:"Hello, how are you?"

STUDENT:"Good. How are you?"

ME:"Are you joining the healthy eating club?"

STUDENT:"Why do we need calcium?"

Altogether he managed to ask the question three times and never at any point when it might have been appropriate.

It reminded me of my own language learning days. I used to do a German class and I was rather good at it. Sadly that wasn't true of everybody. We had a student who was of advanced years and not entirely on the same planet as everybody else. Let's call him Ernie (which wasn't his name!) Once, when we reading a text about the manufacture of Garden Gnomes when in the middle of it he started to talk, apparently earnestly, about the impossibility of breeding them because of the scarcity of female ones.

Anyway, I did a Saturday school once and was startled to find myself partnered with Ernie on a relatively easy exercise where we were simply reading the two parts of a conversation. So I read the first line. And then he read the same first line again. I stopped and explained it to him again. He nodded. So, I read my first line. He read his first line. I read my second line. He read his first line again. We stopped. I explained it to him again. I read my first line. He asked me what we were supposed to be doing.

And so it went on, and that was before we'd got to the role play part.

It gives me a lot of sympathy for my students but frankly if anybody mentions five portions of fruit and veg, six grams of salt, five food groups or anything else about nutrition (however bizarrely they pronounce it) I shall probably do something unspeakable to them with a lettuce.