The second ‘semester’ of our language classes officially started in February. All four of us volunteers are holding our own classes. Nadia having her Italian class, and Angel his Spanish class. With nobody wanting to learn Slovak nor Macedonian, Marija and I were left to fill in for the Conversational English classes. A half of Marija’s soul is somewhere in the previous century, so she was a perfect candidate to lead the class for the old-timers. On the other hand, I, being so hip and cool, could fit perfectly right in with the youngsters, so the decision was made. In this article, I will tell you the short story of my debut class with all its details. Sit down and enjoy a deep dive into the machinations of my mind in all its genius.
Monkey business
There are many things that bring people joy. For some, it might be a sunny day or a nice and hot shower. However, for me, a bit of deceit and tomfoolery always hits the right strings. That is why I decided to combine business with pleasure for the first introductory class. As one can guess, the focus of this class is on introductions. All about who you are, what you do, and so on…. but these introductions would have a little devilish twist to them.
The ruse
I arrived in my class quite early to set up the scene and waited for people to arrive. With everyone gathered up for their first class, I gave them a little welcoming speech explaining what all this is about, and then I told them that today we are going to focus on introductions since nobody knows each other yet. To make it more interesting, we would also play a little game during these introductions. Each of them was to take a small piece of paper from the bunch that I had prepared before the class. I told them that two out of these eight papers have a letter ‘L’ written on them. Those who manage to get the paper with an ‘L’ will have to tell three lies during their own introduction, and that at the end people they will have to guess who the two liars were. What they did not know was that every single paper had an ‘L’ written on it, so every single one of them would be making lies.
You reap what you sow
It all went just fantastic. People were divided into pairs and the introductions began. I, myself, had a hard time discovering the lies. There were some quite good ones and some not very much thought but nonetheless that more hilarious. My favourite one goes to the person lying about working in a pet store. He described his job as selling pet food. However, he had no idea what the name of the store was nor where it was located. We also had a professional flame eater that would add 10 years to her actual age. The participants were busy with their introductions and lies until the end when the time had almost run out.
I dedicated the last five minutes to their thoughts and guesses on who were the liars. With a cheeky smile, I told them that all of their guesses were correct, and then I revealed that all the papers had ‘L’ on them. However, what I did not anticipate was that some of the participants had not checked properly. Therefore, we ended up with two people that were not lying at all because they somehow missed the quite obvious letter on their papers.
Nothing can ever go right. Nevertheless, this little blunder was not going to sour my satisfaction from fooling all of them. At the end, we all left satisfied that night. I did because I managed to deceive people I had just met for the first time, and they did because they got to practice English while having fun. Every week, all of them will have more opportunities to practice English, and I will have more opportunities to make that process more interesting.
Bran
