Will my mom join the ranks?

Today was the perfect day to catch up with my mom on skype from the glorious sunny back yard of this 'wintery' San Jose.  She has kept very busy and it seems her schedule will remain quite full at least through April.  One of her upcoming projects is a part in a small play that a friend of hers is producing at a tiny 'theater' near Meidaimae.  They hope to seat 50 audience per show but my mom seems to think that if that many attend there won't be enough room in the front for the actors in the play.

"I play a person from out of the earth," she told us (cutely, I might add).  "And I teach violin."

I don't think accurately playing an alien violin teacher is going to pose much of a problem since it's terrifically close to what she actually is.  

One of her lines is to sigh to a student, "This is why I don't like kids from earth." 

Love it. 

Oh, and regarding the ranks comment, please see this link:  http://www.imdb.com/list/5ipnlh6ZjmI/

mchjd post 9: Will I ever grow up?

I had a student today, a woman a little younger than my mom but contrarily very proper and polite; a most agreeable student. Today's lesson covered things you might need to know should you need to visit a doctor, with phrases like "the flu" or "food poisoning." Naturally, the word "diarrhea" was also in the text book, but I am enough of a professional at this point that I didn't even crack a smile. Not to say I didn't want to but, proudly, I repressed the juvenile urge to giggle. What happened next made this valiant effort worthless, though.

You see, she had trouble with the word's enunciation. The first time, she said DI-a-rrhe-a. So I corrected her. "The stress is on the third syllable," I said in a teacherly way. di-a-RRHE-a
I felt proud that I was keeping it professional.

Then there was a dialog between a doctor and patient. Of course the writers of this text book couldn't give the patient the flu. Nooo, it had to be food poisoning. At this point, I'm still holding it together, but when my student gets to the line in question, she makes the same error, "I have DIarrhea." So I remind her, "It's diaRRHEa." I'm still holding up.

Here, she begins to chant to get the correct pronunciation firmly into her brain. I'm used to this behavior from students - repetition really does help - but all of a sudden I'm aware that she's saying, "I have diaRRHEa. I have diaRRHEa" over and over again and the second grader in me comes flying out full-force. Tears of laughter begin welling up in my eyes and I can't breathe. She looks concerned and asks me if she's said something wrong. I shake my head 'no' and force myself to think of something-anything!-else. But it's too late; I'm laughing and no longer feeling any pride, but rather that I'm going to get fired if I can't pull myself together. The rest of the lesson was me reminding myself not to remember this incident, forgetting it, then wondering what it was I was trying to not remember, remembering it again and having to quell any hysterics. It was this pattern over and over again, but I managed to survive the remainder of the lesson without incident, though I don't know that 'teaching' accurately describes what I was able to do in those 20 minutes.