This week, teaching

Last week I learned that the concept of Mad Libs does not exist in the imagination of Slovak children, unfortunately.  When such things happen, I'm the one who ends up looking crazy, not them. 

Today, I asked my best group to invent the title of a book and then tell me what the book was about.  One title was Ghost of Red Star.  Roughly speaking, the ghost of Che Guevara comes to one of my students and gives her advice about how to create a revolution in Slovakia.  When I asked her what that may entail, she said that the president and prime minister had to go.  I made the rather obvious observation that this was suprising because they are on the left and so is Che, so why should they be offed?  And she said, and I am not making this up, "These are only little problems!" The book ended with Che's ghost entering another man so that she could marry him.  When I asked whether this was fiction or nonfiction, the response was autobiography.  I totally can't make this stuff up.

Other books included a nonfiction book about wolves from their perspective and a guy who got injections in one of those sell your body to science experiments to pay for school and ended up having hallucinations.  Or not.