Students' Personal Wikipedias
SIAS University
Henan Province, China
Spring 2012
My students rarely carry any books or paper or any other academic tools. Most of them have an electronic translator on their cell phones. And some of them walk around with a thick paper back dictionary that is filled with idioms and slang. Students tend to pick an expression or two from the book and try it out in class. Usually, they are off just a bit but they are proud of their efforts. So it isn’t worth it to correct them.
But in spite of the fact that they have no books, every one of them walks around with a small notebook pad which they keep with them at all times. This is their own Wikipedia. It contains all of the Americano they can record. If I mention a movie that interested me, they whip out that notebook and write down the name of that movie.If I mention an author, that name gets entered in the book. If I use a word that never heard, it is written down after one of them yells out, “Spell it please”. And heads go down and scribble down my every thought.
After class one night, I asked students if they wanted to go for a cup of tea. One student said to me, “lets’ just talk causal. No need to talk turkey all the time.” When I mentioned that this was not a common expression, she was able to site the reference and history of this expression. Apparently, it goes back to the days of the pilgrims.
Another student stopped me recently and asked “what is the difference between polluted and contaminated?’ I started to give her some lame explanations but then suggested that she just look it up in her dictionary.
“What’s the difference between fable and fairy tale”? Well, I tried to explain that they are really similar and we use them interchangeable. “Oh,” she tells me, “I thought a fable had animals that represented something else and a fairy tale didn’t have animals.” She is making notes as I talk.
At the end of every class, I now know to anticipate them. As I am packing up my things, they scramble to get to me first. “Bridget, just one minute, how do you say this word”? And usually, there is a list of four or five words, all unrelated. They have expressions that they think they heard and ask if I can interpret their idea of that they am had heard.
One student in particular comes up to me after class and just runs thought a list. How do you say “sleeve”, “Tom”, “Tim”, “proxy”, “eradicate”, and the list goes on and on. I looked at her long list of words and it looks as if she recently asked someone else for the meaning of “erotica”.
One student wanted me to list all of the American authors since 1950 because she likes American authors. She’s read two books and wants to read more. I mentioned that there were 1000s of authors. “No, no”, she corrects me, “just authors since 1950”. She is reading the Wonderful World of the Wizard of Oz. The top half of the page is written in Chinese and the bottom half is written in English. She sees it as a very humorous book with a very good morale. I asked her what is her interpretation of the moral, “study hard and go to college and you will be successful”, and she tells me confidently. I asked how she came to this conclusion and she turns to her trusty notebook and leafs through the book and finds a few notes she had on the book. She quotes something that confirms her thoughts.
They have charts that convert Celsius to Fahrenheit. They have the exchange rate of US currency. They have the list of all the foreign faculty they know and the colleges they attended. Business cards are stuffed in these notebooks. Email addresses, Skype address and phone numbers are stored in there.
If I mention a state, I have to spell it, give a general idea of its geographic location and indicate any colleges in that state that offer scholarships to foreign students from China.
If I mention something that is too complicated for them to understand at the moment, I have to write it down for them. They never ask me to write it. They just hand me the book and it is understood that I have to write it. Then they squint their eyes and try to decipher what I wrote and then they have to rewrite it in Chinese/American alphabet script.
Then they put their book away and the conversation moves on. And then I make another statement and the book comes out all over again.
