One-sentence stories

(Written 10-10-08)

This week I had my intermediate and advanced classes do a writing exercise where one student started a story by writing a sentence, and the next person in the row wrote the next sentence, and so on. From the stories in each row, they were to pick the best story and I would decide a winner for the class. I told them that the winning story would be the most creative, one that made sense, and was school appropriate.

The term "school appropriate" doesn't seem to exist here. Back home, I would tell my students they had to be "PG" or "school appropriate" in class activities and they knew what I was talking about. Here, I had to explain that means leave out the sex and violence. In spite of this warning, my students wrote all sorts of disturbing things, which completely surprised me. Most of them seem so sweet and innocent, yet here are snippets from some of the stories I received this week:

"I have a sexy girlfriend. She gave me AIDS. We suicided together."
"I was in love with my teacher, but he married my sister. So I got plastic surgery to flirt with him."
"I took a shit in the backyard."
"I hit his penis with a bat."
"My mother is more delicious than cow. She is very fat and salty and spicy." (from the "steak boy" class, this one did NOT surprise me)
"I like American girls because they are fat."
"My parents hit me, so I go to the hospital. Now I am so happy because I can pass the exam. Yeah!"
"He is too angry, so he shooted his mother brain bones."

Nearly every story had something about death or suicide. They are obsessed with it. I told one class I wanted nice stories and to leave out all the death; and one boy (who speaks English very well) said, "but this is art!"

Probably the strangest part of all this was the fact that my co-teachers were entirely unfazed, as if AIDS, suicide and murder are perfectly normal topics for students to write about in class.

My last class of the week, which is my best class behavior and participation wise, wrote this little gem:

"A foreign teacher came to our school. And she is taller than me. She is so popular in the boys' classes that I am jealous of her. So I kill her."

Hmm...I think we'll stick to vocabulary games and speaking exercises in the future.