Tip of my tongue
Teaching November 16th. 2009, 10:00pmToday in my evening classes we were doing “movie riddles”. I thought about the last four or five movies I had watched. The students got my first riddle immediately. As soon as I wrote an “Animation about a father trying to find his son in the sea” they all shouted out Finding Nemo. I decided to try something harder.
I came up with one and wrote the riddle without listing the name of the film. I got up into class and said, ” I’m a heist movie with Robert Redford and Paul Newman. I took place in 1920’s Chicago. My story is about two men trying to do a long con scam on some rich person. Many people double cross each other. In the end of the movie they succeed and steal lots of money.”
The students all looked at me. No one knew the answer. I was shocked none of the older students had seen it. “Come on! It’s the greatest heist movie of all time! It’s….it’s…”
Nothing.
No one knew.
“Oh, I’ll just tell you the answer. It’s…The… uh….”
“Oh boy. Uh. It starts with an S. The score? The….the….Wait a minute, let me think.“
I knew it well enough to hum the them to it. I could picture multiple Simpson parodies of it. I knew I had talked about on Twitter. I could not remember the name of the damn movie.
I made the students go while I worked on trying to remember. If the University’s classrooms had computers standard like they should, this would have never happened. I ran down to the foreign faculty room on my break and asked the riddle to the very first teacher I met. He looked at me like I was a madman and said, “The Sting?”
Ah HA! I stopped one of my students who then relayed my answer to the rest of the people on the stairwell. How embarrassing!
I hate it when I forget a detail or have “tip of the tongue” moments in class. For my lesson teaching grammar this week I wrote out four pages of notes with lots of examples to make sure I understood it myself before I got up in front of class and tried to explain it to anyone else. I’ve also decided to continue with over-preparing my notes so that if I need to teach the same materials again I’ll have the notes available for myself. I put them up in Google Documents so that I can access them anywhere, and I’ll theoretically always be ready for a class.
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