it's a big world

I had English Workshop today, which gets to be less of a train wreck every week. Beyond not knowing what to do with a small group of motivated learners (remember, I'm using all my mental resources to deal with teaching large, mostly disinterested classes), two of them can carry on a conversation, and two of them can't, which makes designing an activity challenging at best.

I do explain some stuff in Spanish instead of forcing the whole time to be English-only, and when I discovered that the students and I think the color "chestnut" are two very different things--they think it's a dark color in between brown and black--I explained to them how color perception is completely determined by culture. This is sort of abstract, but then I pulled out the reliable example of the Japanese color word that includes both blue and green.

Any day you can make teenagers' eyes go wide with astonishment is a good day.