Wish list for Mr. Right

For my weekly English class today, I had prepared 2 articles for reading, comprehension and discussion – “Waiting for Mr Perfect” (The Star) and an extract on suitable styles for various body shapes. They jumped on the first one and seemed to be bent over with amusement as they took turns to read, not stopping to ask about any difficult words or phrases. Well, I’ve always told them not be deterred by these anyway, rather to read for the general ideas or story first. In this one-hour class, the best I can do is to selectively go over some difficult words and subtle expressions. What is more important is the discussion the article stimulates as the main objective of the class is to get them to speak in English. They were so involved with the topic that they started talking excitedly at the same time. It was one of the rare times that they were quick to give opinions and to disagree with the author or to elaborate on his ideas. Yes, in unison they disagreed that honesty, trust and faithfulness are not the most important criteria for the perfect guy, but money, money and money are firsts on the wish list! For loyalty, somebody suggested a yearly contract. Author says you can’t dream for a humorous guy if you are not humorous yourself….Su said she didn’t need a guy as chirpy as herself and others agreed they’d prefer their opposites. Whatever they felt, they were not self-conscious expressing themselves and that’s when they usually speak best.

There were 4 new students today who were actually trainees from the group’s nursing college, 2 men and 2 ladies. It must have been quite an intimidating first day for them because I saw them bewildered most of the time the ‘‘seniors” were laughing their heads off. For their benefit, I went over some words for correct pronunciation and discovered that not everyone knew what “mustache” is or what you actually mean when you say someone is “not drop-dead gorgeous”. More hilarious was when we played hot seat to recall vocabulary in the article….the person in hot seat, tested for the word “moustache” said the word was ‘big boobs”! The class had to end at that point, 20 minutes over schedule.