Wednesday, 27 October, 2010: A3 Class

In this lesson, I tried to check your homework from last time, and found that only one person had completely done the homework (congratulations, Altantogos, for doing all the homework!) and only one other person had even half finished the homework (thank you, Khulan, for doing some of the homework).  This led Marie to tell you about the plan for next term: for this first term, you were lucky because there were no grades in my class, but for next term, I will be giving you guys grades based on class participation (bringing your notebooks/books to class, taking notes, listening to the lesson, following instructions), homework (whether your homework is done and complete), tests (you will have some tests next term), and assignments (I will give one or two assignments), so hopefully this will be enough of an incentive for you to take English class a little more seriously next semester.

Then, we moved on and started talking about family trees.  We looked at a family tree in our textbook of a boy named Peter, and we talked about Peter's family (Who is Peter's grandmother? Who's Caroline? etc).  Then, for fun, Marie drew her enormous family tree on the chalkboard, we found that Marie has 22 aunts and uncles, 33 cousins, and about 33 second cousins, as well.  

We also looked at some family riddles:

My sister is my mother's daughter.
My father is my grandfather's son.
My mother is my father's wife.
My uncle is my aunt's husband.


This reminded Marie of a riddle in a short story called "Juan Verdades", by Joe Hayes.  In this story, Juan Verdades, an extremely honest character, picks all of the apples from his boss's prize apple tree and gives them away to the girl he loves.  When it comes time to admit to his boss what he did, here is what he says:


"A fool picked the apples and gave them away.  The fool is my father's son.  If the fool had a child, he would call his father "grandfather".  I don't have any brothers."


Challenge:  Can you figure out this family riddle?  Who is the fool?  Is it:
a) the speaker? 
b) the person being spoken to?
c) the father?
d) some other person we don't know about?


Don't forget your homework!
Remember the enourmous family tree Marie showed you?  Well, now it's your turn to show me your family tree.  Include your grandparents, your parents, your aunts and uncles, your cousins, and your brothers and sisters!