In my afternoon classes at Qinghua U my students were doing presentations.  Of course, it is rather difficult to motivate 25-35 year old businessmen to prepare for an English presentation about anything.  The presentations were pretty awful.  A few of them did prepare, however.  The presentations were supposed to be only 2-3 minutes, and I would take notes on their grammar and have little mini-lessons after each one. One student kept talking and I had to cut him off at about 17 minutes.  Another student copied and pasted a wikipedia article onto a slide presentation and made the class read it.  One more student showed an inappropriate 11-minute video about Japan. Hmmm…. 

Clark (aka Superman–remember him? Just got married…wasn’t going to tell me…) went to the front of the class to give his presentation.  He decided that he was going to tell the class about his new wife. 🙂 Awwww…  He told us about how he met her and other things.  He also said, ‘…and in 8 months we will have a baby!’  (Which was followed by uproarious laughter from the rest of the class)  I asked him, ‘You do know it takes 9 months to have a baby, right?’  To which he replied, ‘I know.’ So I decided to share the English phrase ‘Shotgun wedding’ with them.  They thought this was hilarious and were happy to hear another ‘useful’ English phrase.  What I didn’t realize was that Clark/Superman didn’t appreciate the comment.  When I was dismissing the class for the afternoon he came up to me and said, ‘My wife and I have had our marriage license for three months already.’  I think I may have hurt his feelings. 🙁 

A note about Chinese culture:  Just because the wedding just happened doesn’t mean that the couple hasn’t been legally married for much longer.  Many of them wait until they can afford it to have the actual ceremony.   So he didn’t just get married two weeks ago. 

Another lesson learned…