the other day i was with a group of three adults here working on some spoken english. we were about done with what we had planned to go over but there was still some time left before anyone had to be anywhere and i didn’t want it to go to waste. anyone who has taught ESL has seen the scores of activities online designed to kill 5 minutes or longer, such as sending a large class to mars to start a new society with each assigned a job and then left to defend why they should not be thrown from the spacecraft in order to conserve an almost fully depleted fuel supply.

i thought of another that i think is a little more appropriate for small groups and for adults especially. a variation of “what ten things would you take with you to a deserted island for a year” which without fail ends up with “food, water, a knife, a tent…” and doesn’t really force them to explain things that haven’t already been said a thousand times, i instead gave them the following.

your company or country or city or ___ is sending you travelling for business or diplomacy or whatever. not short but not too long. anywhere from months to a year. you have to leave your life behind for that amount of time. money and the basics are taken care of. you’ll stay in 4 or 5 star hotels and food is to be taken care of. so the essentials aside,

what three personal objects would you take with you?

you’re only allowed three. so, picture of the family, daughter’s teddy bear to pose in photos, camera. that’s it.

my answers, unfortunately, were a bit too esoteric to serve as a good example, so i gave them something like the above three. in truth it would be this:

first, a massive and formidable chinese dictionary. maybe with english maybe not. the 康熙字典 is a recent obsession. at this point it would probably need to have english to be useful as a study tool, which would be the intent.

second, a copy of the qur’an with accompanying english translation. possibly the yusuf ali translation. possibly muhammad asad. this would also be for the sake of study, in this case arabic. the vast amount of grammar and vocabulary which is used in the qur’an and the influence it has had on fusha modern standard arabic would make it time well spent if you were limited to one book of course materials.

as for the third, i’m not entirely sure.

what would you take? why?