But they said...

I had been so excited about going to and having seen the Dark Knight that my students have started to take a bit of interest in the movie. Coincidentally, the major theme for this week is movies and using more colorful adjectives to describe movie stars (after all, they're not all only beautiful, good, or funny).

As soon as I began the lesson this morning, however, one of my students looked at me and said, "Kate, have you heard about Morgan Freeman?"

*pause*

Okay, you need a bit more background information here. Before talking about movies and books, we spent about 3 days on the theme "The News". I put the links to English news programs on our class site and encouraged them to spend 5 or 10 minutes to check out the news in "real" English. In class, the students listened to news reports and tried to get the gist of the stories. They learned expressions like "The investigation is due to start tomorrow" and "Two workers were fatally injured."

*resume*

So back to the classroom when a student asked me if I heard about Morgan Freeman. As soon as he mentioned the name, more students jumped in trying to tell me what they heard on the news. After a brief moment of indistinguishable noise of students talking on top of one another, one voice came through, "and he was fatally injured." While fighting back the urge to give him a hug for using what he had just learned a few days ago, we got on the Internet to check out what exactly went on. After reading a few links and got the impression that Mr. Freeman is doing fine, the student seemed almost disappointed.

"Okay. I'm sure there will be more report on Mr. Freeman's condition tonight. Now let's get back to our discussion from yesterday..."
"But Kate," the student interrupted, "they said he was fatally injured when I saw it on the news yesterday."
"I'm sure you heard it right," I praised him.

Can you imagine how excited he was the night before when he understood "fatally injured" on an English news program?