We are going thru Peer Evals which is how people get rehired from year to year. Tenured faculty on the PE committee contact all of us non-ten's to see when they can come observe our classes as part of our PE file-filling procedures.
So tenured prof Jeff wrote me last week and we figured out when he'll come visit one of my 202s. I knew him from our intro faculty meeting back in August. Someone had pointed him out to me as part of the Spanish section. On his last email confirming our day/time, he wrote in French. I thought, "Oh that's nice of him to write in 'my' language, I'll write him back in his." I wrote back in Spanish to which he responded in Spanish and then switched to French and quoted something from Rimbaud about things which make your head go round and round. I didn't really latch onto how that quote applied plus since I have long since forgotten most of my grad. school lit. stuff, I didn't even remember it was Rimbaud to be honest, and wrote back to Jeff in Spanish asking who said it. Two more nonsensical academic cleverness emails followed, where I continued in Spanish and Jeff stayed mostly in French...
Then just now when I got back from my last class (before the one I'm about to be late to :) there was another email from Jeff:
Me again. It dawned on me today that you might think I teach Spanish. I teach German and Russian, but I know some French because I'm Canadian...
I immediately started howling with laughter, much to the amazement of my officemates... Slightly embarrassed (me, that is) but mostly thinking how fun it would be to start a trend of writing to people in random languages with which they are only a bit more than slightly familiar.
3 commentaires:
Well you can write to me in German, but if you write to me in Mandarin, I'll have problems - I can't read it at all!
:)
Który jest po prostu (dopiero co) pomylony! lubię wiele języki
holy babel!
it's like a mean trick almost. wow.
i know he's prob. a nerdy brainman (i envy anyone who can get past the "yes, i understand you, but i can't reply" stage in subsequent-to-native languages, so that's a compliment) and was just trying to impress and be sweet and communicate what you know, but oh, the waiting-ness in letting you know he's a "mere" teacher of russian (AND german) and a lucky-ass canadian to boot!
darn those quadrolinguals!
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