Ning Liu TP#12 Culture Class

 I taught the class about Sarcasm for my culture class. To my dismay, only my two conversation partners were interested. Or rather than interested, I’d say they were there to support me. I wrote down the agenda on the board, stating exactly what I was going to do. I had name tags prepared so I could call the students of the class by their names. However, since initially there were only those two, I did not need them. I introduced the concept of sarcasm, and asked the students if they knew what it was. The common answer was “to make fun of somebody.” Unbeknownst to them, it carries a second meaning. When using sarcasm, a sense of negativity can also be conveyed. Sarcasm does not necessarily have to be aimed at somebody. It can be aimed at something. For example, for an unpleasant day, the sarcasm remark could be aimed at the rain, or just how the day has been going in general. I introduced words that had to do with sarcasm, each of which I asked the students to define. If the students could not define the words, then I would explain it. In the middle of the class, three students came in. Sadly, since sarcasm is a relatively higher level speech pattern, I was disappointed that the three students were also only in group 1 like my conversation partners. Once I reached to section of the class where I showed them video clips, I had students explain to me what parts of the clips were using sarcasm. After the video clips, the three students left. Where the three left, one entered. This extra student was participating much more than the three that left, so that made me feel better. I had the grand total of three students in the class at the moment to get together and throw out some sarcastic remarks. To show them examples of sarcasm, I had written up a model where I gave a setting and a dialogue. Given this dialogue, the students were given a few minutes to create small dialogues to show their understanding of sarcasm, to which they used pretty well. One particularly fun one was “Last night, I went to a (American-style) Japanese restaurant. It was really delicious.” Afterwards, I asked if each student’s respective country used sarcasm. Surprisingly enough, Japan does not.