Something called a spring rider

It's 11:35 pm Saturday night. I have 25 minutes to write this week's entry.

It's been a week now since I've been back from Tokyo and I work this week. Monday was a meeting with other Hioki city ALTs; Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were all office days; and Friday was my first day at a school in this new year.

Unfortunately, the school didn't have any classes for me that day and asked me only to grade students' winter vacation English homework.

Not so unfortunately, there was a lot of it, so I actually busy at work for the entire day doing this.

Part of what the second year students' homework was that they had to talk about their town and what's in it. Most students drew maps.

My mind was officially boggled when a student wrote that a park nearby her house has many "animal chair."

I wondered what animals chairs could possibly be and looked at her illustration and realized that she was referring this sort of thing.

I thought to myself: What IS the word for those?

I pulled up an internet browser and looked up playground on wikipedia. It turns out it's called a "spring rider"

I can't remember ever hearing those called ANYTHING much less "spring rider".

I was conflicted- I could see no way around correcting this student's paper with something that probably no one really knows. BUT- if you're talking about a parks, "animal spring riders" is probably a bit more helpful than "animals chairs", so I went with it.

It's so funny when students throw things at you that you really don't know what to do with.

Another 2nd year student wrote that the past tense of "teach" was "peach." I am fairly certain this person was trying to see what they could get away with rather than really thinking they had the correct answer.

In the homework of a 1st year student, she introduced a friend of hers. She wrote: "She likes piano. She is piano." I thought that was amusing. :) Anyway, I crossed out "is" and put "plays" figuring that was a pretty safe guess.

Good to be back to work after 2 weeks of much needed vacation.