Fact Or Fiction

Only rarely will I plan a lesson whilst my students are walking into the room. I will do this when the original lesson I planned had the potential to be a disaster.
For instance, I had planned to do a class debate on ageism with my Tuesday lunchtime class. This would be fine if my class were elderly, but the class was a mixture of young adults and middle aged people. They might have been insulted at my proposed lesson talking about retirement and discrimination in the workplace. I realised I needed to abort my ageism lesson when I asked Tomoko, who is in her late twenties, what she did at the weekend.
"I went to Okinawa for holiday. I went diving, then I went for a jog along the sea-front and then I went clubbing in the evening," she said.
After a full weekend of energetic adventure, she might loose the will to live if she learnt about the ailments that effect people in old age. What a horrible 'welcome back' that would be for her. When I asked the others what they did for the weekend I wasn't listening to their answers. Not because I didn't find their stories interesting, but I was frantically trying to figure out how to fill this one and a half hour lesson after deciding to scrap my planned lesson. I asked the final person, Syuuti, what he did at the weekend, all the while hopelessly searching for inspiration. As I pondered, I managed to catch the tail-end of his weekend adventure which was, "-and then I found a monkey in my car."
My brain was alerted to this strange comment.
"How on earth did a monkey end up in your car?" I spluttered.
"Well, as I was saying, I had been driving through the mountains of Nagano with my wife and we stopped at a mountain edge to see the view. When we turned around we saw a monkey in the front seat driving the steering wheel."
"I don't believe it," I said
"It's true. Don't worry, the engine was switched off so the monkey couldn't drive the car off the mountain."
"If that's a true story, it's very funny," said Mitzuko.
Tomoko and Eiko asked if he took any photos of the driving monkey.
"No, I was too busy trying to kick it out the car," he said.
"I'm not sure I believe you,” said Mitzuko.
I had an idea.
"Today class, we are going to play a game called Fact or Fiction," I said.
My students all leaned forward with facial expressions that read: "Do tell"
I explained the rules: Each person has to write two or three short paragraphs based on a factual or fictional story about themselves or someone they know. The class then has to guess if it was fact or fiction, and hilarity ensues.
The class warmed to this idea and immediately began writing their stories.
The results were interesting.
Eiko had written three mundane stories that people do everyday:
I drank water yesterday
I walked yesterday
I will drink water tomorrow
Her grasp of English is limited but I encouraged her to include a fictional story in her list.
"But these are fictional," she revealed.
"Oh, well see if you can include a factual story which is interesting."
"OK," she said with a grin.
As I walked away I saw her writing: "I drank water today."
Next to Eiko sat Mitzuko and I was surprised to see her story written with such intricate plotting. From what I could fathom, her story was based on her friend Juna, who was a wonderful singer in her youth who was signed to a record label when she was 18 years old. She was the talk of the town until a new boss took over the record company. He exploited the work force by forcing them to work ridiculously long hours in the studio. Juna, although tired by the label's demands, carried on singing to fulfil her dream of one day being a success in America. But the demands of the boss were too severe. He wanted Juna to produce one album a month. Juna could no longer work at this rate and eventually lost her voice. Not to be defeated she carried a law suit against the record label boss and won the case and received a huge sum of money from the courts. With the money she took over the record label and recruited the next generation of wonderful singers, who were all a success in America. And everyone lived happily ever after.
I looked at Mitzuko with a knowing smile and said, "This is fictional, right?"
"No," she said.
"NO?! This bullshit actually happened,” I said, getting carried away.
She sternly stared at me until a mischievous smile swept across her face and she gave me a playful wink, she also asked me what bullshit meant, which I ignored.
"It doesn't matter if it's true or not, I'm buying the film rights," I said as I walked over to Tomoko.
Tomoko's story was a re-telling of her weekend trip to Okinawa, making it obvious it was a factual story. I told her the class would easily guess it's a factual story so I suggested that she write about a mermaid she saw whilst snorkelling. I reassured her this would be a funnier story, despite her confused expression. After persuading her to do as I recommended, I walked towards Syuuiti's desk. His unwholesome story was: Sam has many girlfriends and has gotten them all pregnant. He is not married to them but he is being pressured into it by his cousin, who is a vet. You can get STD if you have unprotected sex.
"Syuuiti, what is this? This isn't a story. This is just crazy uncorrelated thoughts," I said.
"It's English, is it not?" he challenged.
"Yeah, but it's offensive English. I don't want you to read this to the rest of the class,"
"Why not? It's fictional and funny, apart from the STD bit"
"I'm not going to explain to the class what STD means!"
"OK, OK, I will change my funny stories," he said with anguish.
"Good," I said, and walked away.
When everyone had finished their stories, I asked Syuuiti to kick off proceedings.
Syuuiti rose from his seat, dramatically cleared his throat, and read, "Sam has many girlfriends......"