'Snarky Teen Conversations: Is Foreign Language Education Really Necessary'? ;)
S.T.: "Why should I have to learn another language? If someone can't speak English, it's their problem not mine."
Me: "Expanding your mind is never a bad thing and the more ways you can communicate with people, the better off you'll be! Besides, you never know when you might be desperately trying to find a way to Perachora, Greece so you can jump off the cliff into the [possibly] shark-infested water below and you have to ask a cab driver, 'Posso kani?' to find out how much the fare is to there from Athens."
S.T.: <blank stare>
Me: "What? That happened to me once. Well, that and I liked to buy souvenirs so knowing how to say 'how much' was a very important part of my vocabularly that summer..."
S.T.: <bark of incredulous laughter> "Yeah, right! Like you did any of that."
Me: <smiling knowingly> "You don't believe me? Why not?"
S.T.: "You're a librarian. You watch through a window while other people do things."
Me: <laughing> "Ouch! You don't think I did anything exciting in my long-lost youth? Take a guess what my undergraduate major was in college."
S.T.: "Probably something to do with germs. You seem like someone who's a germaphobe."
Me: <laughing to think about how little the thought of germs crossed my mind as we would ravenously eat our lunches mid excavation, hands covered with dirt, bat guano, and bone dust! Although I have to hand it to the kid - I have become a bit of a germaphobe since Eamon came along but what parent isn't?> My undergraduate major was Anthropology, with a concentration in Archaeology. And that's what I used to do for a living many years ago."
S.T.: "What's that mean?"
Me: "It means I dug up old stuff and dead people."
S.T.: "Mmmmhmmm, sure you did."
I'd break out the photos but the Snarky Teen in question would probably just think they were photoshopped. ;)
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Perachora, Greece (web pic)
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