Moment of Clairification

So, I expanded a bit on my geekish fascination for words that have no translation, and wrote this editorial about bilingual education.

“Saudade for bilingual education,” April 11
http://www.dailytexanonline.com/media/storage/paper410/news/2008/04/11/Opinion/Viewpoint.Saudade.For.Bilingual.Education-3319255.shtml

In my years teaching ESL, I always ran into weird situations in which I just couldn’t explain a concept of English or American culture because it just didn’t exist in Hispanic culture. For example, try explaining to someone from another country what a knock-knock joke is… translate the joke and explain the act of pretending your on one side of the door and the other person is on the other… try it, realize how stupid it is… and confusion will ensue…

And when it comes to learning history, we’re trying to understand and making judgments on cultures and people based only on what we dig up. Which begs the question: Which people or segments of our society will leave things to be dug up in a thousand years? And which parts of the past will prioritized and categorized?

And when the heck will Americans stop writing our ESL and Spanish textbooks?