When in doubt, why not be Awesome?

I am once again studying pedagogy, which means a whole lot of bull shit. Actually the study of learning at an MA student is far more practically than my undergraduate degree because it involves the study of linguistics; however, I do wade through a fair amount of poopie in my academic week. This means we have to pretend to be students and do 'activities'. Robin usually gets a strange kick out of pretending she is a ten year old English language learner, but I usually zone out. Today we were given a list of words that all seemed to be related to education. Our vague instruction was to make three columns and put each word in one of those columns. We can label the columns as we saw fit. Knowing full well that the instructions were intentionally unclear due to my previous 3 years of teaching and 4 years of educational college, I knew that it did not matter what the categories were, so I decided to be completely American, which is my go-to response for these situations. I thought that column one would be "Awesome", column two was "Not Awesome", and "Could Be Awesome".

I then went with a gut reaction to each word. We then had to convince the person next to us that we were right; since my partner was my buddy Erica, it was not hard to convince her I was right. Then we got into groups of four to do the same. I had to argue diligently with the Chinese girl Lynn. She was convince, as most of the Asian students were, that the classifications had to do with language form. I bullied her into believe that "Awesome" was a legitimate analysis. I mostly asked her to quickly decide if something was awesome or not with out thinking, and she always picked the same as what was on the list. Then the four of us had to convince four others that our argument was correct. Even though the other four consisted of two Germans that appeared to be invulnerable to the overage of the word "awesome", they completely jumped on the 'Awesome Train' as Erica and I were calling it.

Of course we then had to share with our whole class the compromised three columns. Needless to say everyone loved the justification that levels of awesomeness organized these words. Other people had classroom styles, grammatical structure, and other non-awesome ideas. Of course it did not matter what the answers were. What mattered was how we used out English language skills to communicate and negotiate successfully. For the rest of the class, our very British professor was overusing awesome, which is of course AWESOME!

Awesome: Fluency,

Not Awesome: Accuracy,

Could Be Awesome: