I read this the other day while brushing up on my teaching skills. It really captures the antithesis of one of my rules for people trying to improve their social life. My particular rule is: Life is a Comic Book. Everything has to be amazing or horrible, nothing should just be so-so.
Not only will living and perceiving the world that way bore others, but thirty years from now, when some small child asks you what you’ve done with your life, you will suddenly regret the decades you spent being mediocre. The decades that you can’t get back.
(from Silence Speaks Volumes | English Teacher X, unfortunately the blog has since shut down.)
Got one of those individual students that make the job such a chore. 27 year old guy; got absolutely nothing to say about anything.
He has no opinons whatsoever about politics or life in general. He never reads.
He rarely sees current films, and if he does he can’t remember much of anything about them.
On those rare occasions when he doesn’t work, he mostly watches TV, but can’t remember what he watched. His job is some kind of sales involving industrial equipment. He thinks it’s an okay job because it pays well, but can offer no examples of anything that he does that’s interesting.
He has visited a few other countries with his wife, but seems to have no real strong feelings about them one way or the other. He describes them all as “so-so” and when asked why he thinks so, sits in silence staring at his book.
When asked why he wants to learn English, he says, “For my future.” When asked about what he wants to do in the future, he says he doesn’t know.
This is obviously a person who doesn’t even need to speak ONE language, much less two.