Wednesday, June 24, 2009

The tale of the three pigs


Who would have thought things would change so much at home.

For years my mom has urged my sister and I to study, she is constantly asking us to sit down prepare our exams and write our essays and projects and stuff... she mainly does what every parent does: try to make us hard working/good students. From my point of view she has been quite successful on her task, but my opinion is completely biased.

However, she does not expect the same of herself as a student... A few years ago she started to take english classes twice a week. Of course at first my sister and I were willing to help her with homework and class stuff, but as the years pass her homework requires more and more of her time and unlike us, she asks someone else (mainly her daughters) to do her homework for her.
Last week she had to write a 200 word essay telling a kid's story. She was unwilling to make the effort so she asked my sister and I to write it for her. The problem is we had to adapt the story in spanish to her level of english, and that is a bit complicated taking into account that using, let's say, conditionals or subordinate sentences is not exactly what a student with her level of english can do.

In the end, and after one of the best laughs ever, my sister and I came up with this translation of her story, with some changes in the traslation and the plot (our additions are in italics):

"Once upon a time three little pigs decided to build a house each. The youngest of them all built a hay house. The second eldest built a wooden house and the eldest, being as he was the hardest working of them all, decided to build a brick house.

His two younger brothers laughed at him because he was working too hard, but then one day the wolf came. Each pig hid inside their house and waited for the wolf to arrive.

The wolf knocked on the firt pig's door and when the pig didn't open he started to blow and blow until the house collapsed. The second pig invited his brother to hide in his house, but again the wolf came and blew down the house. Terrified, the two pigs had nowhere to go but their elder brother's house. They asked him to let them in his brick house. He didn't want to but he was very good and he did.

When the wolf came, he blew and blew and blew but the house was so well built that he couldn't bring it down. The wolf hyperventilated and died.

The moral of this story: Hard work always has a reward. Beware of hyperventilation."

I wonder what her teacher thought of the story, and us, cause there's no way he bought that my mom wrote such a thing considering she never does her homework and always answers his questions in spanish.

The moral of this story: Such is Life!

Author's note: Yeah, I should be studying my finalest of finals, I know, but with my mother's example, what do you expect?

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