mind your language

in a previous existence i was an english teacher (i was also a highly evolved monk and a peasant who starved to death, according to a physco, i mean psychic i once saw).
i moved to spain in 1987 and for the first four of my nine years there taught kids and adults and had great fun (for the first year i only worked for 12 hours a week yet still had money to be out every night. imagine – i sometimes do that in a day now!).
i remember classes doing pronunciation - hours spent trying to get students to hear and reproduce the difference between ship and sheep, which both cease to have any meaning and blend into each other if you repeat them too many times. As do chip and cheap and flabberghast and rubberneck (actually, i made that last pair up).
i also remember one student arguing with me that 'overcoat' was the same as 'above all' because it said so in a dictionary her grandmother had given her. bless.
one thing students found it hard to get their heads around was question tags.
you know:
you're double jointed, aren't you?
he has six fingers on each hand, doesn't he?
it's cold in here, isn't it.
then of course, they got more complicated:
if you won the lottery, you wouldn't throw me out of the house, would you?
plums were cheaper before the war on terror, weren't they?
i've been thinking how much teaching must have changed since those heady days. i expect the lessons of today are much simpler, for there now seem to be just two question tags:
u r fat, innit
its gr8 here, innit
my tailor is rich, innit
and to express interest:
'i'm training to be a brain surgeon' 'is it?'
'excuse me, but i think you are standing on my foot' 'is it?'

prepositions also seem to have gone the way of Spangles, route masters and b*witched.
no more i'm going to the park but i'm going park
can anyone get me Lynne Truss's phone number?

remind me to tell you about my lovely student Nao and how she taunted me for being boring (i actually typed boredom there, which would have made me sound very punk).