It was had been being a games games games games TEFLtastic world
I don’t know if anyone has coined the term “desperation googling” yet, but that is the only description for what I have just been doing. My (fairly typical in Japan) Business English class that don’t really want to study Business English had been told that they were going to get the book this week (International Express Intermediate New Edition- yuck!) because I couldn’t think of a single other practice speaking activity for the Past Perfect and Past Continuous. And then I realised that I’d left the textbook at head office…And so “desperation googling” it was- the search terms being “marketing logic puzzle”! And whatdoyouknow, I could’ve given my monitor a kiss when it came up with a logic puzzle involving a marketing department! Not the right grammar, unfortunately, but might be able to twiddle it a bit for next week.
Desperation fading and pulse coming back down to normal, I managed to get my head together for the much more sensible search terms “business english logic puzzles”. I got this worksheet from the In Business site about finding a suspect in a business meeting, but not convinced as students are hardly going to be impressed by a logic puzzle that doesn’t have one correct answer (would be like an abstract jigsaw puzzle where you could stick the pieces in where you like).
Oh well, back to my hard disk then. Decided to go back to the old classic logic puzzles, which I have put up in the worksheets section and will hopefully will come up on someone else’s “desperation google”. You might also want to take a look at my previous efforts for making “was had been being” fun on Usingenglish, here, and coming soon here here and here.
I should perhaps point out that despite several tempting moments in my career when I could have made up a grammar point that doesn’t exist for my own amusement, I have managed to resist all of them and have not really been teaching anyone “I was had been being”. I did, though, once have a Croat student in London who taught all the other students in the school ”I should’ve could’ve would’ve done it”, a phrase that was many years later turned into a crappy pop song. I wonder if he is aware of his claim to fame…