Alibi: An English Teaching Tale From The Old Days

This happened like the second summer I was here. I was teaching a summer-school intensive class of about ten girls, at least eight of whom were really attractive, all of whom were aged between 16 - 25. Intensive teaching it was not -- a lot of chatting about bars and nightclubs and occasionally listening to Rickey Martin or Enrique Iglesias songs (by student request) characterized most of the class. (Obviously this was 2001 or so.)

There's a game often recommended in English-teaching books called "Alibi." The premise is that a robbery (or murder, or whatever) has occurred, and two of the students are the suspects. They are put together for five minutes or so to come up with an alibi for where they were and what they were doing at the time the robbery occurred, and encouraged to plan the alibi to minute details.

The rest of the class are the police, and they come up with a list of questions to ask. They split into two groups and question each of the suspects separately. They ask questions -- "What were you doing at 9:35? What did you do after that? What were you wearing?" -- and then compare the answers and try to find differences in the respective stories, and if they find significant ones, that means the "suspects" are guilty.

So I set up the game.

The alibi of the "suspects" was that they were both having sex with me in a hotel near the river at the time of the robbery. The game broke down completely when the "Police" students wanted to ask each of the suspects about my penis.

I've never tried to play that game in class again.

(I did have sex with about four of the eight hot girls in the class, over the course of that summer, but never two at a time in a hotel room.)

It's actually kind of hard to imagine a bunch of Russian girls being so overtly vulgar these days. That was back when the big Sexual Revolution was going on.