Descriptions in Spanish

The Great Inventions of TBO

I have always been fascinated by Rube Goldberg’s machines, those complicated and imaginative gadgets that, when interconnected, produce a succession of actions that are fun, extraordinary and, at times, very complicated, culminating in a final effect that is more often than not surprising and entertaining. The attraction that I feel towards this type of useless machine -  those that are attractive to the kinesthetic and creative mind - probably stems back to my childhood, where I read the illustrated magazine, TBO, which is now used to refer to comics in Spain.

Rube Goldberg created the character Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts as the creator of crazy artifacts, who appeared in every comic (the original, the TBO) as Butts’ alter ego, and who, in the Spanish magazine, was called Professor Franz of Copenhagen.

Julio Cortázar

Later I discovered with pleasure, an Argentinian with the surname Cortázar who could not, ironically, pronounce his rs. One of the books by Julio Cortázar that fascinated me most, that challenged my intellect and made me open new doors of perception, as Huxley would say, was “Cronopios and Famas”.

As my time working as a Spanish teacher for non-native students came to an end, I always hoped that I would be able to do something that has been treasured in my heart-head-bookshop for a long time…

From there came the idea. The absurd game, the uncontrolled imagination, the Chindogus (useless inventions) taken to the limit…in class. I got busy right away: A2 or B1 students can work on the technical descriptions of objects. The students do not need to know the names of all components, but can describe the objects using more vague descriptors (a contraption that serves to…; a thing that is…to; a device that is normally on…; etc). After a few description game sessions and overcoming the natural fear of speaking in front of the class, you can move onto the next step: entering the surreal world of Cortázar with some of the short stories from the book that we talked about before, to show the magnificent descriptive abilities of the author. This is important as he manages to create vivid imagery without using complicated grammatical or syntactical structures, with the basic information almost resembling a telegram.

An example of Cortázar’s work is “El diario a diario”, where we see the transformation of a newspaper into a mountain of paper, and vice-versa. The story “Camello declarado indeseable” is also fantastic, and in “Instrucciones para subir una escalera” we learn what not to say. From these texts, which are perfectly accessible to a B1 student, classroom activities are implicit; imitating the form of Cortázar, looking at everyday objects from an alternative point of view. It works well.

The next activity would be to put the students in teams, get them to imagine a weird little machine, and in their teams, prepare a presentation that not only describes it physically, but also its purpose and how it functions.

I can assure you that the look of satisfaction on the students’ faces when they realize that they have successfully completed a task of this magnitude is difficult to describe.