Who is Mr. Bean?

Now that the beginning of the school year is upon us again, I am going to share a few of my stories and observations from the previous course.

If you have ever spent any length of time learning English in a classroom setting, you most likely are familiar with Mr. Bean.  However, if you are like me in that you have spent the majority of your life in the United States, you probably have no idea who I'm talking about.  The truth is, despite the fact that Mr. Bean is extremely well know in the world of second language teaching, I did not know who he was until a couple of months ago.  In case you, like I was, are unaware of who Mr. Bean is, he is a character played by Rowan Atkinson that stars in a series of short, nearly wordless episodes that are extremely useful in language teaching.

Several months ago some of my students, not terribly excited about what we had to do in class, asked if I would put on a film for them.  When I refused, they began to beg.  When I continued to refuse, one of the students suggested that we watch Mr. Bean, as it was something they had watched with other teachers in previous classes.  I stuck to my guns and continued to refuse to let them watch a film. "Besides," I told them, "I don't know who Mr. Bean is." The entire class fell silent, as if they were in a state of shock, until one girl said something to the effect of  "How can you not know who Mr. Bean is? You speak English!"  I then tried to explain that in the U.S. Mr. Bean wasn't as common as in England.  They still couldn't believe that I had never heard of him before.  The argument to watch an episode of Mr. Bean changed from "We want to watch it" to "You have to watch this to know who he is, and what better place to watch it than with us".  I told them I would look into it when I got home later that afternoon.  I was rather busy at the time and I forgot spend the few minutes looking him up on the internet. In fact, I didn't expect to ever think of Mr. Bean again.  That all changed when I went to Basque class a couple of months later.

That day in class, we were informed that we were going to watch an episode of Mr. Bean and then, later, recount the story.  "You all know who Mr. Bean is, right," the teacher asked us.   "Ez dakit nor den," I replied. "I don't know who that is."  Once again I had an entire class stare at me in disbelief that I didn't know who he was. The class couldn't believe it and the teacher gave a "really, you're an English speaker who teaches conversation classes and still don't know who he is" look. "But you're American, you have to know who he is," said one of the other students. "That's precisely why I don't have any clue as to who you're talking about," I wanted to say.  You see, I was at a great disadvantage as I hadn't had any exposure to Mr. Bean. For starters, I'm American, I have never studied English as a foreign language in a classroom, and I was the youngest person in the class. We watched the video and the teacher asked, which was in English with Chinese subtitles, and afterwards, the teacher asked if I knew who he was. I replied, "I do now."  So much for being an authority on all things English-related.