Molluscs and Monsters

I'm working with two high school ESL students from Egypt right now, and their dad sits in on a lot of tutoring sessions. Lately we've been reading (an ELL adaptation of) Frankenstein. Apparently it's not a well known story in Egypt, and it's been really interesting reading Frankenstein with three people who are completely unfamiliar with both the book and the pop culture depictions of its characters. 

The kids picked the book out for themselves, and apparently based on the cover (which depicted a kind of store brand MGM Frankenstein's monster staring grimly at the viewer) they thought it was going to be an organized crime thriller. They reasonably assumed, given the beginning of the story was on a ship in the Arctic, that the rest of the story would somehow involve the ship and/or the Arctic. Early on the dad was saying that Victor seemed like a very promising, hardworking student who would make a good doctor, because preserving life is the best reason to study medicine. One of the high schoolers predicted Elizabeth was going to wind up a love interest on the first page she showed up and groaned when he was right. The other high schooler thought Victor was going to become a serial killer when he started stealing body parts, and the first one suggested that was just what happened when college students in England studied too hard. 

All three of them agreed that a lot of problems could have been avoided if Victor had just written back to his family and remembered to eat food.