Adventures in Translating

So one of the nice things about being a teacher of English -- instead of, say, Chemistry or Algebra or History -- is that your students' mistakes can be funny to non-English teachers as well. I mean, "Oh man, you won't BELIEVE the silly thing my student did today -- he substituted X for Y in step 4 instead of 5 of the equation and got a TOTALLY bogus answer!" or "Wow, Susie did the funniest thing today...she said that William Jennings Bryan was all for the gold standard -- not the silver! Hahaha" -- those things just aren't as funny to thought outside professional circles (actually, they aren't really that funny within professional circles either...).

But foreign-language teaching -- there's a discipline that provides plenty of fodder for hilarity. And my students have not disappointed me thus far into the quarter. Some of my favorite flub-ups:
* During an 'introduce yourself' activity:
One of my older girls writing about the most interesting thing about her: "I am a black man."
* While practicing past tense, another student wrote the following about what he did yesterday:
" I went to the bazaar. I drank Coca-Cola. I did my sister. I ate dinner." (This one made me laugh so hard I had to excuse myself from class)

Part of the reason that these are so funny to me, of course, is that I've made much more embarressing linguistic mistakes of my own over the past 14 months. Last fall, for example, I realized that what I'd thought was the word for "pig" was actually the word for "little boy's penis" -- and finally understood why my classes would erupt in laughter every time we did a lesson on farm animals. I've also asked cab drivers to "please give me a sugar cube" instead of querying whether they can take me to a city named Kant. I've called trees "shits" and asked whether a dish was made of house meat. As a result, I'm now a little humbler and a whole lot more forgiving of others' language mistakes. But that doesn't mean that I can't laugh at my students, too.

Just Another (Manic) Monday

Random intro note: I just got my hair cut -- took like 5 inches off and feel like a new person. I managed to find a salon here with a guy who actually knows what he's doing (although he doesn't serve me chai lattes...or put conditioner in my hair...)

So anyway...I don't teach on Mondays, so was spending a leisurely morning yesterday prepping for the week's lessons and watching old episodes of the West Wing. At 9:30, I hear, "Miss Terri! Miss Terri!" and loud banging on my door. My apa had apparently told her to come get me from the house and tell me to go to school as quickly as I could. I have no idea why I"ve been called, so I frenetically pull on school-appropriate clothes and run out the door. On the way, I juggle thoughts of Apa getting sick, my vice principal dumping some new class on me, some random American coming (maybe from USAID or the like), or -- what seems most plausible at the time -- I've somehow gotten myself into trouble. But then I show up at school and see a 10th form girl and her mom waiting on a bench. Apparently I'd been summoned to give the girl the 3 minute English "entrance exam" (which, since being handed off to me, consists of extremely difficult things like "What is this? (while holding a book or pen)" and "Tell me about your family"), even though there was another English teacher at school that day who could've given it to her. I was a little ticked, and so rewarded myself when I got home with another cup of coffee and 3 additional episodes of West Wing.

Back to School

So today my school held its "First Bell" ceremony this morning, thus officially beginning the school year. Although I can't say that I'm quite ready to deal with apathetic students and surprise 7:30 am meetings, I couldn't help but get that hooray-school's-back! feeling that's hit me every August since that one in 1989 when my mom dressed me in my purple rainslicker and strapped on brand-new backpack and sent me off to kindergarten. Plus, this year, I wasn't the so-green-it's-almost-painful-to-watch new kid and so got to do fun things like rave about how much some of my boys have grown and laugh to myself about some pretty unfortunate new haircuts (the mullet never really went out of style here). It's nice to remember that I have a community here, even if it drives me batty sometimes.