***This post sponsored by thetalklist.com- learn English like a native!
Sometimes teachers learn just as
much from their students as students do from teachers. There are days in the
classroom when you feel like you’re getting off track or you end up speaking in
the students’ native language more than English, but you leave laughing, having
strengthened the bond of trust and comfort that is so important in foreign
language learning, and end up with some hilarious stories. I wanted to share
with you three funny stories from my English classroom:
1. The topic
for the day was household items. The students had lists of nouns and associated
verbs, and were then instructed to describe some aspect of their daily routines
using the words from the list. One student got to “shower” and asked me what it
meant. I said the Russian word, but turns out I had said dusha (soul) rather than dush (shower). He looked a little confused at first, but then kind of went with
it. I think his sentence was something like “I wake in the morning and my
shower is good,” so I didn’t realize the problem until I tried explaining the
difference between a soul and a bathtub, then everyone was very confused.
2. The topic
for the day was food. We were listing all the fruits and vegetables we knew in
English. Some foods are more easily available in the US and some more common in
Russia, so we were discussing that difference. I mentioned that I hadn’t seen
fresh broccoli or green beans in Russian grocery stores, and one of my
students, a man in his mid-forties, said “that’s because broccoli is for
women.”
…excuse
me? I thought he must have gotten confused with the language, but nope, turns
out he really thinks broccoli is a female food. *As far as I can tell, this is
not a particularly widespread opinion amongst Russians*
3. I was
teaching during the summer at a small school with mostly middle aged adult
students. Summer classes in Russia are always a bit slower, less attendance-
students feel that since it is summer they have less of an obligation to
attend! One lesson, one of my younger students hadn’t done his homework, and apologized
saying he had a rough night. I had him tell the story in English. He explained
that the night before he had gotten a call from one of his friends who had
gotten into a fight at a bar, and needed his “posse” to come back him up. So my
student had to go to the bar fight, to defend his friend’s honor. He ended up
preventing a fist fight, and saving the day, but the aggressive friend couldn’t
get himself home and my student had to let him spend the night! This led to a
great discussion about cultural and gender norms, vocabulary for fighting, and
slang in both languages!
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