Don't get me wrong, I love my kids and teaching...it's just a rollercoaster. I have certain classes that I know will be fun & interactive, and I know there are some that are tiny little devils just waiting to cause problems. The rest, however, are like those mystery cards on Wheel of Fortune...could be jackpot, could be bankrupt. Also, you never know what is going to come out of the kids' mouths.
For example: it surprises me how many words in English, when pronounced incorrectly, sound inappropriate or wrong. This being said, I've found out most of these words because Spanish students learning English, just like English students learning Spanish, try their best to utlilize "Spanglish". In English, people usually just add "o" to the end of a word....like "car-o", or "kitchen-o", or "basketball-o". Sometimes (not often) that works. In Spanish, though, it goes backwards. Therefore kids usually just drop the 'a' or 'o' at the end of the word. A few weeks ago, when we were learning about Halloween, the kids employed this technique constantly. I showed them a picture of a bat (murcielago in Spanish) and they all started screaming "MURCIEL!!! MURCIEL!!!" ....murciel? Really? Have you really never seen Batman?? Or pumpkin (in Spanish: calabaza) "CALABAZ!!! CALABAZ!!!" or the best one yet, ghost (fantasma): "FANTAS!! FANTAS!!!" No, Fanta is a drink. The best part is I would usually give them this look that's like "are you freaking serious right now??" which apparently, in body language, translates to "scream your wrong answer louder so it will magically become correct".
Knowing Spanish helps me understand what they say when they do this, but sometimes these little tricks don't work. At school, there are 2 "toys" that are really popular right now. One is SpongeBob trading cards...they're like baseball cards but in my opinion substantially more worthless because they have pictures of fictional underwater cartoons (aka SpongeBob, or Bob Esponja, and his best friend Patricio [Patrick]...etc. etc.) These kids go crazy about their cards. They even have albums to keep the cards in. Nuts. The second, which is even more popular, are those Silly Bandz, the rubber bands shaped like crap in different colors. I choose to call them "crack bandz", because the kids trade and show off these things as if they were worth a kilo of heroin. If you ask them (and I have made this mistake many times now) to show you their crack bandz, they will roll up their sleeve to display 45 different colors of bands all the way up to their elbows and show you, one by one, what each bracelet is. Not only do they cut off circulation, but you usually can't tell what the hell they are. Then I look like an asshole because I'm not getting how earth-shatteringly cool their rubber band is.
Let me show you: this is an actual Crack Band.
Florescent orange and annoying, in all its glory. Tell me, do you see what the hell it is?? I don't. And I didn't at recess one day. There's this kid in one of my 6th grade classes, he's twice as tall as the other kids, and wears glasses that are as thick as coke bottles, which makes his eyes look 4 times bigger than reality. He's decently nerdy and has also recently started hugging me and telling me he loves me and that I'm his best friend. Don't be fooled though, he has tons of friends, he just like sucking up and hates when his class gets in trouble for being major a-holes. Anyways, one day he comes up to me at recess and says "He-llo Chelsea!! How are jew today? Eh, Chelsea, loo-k! Jew see? Do jew hab any of dees?" and shows me his array of 5 Crack Bandz. (P.S. only 5! I was surprised.) I said "oooh, yes I've seen those. Very nice. What are they?" (Mistake #1.) He starts taking them off and showing me..."dees one ees cat, dees one ees dog, dees one is beard--" I interjected and asked "beard?? OH, bird. B-IR-D. Not beard. Beards can't fly. Continue" He laughed, but still called it a beard by accident. "Dees one ees rabbeet, and dees one ees for jew!!"
The kid GAVE ME a Crack Band! It's the cutest thing in the world. One of the girls in my private English lessons gave me one too. She also has thick glasses and a (therefore magnified) slight cross-eye, must be a vision-impaired thing. Don't get me wrong though, that girl is cute as crap. It's kind of like this, but less Asian:
Anyways he gives me the Crack Band (see above). I say "ooooh, thank you!! It's great! Umm...what is it?" He takes it from me, tries to straighten it out, and says "Loo-k! Ees a...hmm, how jew say? Een Spaneesh ees a foca!" He said it very quickly, though, so I didn't catch the word. And I still couldn't figure out what it looked like. So I'm squinting and looking at it and trying to maintain a decent expression of overall appreciation and asked "how do you say it in English? Do you know?" (Mistake #2) He looks at it and without hesitation reverts back to Spanglish. "Ees a, jew know, ees a fock!! Jess? A fock!!"
My immediate thought was "well, if you turn it sideways it looks kind of phallic but that can't possibly be right...can it??" He was so excited with his exponentially large eyes looking all hopeful like I understood what the hell he was saying. I nodded a couple of times but decided I wasn't going to wear the Crack Band if it was really supposed to be part of the male anatomy, because that's just too far. Plus, I could just see the kids seeing me wearing it and asking what it was and me having to explain it and....yeah, no. While all of this flashed through my head I finally concluded that I should just ask him again in Spanish. So finally I said "hey, what is it again in Spanish??" "pues es una foca!!" Una foca. A seal. Duh. It was upside down, and sideways.
Finally relieved that it was not a penis, I wore it proudly for the rest of the day. Kids sure say the darndest things. All time time. Here's a list of things kids said last week:
1. I asked "how was your Halloween??" They all responded "good, I was a (insert decently scary Halloween related entity)!!" I tried to explain "I was a viking (and a cute one at that! [see below]) but you don't HAVE to always be scary! For example you could be SpongeBob, or a princess, or a cloud...anything!" One of my students raises her hand really excitedly and says "or jew could be a sexy bampire!! Jess, jess!! Ees on TV an dee Internet! Eeen United States people dress up like da sexy bampire!" .......great. Thanks, American culture, for subjecting me to one of the most awkward conversations of my life. "Yes, sometimes adults like to dress sexy because they cannot go trick-or-treating..." but I was cut off by my students brainstorming different outfits they could make sexy. "Jew could be a sexy mommy (mummy), a sexy cat, a sexy pirate, a sexy eskeleton..." Okay okay, you can really make anything sexy. Point, 6th graders. *sigh*
2. The same sweetheart that gave me the orange seal Crack Band struck again later in class that same day. I was walking through class while they were doing a worksheet and one of the girls said she liked my nail polish. It was black and glittery (left over from Halloween the Sunday before) so I showed her. He looks over and says "Chelsea, can I ask jew a question? Are jew gotic?" Gothic?!? ME?? Seriously? I think the appropriate, politically correct teacher thing to say would be "gothic is a stereotype that is just a social construct without any adequate foundation". Atleast, in retrospect, that seems more appropriate than my answer. Instead of approaching it that way, I simply laughed in his face and told him "am I GOTHIC? Look. I have blonde hair. I am wearing a purple shirt. I'm wearing jeans. NO, I'm not gothic just because of my nail polish. Black is stylish these days anyways". As if my affirmation of the stereotype wasn't bad enough, his classmates started telling him other outfits I had worn and other characteristics of mine that were clearly against the stereotype. Haha, my bad.
3. In my class of 4th graders, we were reading a story about Sally who wants to make a milkshake (which is, by the way, absurd anyways because Spain's concept of "milkshake" is chocolate milk...) and ends up exploding it everywhere because she was too young and needed help. I was trying to explain that her brother was laughing because she was going to "get in trouble" and it "wasn't his fault". I thought 4th graders should know this vocabulary because they could use it often. I know I did when I was little. Hell, I still do today. It's never my fault. Anyways, I wrote on the board "meterse en un lio= to get in trouble", and "no es su culpa= not his/her fault." As I'm writing in Spanish, one of the kids gasps and says [in Spanish] "OH!!! So she knows Spanish then!??" and I kind of roll my eyes while still writing thinking "yeah, duh, they've finally figured it out..". However, before I could confront their accusations, another kid literally smacks that kid in the arm with their ruler and says, "no, STUPID, she doesn't KNOW Spanish, she can only write in Spanish."
Great work, kids, haha. Keep up that believer attitude. That mindset is how kids, like my brother, end up believing in Santa Claus until they are 15. In any case that's not my brother, though, I find it endearing and cute. Stayed tuned til next time when I write about my new favorite subject: My new Master's classes.
P.S. this is me as a viking!! I inhereted the outfit from a boy one of my roommates brought home. I had to alter it a bit though...so he probably won't want it back once he sees that it now is thigh-high and has a V-neck cut into it. Hehe. Happy Halloween!!
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