ESL Students say The Darndest Things

This past weeks have provided a series of amusing classroom scenarios.  Not unlike the time I told my Spanish teacher (in Spanish of course) that if I ever met Antonio Banderas I would feed him money, my kids have some confusion with certain words.

For instance, in one class of 9-year-olds, we are learning about clothes.  Every day I ask the kids to tell me what they're wearing.  We get to Nick who tells me that he's wearing panties.  (Where he learned this word by the way, I don't know).  After chocking back a laugh I tried to explain that boys shouldn't say that they're wearing panties.  And that of course was fuel for the fire because this started a trend with the boys.  They think they're being rebellious in telling me that they're all wearing panties when of course in reality...no, just...no.

So the next day the class gets settled and I ask them all what they're wearing.  This time the boys proceed to tell me "I'm not wearing any panties!"  (thunk, thunk, thunk)

Yesterday, in my 6:00pm class of 13-year-olds, the kids were hungry.  They kept begging me to buy them noodles.  I was all "no I'm not buying you noodles" and thus I paid the price.  In class that day they had to read a dialogue from their book.  The dialogue went something like "Hi Barbara, ready to go to the movie?"  "Yeah, but first lets take a walk around the park."  "Ok, hey that guy is fishing!"  "Hello, I can't seem to catch any fish, I'm not having any luck."  "You don't need luck to catch fish, you need to be a good fisherman."  And scene.  These dialogues rarely make any sense.

Anyway, this dialogue, read aloud by the class turned into "Hi Barbara, ready to eat noodles?"  "Yeah, but first let's eat noodles."  "Ok!  Hey that guy is eating noodles!"  "Hello, I can't seem to catch any noodles, I'm not having any noodles."  "You don't need noodles to catch noodles, you need to be a good noodleman." 

I quit.