Ooops

"Ooops" is one of the words that I actually had to teach my class, which surprised me, being the klutz that I am. I figured that they had heard it about a zillion times by now from me alone!

So I was teaching yesterday and one of the assignments was to listen to a phone conversation and correct an email address that is shared. In the book, there was a yellow piece of paper that the email was written on and I asked the student what that particular office supply was called. They gave guesses and I wrote “Post-It Note” on the board, and explained that sometimes products take on a brand name as their common name, and could they think of any? The class came up with Kleenex and Q-Tips and then drew a blank. Not thinking, I blurted, “how about Tampax?” My own horror at what I just said was eclipsed by the look of confusion on my students faces and I quickly stabbed the play button and started the listening before anyone had a chance to write down this new vocab word that I had unwittingly given them. It occurred to me later that not only did the entire class not know what this word meant they probably didn’t know what happens monthly to a woman that would cause the need of this particular item.

This was just slightly worse then last term when I had the students do some creative writing in class. We were playing the game that Sarah and our friends used to play back in grade school where you write the first line of a story, pass it to your friend, and they write the next line and fold the paper so that you can only see what they wrote. They pass it on and so on. Anyway, one of the students had written that the main character “ran away and quit his job and became a huge rubber.” I burst out laughing and told him that he meant “robber” and that a rubber was something very different. “What is it?” my students demanded. “Well,” I said, “in England it’s an eraser, but in America its a… um…” I stopped suddenly and turned bright red as I realized where I was going with this. “Well, it’s something very different,” I finally said lamely and quickly signaled my student to keep reading. “It’s a condom, right?” he offered brightly. I confirmed this with a nod and then stabbed my finger at his paper to get him to read and the rest of the class shared snickers at my embarrassment.

Thank God I have a class of guys, otherwise I might be on a plane back to Samoa right now.