You know it’s been a good day teaching ESL when you have to literally wipe your eyes from laughing so hard in class. Yes, it was one of those days today. Not that it was a day of great gains with the English language, just that we had so much fun in the grand attempt to make a bit of headway.
But first, the expanation of my strange title.
There are two cousins who have never been in one of my classes, but I’ve gotten to know because they belong to the “clump” of young Burmese guys who drive their cars much too fast and live crammed eight to an apartment.
Anyway, I always call the one by the other’s name even though they don’t really look alike, and one day I was trying to think what it was that they both reminded me of. Not who, but what. An animal, definitely. Then it hit me that they were as like a pair of squirrel cousins as could be, one bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and the other sleepy-eyed, but no less squirrely. Although I don’t generally like squirrels, these squirrel cousins are quite a different story. And don’t ask me to explain how I came up with the idea that two students look like a pair of squirrels. If you saw them, you’d know exactly what I mean.
Now back to what made me shed tears of uncontrollable laughter in class this afternoon. We had divided Job Class into three groups which afforded me the unheard of luxury of sitting down at a table with four students of relatively the same level and working with them at our own unhurried pace. I had one student who comes in and out of ESL class with months-long breaks in between and who has never been in class long enough to learn more than “I’m from Burma” and “Nice to meet you, too.” There was one lady who has only been in the U.S. for one month and who has obviously never had the chance to go to school, and a couple here for a little over a week now: the husband speaks a few words and understands nothing, and his wife looks helplessly at the table anytime I call on her.
Thankfully, they all speak Burmese, so when one of them got something, they all got it. We managed in this way to make it through “How long have you lived in the U.S.?” “What’s your date of birth?” “Are you married?” “How many children do you have?” and “How old are they?” However when I asked the next logical question to the couple who said they had one six-year-old child, “Boy or girl?” they were all completely lost.
I wasn’t counting on this. “B o y or g i r l ?” I repeated more slowly and clearly this time. Still nothing. Hmm. I pointed to the two men. “Boy. Boy.” Then at the women, “Girl, girl.” Blank stares followed by nervous giggles. I had no idea how to make this one come across, and the longer I sat racking my brain for how to explain, the louder they all laughed, until the funniness of it all hit me, too, and I just sat back and laughed with them. Then I resorted to the easy way out, walking over to the next class (wiping my eyes and trying to compose myself) to recruit a translator. You can imagine if we were laughing before, how we were laughing after they understood what I had been trying to say.
This was by no means the only thing that made me laugh in class today–just try to imagine two men in their 50s repeating over and over again, “Male, male, male” making a sound rather like a meow coming from a pair of annoyed and malnourished cats.
The rest of today’s laughter will have to wait for another time.
