ESL Lessons Go Both Ways

One of the benefits of attending a church in which there is always a fresh crop of Koreans each year is that it nets me some ESL teaching gigs. I LOVE to teach English, especially to grateful learners. Just the way that different words sound on the ears, the different implications words carry -- it makes you realize what a creative God we have, inventing so many different languages and dialects within language. It is truly an awesome world chock full of false cognates :). One Korean friend often surveys me about new English words. She recently told me about her new photography website which she wanted to call HerApples.com. She said her male colleagues were extremely supportive of this domain name.

My latest student is very hungry to learn English. She came to this country from Korea just over a year ago and is very charming. She visits us a couple of days a week and I think it is as good for me as it is for her. I keep realizing all of the cultural assumptions I make in planning our lessons. Do you know the saying, "There are three kinds of people in this world, there are men, women, and American women"? Oh mercy, is that ever true. I am such an American woman when it comes to presuming where I can go, whom I can talk to, what I can buy and so forth.

Last week I gave my student prompts to encourage her to speak with confidence about certain topics. She was holding up a picture of a Cadillac and so I asked her to pretend that I was her husband and that I had just told her that she wasn't allowed to buy the Cadillac.

So of course I expect her to be all, "YOU CAN'T SAY THAT IT'S MY MONEY I'LL BUY WHAT I WANT I DESERVE THIS CAR."

Instead she says, "If my husband say that, I say, 'Okay.'"

Someone please buy this woman a Cadi. She'd like it in white.