Humiliation: Stories

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One day, about eight years ago, I was teaching an advanced group and had them doing some conversation exercise, which I eventually wanted to bring to a close. I stood at the front, clapped my hands and waited as the group slowly got the message, except for two young women, who were deep in conversation. I then whistled and one of them looked at me and said, "We are not dogs!" Not being one to miss a vocab opportunity, I said, "No, you are bitches!" Fortunately, they still speak to me when we meet in the street. The other student, trying hard to control his laughter, proceeded to ask again if I worked out, and now, getting a bit annoyed, I again replied that I did not work out. I worked IN. I worked at an "indoor" restaurant, not outdoors. Finally the student explained to me that working out meant exercising. I had only been in the United States approximately three months, so this was a very embarassing experience particularly for someone like me who was always a perfectionist and had minimal tolerance for mistakes when I communicated with others.

The girls looked at me as if asking in the language of the Caterpillar' WHOOOO RRRRRR UUUUUUUUU..'and 'YYYYYYYYYYY' RRRRRRR , UUUUUUUUUU , here' I sensed the anxiety in the restless whispering in the room. The whole restaurant exploded in laughter; Steven turned red and had such a laughing fit that he nearly choked. His mother, a rather dignified lady, wasn't far from that stage. Turns out it was a traditional dish from his "minority" ethnic group. I teach an EFL class of eight, 45-year-old seaport managing personnel at a private English school in Izmit, Turkey. They are all males and verbally very expressive. We were discussing current affairs and i started a conversation on the death of Pope John Paul. The word for "Pope" in Turkish is "Papa" and the word for "butt" is "popo". To start off the discussion I began to speak in Turkish confusing the two words. My questions translated in English were as follows: "What do you think about the death of the butt (popo)? I teach private English classes to mostly young Brazilian professionals. Class had just begun and I asked my student to tell me what she had done that morning and afternoon before our class. She began to tell me about her lunch plans with her family, but suddenly couldn't think of a word in English. She asked me for a moment to consult her dictionary, and then started her description again. She said, "We prepared an orgy, but we had to wait for my sister's boyfriend." I was silent for a couple seconds, but then a loud 'What???" escaped me. I tried not to laugh as I explained that I thought the dictionary had given her a wrong definition. I asked her to show me a picture from Google images. She had been trying to say dried salted cod, but her dictionary told her the English word for that was "orgy". I explained "orgy" to her and when we stopped laughing, she said, "Stupid dictionary! I'm deleting from my phone right now!".

I replied haughtily "I too am a 'sage femme', but I at least remember to collect my kids on time" It was only after some explanation and miming that I understood that sagefemme is a midwife. A good example of not doing a literal translation. Debbie" or a similar sounding word in the Nanjing (200 km away) dialect means 'vulva' as I discovered from a more open-minded Chinese lady teacher. Oops ! Won't make that mistake again...... Short Story Writing | Writers | Read Online | Writing Contests | Writing Software | Writing Journals | Writing A Book | Writing A Novel

It was my first day teaching Kindergarten alone at a language school in South Korea. My boss was very adamant about the children not being allowed to speak Korean. So, like a good worker ant, I kept shouting at the student the whole time to stop speaking Korean (what a waste of time). One little boy was especially getting on my nerves because he was jumping up and down and speaking Korean (boss told me he was a handful). I told him very forcibly to sit down and stop speaking Korean. Next thing I knew, he went quiet and started staring at the floor. A minute later I took a peek and realized he had peed his pants! Any guesses what he was saying in Korean?

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Well, it depends..I remembered the most common and frequent answer, one of our Tutors gave in the Nottingham University ELT Applied Linguistics class. When this is said with an uncorrected Vietnamese accent, of course the "eks" pronunciation of the "X" is missing, and becomes a "K", so the word "fax" sounds like "Fak". Vietnamese have a particular problem with pronunciation, in particular, the final consonants in most words. Do you think he's gonna win it ? Language: English Words: 1,584 Chapters: 1/1 Kudos: 10 Bookmarks: 2 Hits: 2,271 Well, I handed out the photocopied material to my adult students and began the exercises. 1. I dont have a watch but I think it is twelve-ish. Very good. 2. She is 45 years old but she looks youngish.

Conversation stopped, and everyone stared at me, aghast. Wha'd I do wrong? Steven, blushing and in halting English, English, told me "Teacher Ernie, we eat those." What we see all through history is that people are denied their past as part of a way to control them," says Hornby. "The fascist playbook is always to destroy the history and culture of the minority it is repressing. History empowers us. At its most fundamental, it says, 'We have always been here. We have a place.'"The Principal gave a loud introduction and left the class; I felt that she almost scurried out of the classroom; reminded me of the white rabbit of ' Alice in Wonderland' We were learning names of occupations, having students come to the front, I show him or her a picture of someone working, and they act out the job while the class guesses what they are, whoever guesses first gets to act next. I showed a boy a picture of a dentist, he nodded at me like he knew what to do, stepped up and took a golf swing. Halloween was advancing upon us where it is also highly celebrated in Panama, 9 degrees north of the equator. I had baked Halloween cupcakes for both of my classes, but had brought only cupcakes for one classroom the day before Halloween and it was for the second class not the first. I was in the first classroom and left for two minutes. Upon returning, I noticed that the aluminum foil covering the cupcakes had moved. Meanwhile, the students were on their way out. As I moved towards the cupcakes and lifted the aluminum foil, I noticed half of them gone. I was so dissapointed! I could not believe my students had eaten the other group's cupcakes knowing they were going to receive their cupcakes tomorrow. Well, they must have been good as the cupcake holders were in the garbage. The lesson I learned was to never let the students know you have sweets for them.

Stephen Hornby, national playwright-in-residence for the UK's LGBT History Month, argues that our stories have long been actively suppressed. "The only interest used to be in censoring or denying any queer elements of the records of the past. So, things were kept from public display, passages were omitted from books and sexual relationships were presented as passionate friendships. That was wilful and deliberate distortion." I told her what it meant to say a man is well hung here. She blushed and I think her husband probably got an ear full when she got home.When it comes to written – rather than verbal – evidence of working-class queer lives, this is often ambiguous. For Stephen Hornby's last play, The Adhesion of Love, he researched a group of working-class men from Bolton who set up a Walt Whitman appreciation society in the 1880s. They entered into regular correspondence with America’s great queer poet – and two of them even travelled to New York to visit him. In the play, Hornby has inferred that the men were what we'd now call gay. "If we look at the record that does exist of the Bolton men’s lives with the assumption that they were heterosexual," he says, "we're just left with a lot of puzzles and unanswerable questions. If we flip it, and assume they were interested in men sexually and emotionally, then all those puzzles disappear, and all the questions are answered." Indeed, Murphy has led the way with fictionalising queer history for a popular TV audience: having finished its third and final season last week, Pose blew open the drag ball culture scene of New York in the late 80s, and last year's Hollywood was a LGBTQ+-themed fantasy set in 1940s Los Angeles. Elsewhere on the small screen, It’s a Sin's five episodes have had a total of over 18 million views in the UK, while it earned near-universal raves on both sides of the Atlantic. Add to this recent queer-themed period films Carol and Call Me By Your Name, plus the French indie hit 120 Beats Per Minute, a love story set amongst the Aids activist movement of 1980s Paris, and it is clear that there is now a huge scope for telling queer stories in mainstream film and TV. Most recently, the internet exploded with behind-the-scenes photos of Harry Styles from the shoot of new film My Policeman, an adaptation of Bethan Roberts's 2012 novel starring the pop superstar as a closeted gay man in the 1950s. S2. I would have been very happy to receive your fak, but at the time I was faking somebody else- sorry. Language: English Words: 141,910 Chapters: 11/11 Comments: 209 Kudos: 836 Bookmarks: 134 Hits: 34,224 I teach in a french speaking country. One evening 40 minutes after the class had ended, a mother rushed in to collect her daughter. She apologised saying "Sorry mais I am sage femme" I understood enough 'sage' means good and 'femme' means woman.