oops...dang language barriers

So when you’re teaching English to 9,10, and 11-year-olds who are from Italy, the Philippines, Nigeria, and even China, there are bound to be some funny stories that come out of the class time together. About a week and a half ago, one of my students, Cici was simply trying to help out one of the boys in our class. The act was innocent to be completely honest. One of the boys was asking for paper and he was using only motions so I asked for him to tell me in English that he wanted a piece of paper. He was struggling to think of the word “sheet” and CiCi helped him out by responding with “shit, the shit of paper”. I’m sorry if this is vulgar to you, but at the time I was doing everything I could not to laugh. She had no idea what she was saying because the sound only thing that made an innocent word turn into a seemingly bad word was her accent. I was hoping the whole situation would fly under the radar and no one would understand what she said, but as she started repeating it over and over again, one of the boys yelled “HEY THAT’S A BAD WORD!!”. Great. So, at that moment I was able to explain to my whole class what “s***” means and why CiCi said it and that in the future they should all just say that they want a piece of paper….and that’s my story for today…even though there are so many more to tell…