For You Dad

In talking with my father recently, I realized that there are at least some people out there who read these thoughts, musings, and stories, and so it is probably worth it to keep it high on my priority list. Plus, what excuse do I have not to post since it was a three day weekend for Day of the Teacher (though it seems mostly like an excuse for a day off and a lunch/dance party - which I took advantage of on Friday to integrate more into the community of teachers at Santa Cruz and to wave my American flag with pride) and there is a high likelihood of a strike tomorrow or Wednesday by the transportation workers here?

Anyway, the story I feel like relating would also be something I imagine my Dad appreciating, so I felt this post would be aptly dedicated to him.

The other day, I was putting up an exercise on the board to with my fourth grade of primary students. I wrote a number of sentences with a blank, alongside the instructions. The instructions were to ¨Put a number in the space¨(I use the word space instead of blank often because it looks exactly like the Spanish espacio and so I feel like it helps boost their understanding of cognates).

All of a sudden, I see this one little child, Ivan (who is quite sweet and good natured, though he gets distracted often), gasp and start to look around at his classmates. I quickly realize something is wrong (I have learned to read students faces and my own mistakes quite quickly) and take a second look at the instructions. With my slightly messy handwriting, I had almost united the first two words of the instructions so that they read ¨Puta¨ instead of ¨Put a.¨ Anyone who knows Spanish will immediately realize my error, and for those who don´t, let´s just leave it at the fact that I had pretty much written a serious bad word.

I quickly erased the a with my hand and went through the instructions one more time to try to focus the students. Though that saved the day, I couldn´t help but giggle to myself and make a mental note so save this story as a good one to relate about the pitfalls of teaching across languages.