Our Students

Some of you may have heard me talking or writing about how our students speak and write. Generally, it is seen as poor taste to poke fun at English Language Learners and how they speak English, but our students have been learning it since at least kindergarten. One of our co-workers wrote the email below as his weekly reminder about our Ultimate Frisbee game. It is pretty amazing how accurate it is compared to my student's speech. 


Frisbee is a sport that been played for million years about and you should like it. For example, Ultimate Frisbee was new and was invented in california US until the 1960s.  You need frisbee and many friends on order that to play. There are some arguments why should you play frisbee? Frisbee gives the excercise because you have to run fastly and are always out of breathes when they throw the frisbee far but you didn't got it. Frisbee encourages teamwork because you are in a team and teams are important to play together. Frisbee teaches discipline and skill since these are great things so you are not mediocre. Is that this is why my thesis;  Ultimate Frisbee is the sport you need to be playing in Tuesday on 4pm.

ps mr put me a 90.


My favorite is the last line. I hear that all the time. They say put instead of give when talking about grades. They also always ask about what homework I left them (instead of gave them). The thing is, they usually know how to say it correctly if you tell them that's not how we say it in English. Teaching the kids the proper way to say things in English has become my favorite thing about working here. Usually it's grammar, but I also have given mini-lessons on "molest" (to bother in Spanish) and "pedophile" which they thought just meant liked children. 


Sometimes I really have no idea what they are trying to say and sometimes I just want to push them to think about the correct way to say something. I have become quite fond of saying "that's not an English sentence" and "that doesn't make sense in English."