Apparently it is possible for someone to become a teacher overnight. I arrived in Oaxaca on a Thursday, and on Tuesday evening, I was teaching a class of adult beginner English students how to say and use "Where are you from? I am from ____." They are a fun group. Actually, there are two groups. One that comes from 4:00-5:30 (the uber beginners) and one that comes from 5:30-7:00 (the high beginners).
The first group is 10 or so people ranging from teens to folks in their mid-forties or so. There's a group of teenage girls who have some pretty good vocab already, and we teachers have been working hard to learn and remember everyone's names. One of the younger girls has a name with more indigenous roots: Xitlali (pronounced something like Sit-Lah-Lee), and we still haven't quite gotten it down. But Chelsea (one of my fellow teachers) made a great attempt to simplify things by asking her if she had a nickname. With a big smile on her face, Xitlali said, "You can call me Shit!." Chelsea nipped that idea in the bud real quick.
The other 7 of us who were observing her lesson were having a hard time not cracking up at that one. But the students were having a hard time not cracking up at the fact that Chelsea kept calling one of the older male students (named Jose) Pepe. Apparently he'd introduced himself to her one-on-one as Pepe, but there must be some implication of intimacy with this name being used in a group. So every time Chelsea refered to Jose as Pepe, the teenage girls were all a-twitter.
So Chelsea had kind of a rough lesson, but she made it through, and I figure if the students are doing any better with English than we're doing with names, we should be okay. Although maybe instead of teaching "My name is Pepe," we should be teaching, "Do not call me shit."
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3 comments:
That's so funny! In high school I had an exchange student from Mexico stay with us. Her name was Xochiquetzal. You should have seen us try to pronounce it when we met her at the airport! She was from Guerrero, Mexico...I think that is near you (kind of).
This is known as a crappy moniker.
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