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Wading Through Maple Syrup

True story: I once fell in a vat of maple syrup. I was 15 and the guy who would later become my Hub was told by our then-boss at the castle we worked in to hose me down with the spray-thing they used to wash the cobbles of the courtyard.

Teaching English as a foreign language (which is what I”m doing this week), is akin to wading through maple syrup every single day, particularly when you’re teaching people with very little or patchy English when you don’t speak theirs either. Take yesterday for example:

STUDENT: Lucy, Lucy! I am in great pain.

LUCY: What is wrong with you?

STUDENT: Nothing is wrong, I am in pain.

LUCY: That’s what’s wrong… Never mind. What is the problem?

STUDENT: I have a bladder in my foot.

LUCY: I don’t think you do. Your bladder is inside you.

STUDENT: Yes, inside my foot.

LUCY: Describe the “bladder” to me.

STUDENT: We go walking… Shoes hurt me.

LUCY: Ah. You have BLISTERS on your feet.

STUDENT: That’s what I said.

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2 thoughts on “Wading Through Maple Syrup”

  1. I dont like maple syrup, much to the annoyance of all my new found countrymen/women.

    that story reminds me of being in english once and the teacher read out a story written by a friend of mine.

    What he meant to write was “the lifeguard pulls the woman from the sea and wraps her in a towel”

    However he forgot to place the W at the beginning and spelled it with an e in between the p and s!

    He never lived that down…..

    Charles

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