Peaches and Ketchup

Are you still using petfinder.com to look for unfortunate dogs? Because I am.

(Goodness I just typed "I ham" instead of "I am." You can take the girl out of France but you can't take ze crazy French pronunciation of words that start with vowels of ze Hamerican girl!)

Back to dogs that will make you cry:



This is Peaches. She's looking for a place to spend her senior year. I would be all about her spending it with me, but I have a feeling that year has more nasal bleeding than all the other years combined.

The combination of French accents and dogs reminds me of the day I taught my kids the word "dog" last year. Among the delicious American cuisine that has been brought to France is the hot dog, which the French didn't feel deserved a French translation, and kept its original name, 'ot dog." A lot of food words in France have American names: chicken, fillet-o-fish, cheeseburger, brownies etc. This made my kids learn food and animals easily. Except for dog. They were all confused by dog.

The day I taught it, one kid raised his hand:
"Wait... if 'dog' means dog, what does 'hot dog' mean?"
Well, it actually means a hot dog.

We all joke when we're little that hot dogs are made of dogs, or maybe vice versa, but it's never a huge problem. We learn both words at about the same time, a time when we're still learning about cars and gravity and how our hands move, so it doesn't seem like the craziest thing.

Imagine just getting slammed with this information at age ten.

OH MY GOSH ARE THEY MADE OF DOGS?!?
AH I'M GOING TO VOMIT!
THIS IS WHY I'M A VEGETARIAN! THIS IS WHY!
THERE ARE DOGS IN MY STOMACH!

I miss those guys.

on the language playground, English is the one that throws snowballs filled with rocks.

Why does tough rhyme with stuff, but dough rhymes with slow? Is that fair? Why do people want to learn this language?

If you're happy and you know it

Yesterday, armed with smiling and frowning flashcards, I attempted to teach a group of 5-year-olds to say "I'm happy." I secretly had a second goal that no one would bite anyone, but I didn't want to get ahead of myself.



"I'm happy." I said, holding up a flashcard. "Now you say it."

Yellow! Blue! I like gorillas! Your hair is beautiful! Is it Thanksgiving again? Can we dance? How do you say pink? Can I keep those flashcards? He said a swear word! I had a hamster and it died!

"Those are all great comments guys. Let's try this again. Repeat: I'm happy."

And finally something clicked with the boy on the edge of the bench. He grinned at me, threw his hands in the air, and shouted "I'M HAPPY!" with a perfect accent. His classmates stared at him in stunned silence.

So he proudly translated for them: "It means 'I love you.'"

and now for something you'll really like

I thought I had already heard the most bizarre things kids could be thankful for, until a ten-year-old girl was making her list yesterday, and asked me for the translation of a "bald mouse."

Me: A bald mouse?
HER: Yes a mouse that is bald.
ME: Can you describe it some more?
HER: Well, it's like a mouse, but it can also fly, and to fly it spreads its arms.

If you speak French you already know what this animal is so please don't laugh at me. Actually, everyone, please don't laugh at me. I told her it was a flying squirrel. And she thanked me and wrote it down, and I made a mental note that she was crazy. But then I got home and looked up "bald mouse" and it's a bat.

And it wasn't that funny until I thought of my alternate-reality Batman: FlyingSquirrelman.
All the alternate-reality super-villains are trembling in fear right now.

how old are you?

Today a kid asked how to say underwear in English and got sent to the corner.

It was the teacher who sent him to the corner. I didn't take any disciplinary action. Because when I held up a flashcard with the word "pumpkin pie" and the entire class screamed "PUMPKIN PEE!" I laughed for almost a minute before regaining composure and correcting their pronunciation.

So who am I to judge.

clap your hands

Maybe teaching English to preschoolers isn't so bad.

"ello, my name is Baguette."

It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon at an elementary school in downtown Marseille, and the second-graders were ripping out each other's hair as they wailed their wolf mating song in the blood-soaked schoolyard. Schools in France, or at least in Marseille, don't have playgrounds - instead they throw 100 kids loose in the terrace to run around screaming at the top of their lungs like wild animals. This is what I listened to as I waited in the teachers' lounge for my first day.

I taught two classes, the equivalent of kindergarten and first grade. It's freaking hard to learn a second language. I tried to teach the first graders a pretty simple hello song, and they looked at me like I was singing this:



More like I was a really beautiful superhero singing that while levitating and shooting lasers. One of the kids whispered "she's such a beautiful singer." They were really enthusiastic. I would sing "Get up on your feet!" and they would repeat "Waaa-haaa-vaaaaa-yaa-MEEE!"

Kindergarten didn't fare as well. They spent the whole hour raising their fingers and asking "How do you say gold? How do you say scab? How do you say giraffe? How do you say earrings?" They also had a hard time believing that I understood them.

KID: How do you say butterfly?
ME: butterfly.
KID: It's a little bug, with colorful wings
ME: yes, in English it's butterfly
KID: it's very small, it comes from a caterpillar.
ME: in English the word for it is butterfly.
2ND KID: you should draw a picture and show it to her next week, then she'll understand.

But they all completely loved me, and kept grinning at me and hugging me, and they were super well behaved. One kid told me his name was Baguette, but he said it so politely and was such a good singer, that it was hard to get too mad at him. Those French kids love their baguettes. At the end some kids gave me pictures, and they all couldn't wait for next week.



I'm assuming next week a six-year-old will walk up to me and tell me that she saw a butterfly with gold earrings bite a giraffe and give it a nasty scab. Minds like steel traps, those six-year-olds.