Who Did It?

Today I taught a 7 year old Korean girl the correct way to say that she farted.

It was a level three class - meaning third grade level American curriculum. There are only 3 kids there - Annie, Jenny and David. The assignment had been to write a journal entry about something embarrassing that had happened to them. As I ask them to hand in their journal, Annie, an *adorable* girl that is one of the brightest and most delightful students I have ever taught, starts giggling incessantly as she pulls her notebook. I ask her what is so funny, but in the midst of her giddiness, her English went out the window and she just continued to giggle and spit out some unintelligible words. What's wrong....ah! I quickly gathered that she was worried about other students seeing her embarrassing story. Bear in mind that the only two students in the class are her close friend and a semi-crude boy who really could care less. But whatever. So I have her give it to me so I can read it quietly, wondering what it could be that she was so ashamed of. The first sentence says:

"One day I was on the bus from school, and I broke gas."

Ok, now I know why she didn't want to share it. This kind of thing is pretty embarrassing for any little girl.

I must say that I was impressed that she didn't revert to saying farted, but instead attempted to use the more polite phrase. Or maybe she didn't know the word "farted." But politness aside, the only thing I could think about at that moment was that "broke gas" is not the proper phrase! You can say "passed gas," or "broke wind," but you can't say "broke gas!" Sure, people will know what you mean, but its not the right way to say it!

This sort of conflict comes up on an hourly basis when teaching language to foreign speakers. As they are natually going to make a ton of mistakes, I often let some things slip so as not to overwhelm them with corrections. What usually goes uncorrected, especially in the lower level students, are the things that are *close enough,* meaning that a native speaker would generally know what they meant even if the grammar was a bit off. And “breaking gas” fell into this category.

But for some reason, I couldn't let this one go (pun NOT intended). How to discreetly correct her without revealing her embarrassing moment to the other kids....as much as I wanted to use this as an opportunity to teach them all the proper phrase, imagine them going home and telling Mom and Dad what they learned from Nicole Teacher today! Not going to happen, but I HAD to correct Annie.

My compromise was to write the two proper phrases in her book for her, so in my red teacher pen and neatest handwriting, I write "break wind" and "pass gas" in her notebook. I point it out to her, she nods her head in appreciation, giggles some more and hides the incriminating story away.

Many of the more obscure phrases, sayings and slangs that I teach the kids to say are the types of things that they will probably forget completely before they ever get the chance to use them. Will Annie ever get a chance to use this phrase again? And if she does, will she remember? Who knows, but I did what I could. I can go to sleep at night knowing that I taught one student a useful slang phrase...I mean, who doesn't talk about farting? Everyone talks about farting (admit it, you know you do), and is she spends any amount of time speaking English in her life, I have no doubt that she will need to know this phrase someday. And hopefully she will remember the caring teacher who taught her.

So the rest of Annie’s journal story also enlightened me to one similarity between Korea and the US that I have not read in any of books about Korea: after Annie “broke gas,” another student next to her on the bus noticed the smell and asked the eternal question – Who did it? And Annie did exactly what you would expect of any rationale person:

She blamed it on the bus driver.

(Note: I wrote this a few months ago and am just posting it now. I am happy to report that Annie DID remember what I taught her about the right way to say she farted – it came up in another journal, and she used the correct phrase -- “passed gas.” I am very proud.)