Top 10: Funny Moments In TEFL

  1. Exposing multi-colored, bought-in-a-rush-at-Target undergarments when you turn around and reach up to write at the top of the whiteboard.
  2. An Elementary student mistaking a Scottish teacher’s “vacuum cleaner” for “f%*k you cleaner”.
  3. Every time someone says “beer” instead of “bear”.
  4. Absentmindedly replacing the Headway Pre-Intermediate cassete with the Robbie Williams Escapology cassette you’ve been listening to repeatedly and then just popping it in the cassette player with your students poised to listen for gist.
  5. Realizing that in your painstaking but unskilled artistry you’ve carefully drawn something obscene on the whiteboard.
  6. Weaker students who surprise you with their sense of humor on tests: David Beckham is a metrosexual, but I’m not.
  7. Trying to play a cassette before you’ve put the tape in or plugged it in, especially if you don’t realize it before you start acting like the player is a piece of crap. (hmm, problems with basic technology seem to be a recurring theme here)
  8. Unknowingly calling your student not by her correct name, but by something remarkably similar which actually means “trash” in her language.
  9. This.
  10. Mistakes such as: “An accommodation is something you wear around your neck”, “Last summer I worked as a baywatch” and “I’m preparing dinner for several ghosts tonight.” “My mother has a small puddle” and “I have about $10 in my nurse.”