My English-as-second-language teacher hated me because I kept correcting her spelling and vocabulary. But it was okay because I hated her right back and took every opportunity to annoy her (for the sake of rigorous accuracy, of course). Fortunately she couldn’t actually harm or sabotage me because I aced almost all of my tests and had good scores in national ESL competitions, and a sudden drop in grades would likely have been too obvious.
The point where I’d had enough was a test about the anatomy of vehicles. She had crossed out my answer to “left side of a ship” because I’d written port or larboard (not that I expected someone with a master’s diploma to know the etymology of nautical terms*, or not to confuse larboard with starboard because they looked similar), but what made my blood fucking boil was when she crossed out my answers of hood and trunk because I’d used the American words instead of the British bonnet and boot, and when I pointed out that she’d marked those same answers as correct in others’ tests, she went back and fucking changed the scores on the other tests. I told her it was “deplorable conduct for a teacher” (approximate translation, and as polite as I was going to get that day) and she dragged me to the principal for disrupting the class.
That was the third year of high school (I think “junior” is the American equivalent). I took an option to graduate one year early from ESL, in part out of spite. I’m sure she was glad to be rid of me.
* I knew “larboard” and “starboard” and the names of individual sails from Assassin’s Creed 4. Much of my vocabulary comes from games (including some Russian from STALKER, Metro, and MGSV).
edit: A resurfaced memory! Still regarding sailing – she thought “in distress” meant that things were calm and safe because “di-stress” was the opposite of “stress”. I swear I’m not making this shit up!
this reminds me of a time (similar situation, english as a second language, and i knew english better than the english teacher) the teacher was talking about past tense, and trying to find a word that ends with a “y” to show an example of adding “ed” to the end.
the example? buy turning into buyed. i corrected her, saying the past tense of buy was bought. she gave another example: fly turning into flyed. i corrected her again, saying it was flew, but she just gave up and used flyed as the example anyway
When we started learning about past tense (primary school, probably 6th year, amazing teacher), the first thing we learned was a list of irregular verbs. We spent at least a week just memorizing them before the regular -d/-ed verbs were even mentioned. I’d like to think it was a deliberate choice, to condition us to consider irregular verbs first when using past tense.
That same teacher also taught us how to write and read the international phonetic alphabet. Again, she was amazing.
My English-as-second-language teacher hated me because I kept correcting her spelling and vocabulary. But it was okay because I hated her right back and took every opportunity to annoy her (for the sake of rigorous accuracy, of course). Fortunately she couldn’t actually harm or sabotage me because I aced almost all of my tests and had good scores in national ESL competitions, and a sudden drop in grades would likely have been too obvious.
The point where I’d had enough was a test about the anatomy of vehicles. She had crossed out my answer to “left side of a ship” because I’d written port or larboard (not that I expected someone with a master’s diploma to know the etymology of nautical terms*, or not to confuse larboard with starboard because they looked similar), but what made my blood fucking boil was when she crossed out my answers of hood and trunk because I’d used the American words instead of the British bonnet and boot, and when I pointed out that she’d marked those same answers as correct in others’ tests, she went back and fucking changed the scores on the other tests. I told her it was “deplorable conduct for a teacher” (approximate translation, and as polite as I was going to get that day) and she dragged me to the principal for disrupting the class.
That was the third year of high school (I think “junior” is the American equivalent). I took an option to graduate one year early from ESL, in part out of spite. I’m sure she was glad to be rid of me.
* I knew “larboard” and “starboard” and the names of individual sails from Assassin’s Creed 4. Much of my vocabulary comes from games (including some Russian from STALKER, Metro, and MGSV).
edit: A resurfaced memory! Still regarding sailing – she thought “in distress” meant that things were calm and safe because “di-stress” was the opposite of “stress”. I swear I’m not making this shit up!
this reminds me of a time (similar situation, english as a second language, and i knew english better than the english teacher) the teacher was talking about past tense, and trying to find a word that ends with a “y” to show an example of adding “ed” to the end.
the example? buy turning into buyed. i corrected her, saying the past tense of buy was bought. she gave another example: fly turning into flyed. i corrected her again, saying it was flew, but she just gave up and used flyed as the example anyway
When we started learning about past tense (primary school, probably 6th year, amazing teacher), the first thing we learned was a list of irregular verbs. We spent at least a week just memorizing them before the regular -d/-ed verbs were even mentioned. I’d like to think it was a deliberate choice, to condition us to consider irregular verbs first when using past tense.
That same teacher also taught us how to write and read the international phonetic alphabet. Again, she was amazing.
i wish i had that teacher at school. thankfully i had a pretty good teacher in an english course i did for a few years
this is all really surprising. what were the native languages here? it was in the uk right?
Europe, but not an English-speaking country. No native speakers were involved.