One of the things that irks me as a teacher is an interruption that detracts from the lesson. But when the distraction happens due to words that are either mispronounced, misunderstood, or just plain out delivered with no pun intended, there’s just nothing you can do but laugh and try to regain control, which, sometimes, is impossible. Double entendres are the worst. You or a student says something totally innocently and everyone else takes it the wrong way. Many, many minutes of teaching time are taken up because your class and you, most often, are laughing so hard you can’t even function. Sometimes, you can get the class back and go on with the lesson, but other times, it’s impossible to stop the hysteria and you just have to let go and enjoy the stupidity of the moment.
One of the worst distractions caused by words happened in my early years when I taught junior high. I decided the lesson of the day was to be about word play.
“Today, we’re going to study how words are used,” I started. “Turn to page 45 and we’ll look at word play, puns, and boners.”
Immediately, there were snickers from the boys and muffled giggles from the girls. One boy, however, nearly fell out of his seat with sudden laughter.
“What’s so funny?” I struggled to maintain my ire. I was very young then, very inexperienced, very naïve. I had no idea ninth graders even knew the “other” meaning of boner. I sure found out as the class just kept trying to control themselves and the dirty-minded one just kept right on laughing his fool head off.
I fought to control my own laughter as I struggled to look serious and angry. “Get your mind out of the gutter right now, Miguel. Can you show me that you have a little bit of maturity, enough to study the English language without behaving like a child?” He couldn’t stop, though. Poor thing. I sympathize now, having gotten the giggles myself at the most inopportune times, like staff meetings and church services. At the time, however, I was trying to maintain order in the classroom, so I just rebuked the poor guy for a while until he finally collected himself. I never did go through the language arts type of boners, just concentrated on puns and less dangerous forms of word play.
Other instances occur when words like cock appear in the reading material. There is nothing so irritating as having to interrupt Shakespeare and ask for a bit of maturity from the class to get over it and regard the other meaning in their reading. There is also nothing so shocking as coming to the realization that your students know a lot more than you give them credit for. The first time I read the poem “Sex Without Love” by Sharon Olds to my AP juniors, I encountered just how sexually smart they really are. I had read the poem before in preparation for the class, but I hadn’t gotten the double entendre in one particular line. Olds describes the lovers coming to the conclusion that intercourse is meaningless without love: “How do they come to the -- come to the — God come to the…” well, I didn’t realize you’re supposed to read it with rising crescendo like at the moment of climax. It was a sixteen-year-old boy who told me I’d read it wrong and proceeded to read it with passion. I don’t know who blushed more, the girls in the class or me. The boy didn’t; he just sat back with a sly grin on his face and watched our reactions. To think that such a young kid knew…well, it shouldn’t have been a shock, but it was. I told one of my friends, Mrs. J., who teaches freshmen, about my little awakening to the carnal knowledge of the youth today. Poor woman. Her stories are more shocking than mine. She has always had success with Romeo & Juliet; the boys love the feuding caused by the Capulets and Montagues, and the girls love the romance between “the star-crossed lovers.” That is, until the 1990s. Social changes throughout the years inhibit students from enjoying Shakespeare like they used to. In his time, young females such as Juliet knew that marriage was coming into their lives in the near future. It was accepted, if not entirely welcome. However, today’s twelve to fifteen-year-olds have already begun to experiment with sex; to them, “Juliet’s just a little ho” and use exactly those terms to describe her to Mrs. J. I just think the whole sexual awareness and loss of innocence is sad.
There are many times when words, syllables, and consonants are massacred through the way we play with words, either knowingly or not. Tino either could never get Melinda’s name right or he did it on purpose, but he almost always called her Melissa. One day, I guess she’d had about all she was going to take.
“It’s Melinda,” she barked. “Get it right!”
“Sheesh,” Tino retorted. “All right, all right, Melinda. What’s the big deal; it’s only one syllable?”
“Actually, it’s two,” I responded, adding, “Tina. What’s one vowel?”
“Ohhhh,” several students started making it worse for Tino. “Miss got you there, Tina!”
“Tina, meet Melinda!”
“Right on, Miss,” Melinda ran up to me for a high five. Poor Tina, I mean Tino. We laughed for days at his expense.
Many, many bloopers happen because of mispronunciation. Two that stand out arose through vocabulary and poetry. I give my AP classes a list of ten new SAT vocabulary words each Monday to use a few in their assignments for the week. I said the word “prostrate” which one of the boys heard as “prostate.”
“Oh,” he piped up enthusiastically. “Isn’t that the medical term for dick?”
Boy, was that a riotous moment which kept us from moving on for quite some time before we could collect ourselves. The other event that stands out happened when another young man reached that wonderful moment of clarity about how authors create paradoxes. His face lit up with understanding at how “the fall shall further the flight” in George Herbert’s poem “Easter Wings.”
“Urethra!” he yelled proudly, arms raised in triumph.
“Whaaat?” I yelled back as the girls looked on in shock.
“Urethra!” he beamed. “You know, I finally get how—”
“No, no,” I responded, barely containing myself through the giggles that just wouldn’t stay down. By this time the girls and a few of the boys were practically falling out of their desks laughing. “Do you know what you’re saying?”
Of course, it was the girls who saved me from explaining, clarifying the definition of urethra and eureka. That was a bad moment indeed. We laughed till we cried.
These are instances that occur without warning. I mean, at least when the word cock appears in a work of literature, you brace yourself, expecting the little monsters to snicker as you put them in their places and remind them that the word also refers to a rooster. But these all out Archie Bunker-style blunders make us howl for days.
There are also other times when words fall out of your mouth with no pun intended and the not-so-innocent boys and girls you work with let you know just how savvy they really are. Take, for instance, what happened to my friend Lydia, one of our counselors who has also doubled for many years as a coach. One particular evening after the basketball team lost badly at an out of town game, everyone was feeling very low as they shuffled dejectedly into the bus for the ride home. Lydia followed the students, carrying a load of forgotten jackets, purses, pom poms, and miscellaneous other items. She could barely see over the pile as she climbed into the bus.
“Ahhhh,” she yelled as she tripped over something in the aisle and went down, dropping everything to catch herself on all fours. Amidst cries of “Watch out!” and “Miss, are you alright?” she stood, trying to regain her dignity and huffing with anger at what she’d tripped over. A number of basketballs lay at her feet. Without thinking, she asked, “Who left their balls on the floor?”
Of course, with a busload of dirty-minded adolescents, you know what they were thinking. The whole lot of them burst into laughter and catcalls as she blushed and tried to get into her seat low enough so they couldn’t see that she, too, couldn’t stop the hysterical laughter that overtook her. Lydia still blushes when she tells her story, but she consoles herself with the fact that at least she provided the other coaches, the team, the cheerleaders, and the dance team with a reason to forget the defeat of the game on the long ride home.
Another couple of episodes occurred with my friend, Cathy. We were at the grocery store buying items for an annual barbeque she does through Key Club. After our local university’s homecoming parade through the town, she and her group provide all the members of the bands (between 300-500 members) with burgers and hot dogs as a community service. We had a few students in tow to help with the four baskets of food when Cathy decided to stop for produce. She held up a rather thick and long cucumber and innocently said, “Mmmm, I just love these.”
Unfortunately for the both of us, high school boys have excellent hearing and have also heard those nasty rumors of how women use cucumbers.
One boy snorted and turned with a smile, saying slyly, “I’ll just bet you do!”
Oh my God! She and I just looked wide-eyed at one another and laughed like loons. “Y-y-you weren’t supposed to hear that,” she gasped at the boy. “A-a-and you certainly took my meaning the wrong way!”
“Sure, I did,” he mocked, walking away from his teachers who couldn’t quite get a hold of themselves. Our faces were so red we fit right in with those tomatoes in produce.
Another one of those unforgettable moments happened because I just didn’t think before I spoke. I have found that the seniors really enjoy reading Like Water for Chocolate, after which I show them the movie. Of course, the book does have some racy parts, like the wedding sheet that I was asked to describe in detail by some curious students who just didn’t get the reason for the small slit in the cloth. Then there’s the end of the story where Tita and Pedro finally get to consummate their love after forty years of separation, and the moment is so climactic he dies. We were at that part of the video when Cathy strolled in and asked, “What’re you watching?”
“Like Water for Chocolate,” I replied, not thinking about where I was and with whom. That saying about little pitchers having big ears is so true. I added stupidly, “You know, the part where he comes and goes?”
Well, Cathy and I are mature married women and perverts at heart. We got my little joke and cracked up. Unfortunately, so did Renee, my student, who turned to me with a devious smile and said, “Gosh, Miss, I didn’t know you were so dirty!”
“I’m sorry,” I apologized, laughing like an idiot. “I didn’t think!”
“Hey,” Cathy added between her own bouts of laughter, “you’re not supposed to know what she meant!”
“Yeah, right,” Renee replied and went to tell the rest of the class. The remainder of the school year even after she wasn’t in my class anymore, she made it her mission to ask how it was going—or coming—with a raising of her brow and a sly smirk on her face. She graduated over five years ago, and to this day, I have not lived that particular blunder down. Renee’s younger sisters, her nieces, her female cousins were apparently all told. Periodically I’ll know who one of them is because they’ll pass me in the halls and say something like, “Oh, Miss, my Auntie Renee says hello. And she wants to know if you’re still coming and going!
One of the worst distractions caused by words happened in my early years when I taught junior high. I decided the lesson of the day was to be about word play.
“Today, we’re going to study how words are used,” I started. “Turn to page 45 and we’ll look at word play, puns, and boners.”
Immediately, there were snickers from the boys and muffled giggles from the girls. One boy, however, nearly fell out of his seat with sudden laughter.
“What’s so funny?” I struggled to maintain my ire. I was very young then, very inexperienced, very naïve. I had no idea ninth graders even knew the “other” meaning of boner. I sure found out as the class just kept trying to control themselves and the dirty-minded one just kept right on laughing his fool head off.
I fought to control my own laughter as I struggled to look serious and angry. “Get your mind out of the gutter right now, Miguel. Can you show me that you have a little bit of maturity, enough to study the English language without behaving like a child?” He couldn’t stop, though. Poor thing. I sympathize now, having gotten the giggles myself at the most inopportune times, like staff meetings and church services. At the time, however, I was trying to maintain order in the classroom, so I just rebuked the poor guy for a while until he finally collected himself. I never did go through the language arts type of boners, just concentrated on puns and less dangerous forms of word play.
Other instances occur when words like cock appear in the reading material. There is nothing so irritating as having to interrupt Shakespeare and ask for a bit of maturity from the class to get over it and regard the other meaning in their reading. There is also nothing so shocking as coming to the realization that your students know a lot more than you give them credit for. The first time I read the poem “Sex Without Love” by Sharon Olds to my AP juniors, I encountered just how sexually smart they really are. I had read the poem before in preparation for the class, but I hadn’t gotten the double entendre in one particular line. Olds describes the lovers coming to the conclusion that intercourse is meaningless without love: “How do they come to the -- come to the — God come to the…” well, I didn’t realize you’re supposed to read it with rising crescendo like at the moment of climax. It was a sixteen-year-old boy who told me I’d read it wrong and proceeded to read it with passion. I don’t know who blushed more, the girls in the class or me. The boy didn’t; he just sat back with a sly grin on his face and watched our reactions. To think that such a young kid knew…well, it shouldn’t have been a shock, but it was. I told one of my friends, Mrs. J., who teaches freshmen, about my little awakening to the carnal knowledge of the youth today. Poor woman. Her stories are more shocking than mine. She has always had success with Romeo & Juliet; the boys love the feuding caused by the Capulets and Montagues, and the girls love the romance between “the star-crossed lovers.” That is, until the 1990s. Social changes throughout the years inhibit students from enjoying Shakespeare like they used to. In his time, young females such as Juliet knew that marriage was coming into their lives in the near future. It was accepted, if not entirely welcome. However, today’s twelve to fifteen-year-olds have already begun to experiment with sex; to them, “Juliet’s just a little ho” and use exactly those terms to describe her to Mrs. J. I just think the whole sexual awareness and loss of innocence is sad.
There are many times when words, syllables, and consonants are massacred through the way we play with words, either knowingly or not. Tino either could never get Melinda’s name right or he did it on purpose, but he almost always called her Melissa. One day, I guess she’d had about all she was going to take.
“It’s Melinda,” she barked. “Get it right!”
“Sheesh,” Tino retorted. “All right, all right, Melinda. What’s the big deal; it’s only one syllable?”
“Actually, it’s two,” I responded, adding, “Tina. What’s one vowel?”
“Ohhhh,” several students started making it worse for Tino. “Miss got you there, Tina!”
“Tina, meet Melinda!”
“Right on, Miss,” Melinda ran up to me for a high five. Poor Tina, I mean Tino. We laughed for days at his expense.
Many, many bloopers happen because of mispronunciation. Two that stand out arose through vocabulary and poetry. I give my AP classes a list of ten new SAT vocabulary words each Monday to use a few in their assignments for the week. I said the word “prostrate” which one of the boys heard as “prostate.”
“Oh,” he piped up enthusiastically. “Isn’t that the medical term for dick?”
Boy, was that a riotous moment which kept us from moving on for quite some time before we could collect ourselves. The other event that stands out happened when another young man reached that wonderful moment of clarity about how authors create paradoxes. His face lit up with understanding at how “the fall shall further the flight” in George Herbert’s poem “Easter Wings.”
“Urethra!” he yelled proudly, arms raised in triumph.
“Whaaat?” I yelled back as the girls looked on in shock.
“Urethra!” he beamed. “You know, I finally get how—”
“No, no,” I responded, barely containing myself through the giggles that just wouldn’t stay down. By this time the girls and a few of the boys were practically falling out of their desks laughing. “Do you know what you’re saying?”
Of course, it was the girls who saved me from explaining, clarifying the definition of urethra and eureka. That was a bad moment indeed. We laughed till we cried.
These are instances that occur without warning. I mean, at least when the word cock appears in a work of literature, you brace yourself, expecting the little monsters to snicker as you put them in their places and remind them that the word also refers to a rooster. But these all out Archie Bunker-style blunders make us howl for days.
There are also other times when words fall out of your mouth with no pun intended and the not-so-innocent boys and girls you work with let you know just how savvy they really are. Take, for instance, what happened to my friend Lydia, one of our counselors who has also doubled for many years as a coach. One particular evening after the basketball team lost badly at an out of town game, everyone was feeling very low as they shuffled dejectedly into the bus for the ride home. Lydia followed the students, carrying a load of forgotten jackets, purses, pom poms, and miscellaneous other items. She could barely see over the pile as she climbed into the bus.
“Ahhhh,” she yelled as she tripped over something in the aisle and went down, dropping everything to catch herself on all fours. Amidst cries of “Watch out!” and “Miss, are you alright?” she stood, trying to regain her dignity and huffing with anger at what she’d tripped over. A number of basketballs lay at her feet. Without thinking, she asked, “Who left their balls on the floor?”
Of course, with a busload of dirty-minded adolescents, you know what they were thinking. The whole lot of them burst into laughter and catcalls as she blushed and tried to get into her seat low enough so they couldn’t see that she, too, couldn’t stop the hysterical laughter that overtook her. Lydia still blushes when she tells her story, but she consoles herself with the fact that at least she provided the other coaches, the team, the cheerleaders, and the dance team with a reason to forget the defeat of the game on the long ride home.
Another couple of episodes occurred with my friend, Cathy. We were at the grocery store buying items for an annual barbeque she does through Key Club. After our local university’s homecoming parade through the town, she and her group provide all the members of the bands (between 300-500 members) with burgers and hot dogs as a community service. We had a few students in tow to help with the four baskets of food when Cathy decided to stop for produce. She held up a rather thick and long cucumber and innocently said, “Mmmm, I just love these.”
Unfortunately for the both of us, high school boys have excellent hearing and have also heard those nasty rumors of how women use cucumbers.
One boy snorted and turned with a smile, saying slyly, “I’ll just bet you do!”
Oh my God! She and I just looked wide-eyed at one another and laughed like loons. “Y-y-you weren’t supposed to hear that,” she gasped at the boy. “A-a-and you certainly took my meaning the wrong way!”
“Sure, I did,” he mocked, walking away from his teachers who couldn’t quite get a hold of themselves. Our faces were so red we fit right in with those tomatoes in produce.
Another one of those unforgettable moments happened because I just didn’t think before I spoke. I have found that the seniors really enjoy reading Like Water for Chocolate, after which I show them the movie. Of course, the book does have some racy parts, like the wedding sheet that I was asked to describe in detail by some curious students who just didn’t get the reason for the small slit in the cloth. Then there’s the end of the story where Tita and Pedro finally get to consummate their love after forty years of separation, and the moment is so climactic he dies. We were at that part of the video when Cathy strolled in and asked, “What’re you watching?”
“Like Water for Chocolate,” I replied, not thinking about where I was and with whom. That saying about little pitchers having big ears is so true. I added stupidly, “You know, the part where he comes and goes?”
Well, Cathy and I are mature married women and perverts at heart. We got my little joke and cracked up. Unfortunately, so did Renee, my student, who turned to me with a devious smile and said, “Gosh, Miss, I didn’t know you were so dirty!”
“I’m sorry,” I apologized, laughing like an idiot. “I didn’t think!”
“Hey,” Cathy added between her own bouts of laughter, “you’re not supposed to know what she meant!”
“Yeah, right,” Renee replied and went to tell the rest of the class. The remainder of the school year even after she wasn’t in my class anymore, she made it her mission to ask how it was going—or coming—with a raising of her brow and a sly smirk on her face. She graduated over five years ago, and to this day, I have not lived that particular blunder down. Renee’s younger sisters, her nieces, her female cousins were apparently all told. Periodically I’ll know who one of them is because they’ll pass me in the halls and say something like, “Oh, Miss, my Auntie Renee says hello. And she wants to know if you’re still coming and going!
Header art by T. Guzzio.
CONNECT WITH CARMEN:
Carmen Baca taught a variety of English and history courses, mostly at the high school and college levels, over the course of thirty-six years before retiring in 2014. Set in the early nineteen hundreds, her debut novel El Hermano provides historical insight into the life of a rural community which embraced los Hermanos and welcomed their selfless acts of charity (learn more about El Hermano here). Living on the land left to her by her father, she and her husband enjoy a peaceful county life in northern New Mexico. Follow her on Facebook, and check out her website.
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