There was a girl wearing a shirt that pictured a 1950's looking cartoon of one woman whispering in another's ear. The caption reads "Abortions Tickle." Why do I write about this? An observation on Korean abuses of English? The dicotamy that exists in teaching English and how well does a person ever truly know a second language unless they are raised with it. All day long this girl was getting gasps of horror from the Western teachers, but how do we explain the intrinsicness of why this is so painfully wrong? Do we even bother to try?
Personally, I never actually saw the shirt. If I did though, I would have been hard pressed to think in simple enough English my thoughts conveying why I don't like her shirt.
This is a bit of a struggle I've found even in teaching ESL for a mere two weeks. Already I feel my vocabulary diminshing. I fight against it, I try my best not to "dumb myself down" in front of my kids. But it's hard, I lose sentences when I talk to them. I refer to them as "Emily Teacher's class." I'm giving them a vocab quiz of 15 words tomorrow. All of them we've learned through class room discussions. I'm trying to get them talking as much as possible as that's what I was told my job would be, improving their spoken English fluency. However, us teachers just learned that the parents were told their students would have learned 900 new words by the end of the 3 weeks. If you're keeping county that's 300 words/week or 60/day. Imagine trying to RETAIN 60 new words of a language a day. Um, yeah, right.
3 comments:
i think i have seen that shirt.
i think it is meant to be ironic. as in, "yeah abortions feel great. women have them all the time becuase they feel so great. they dont hurt, they just tickle a bit."
yeah, i agree, i think that shirt's hilarious. it plays off the right's idea that liberals have abortions for fun just because they can and that they view it as pain-free, guilt-free birth control.
I believe that the shirt is sold on a site called tshirthell.com. It's definitely meant as a joke, and probably one of the least offensive t-shirts on that site, which generally is pretty funny.
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