Story #11 – Mixed Signals

A few years ago, when I first started teaching an ESL class of students, I learned quickly that subtle gestures sometimes have completely different meanings across cultures. At the end one day early in the year, I waved goodbye to Addis, one of my new students, as she was getting ready to board her school bus. Addis whirled around and ran toward me as her bus rode away.

She noticed how confused I looked; I couldn’t figure out why she had decided to miss her bus and instead come running up to me. What I didn’t realize at the time, and what Addis was unable to articulate in English, was that in Ethiopia, the gesture that Americans use to wave goodbye means “come here.”

Paul Dragin
East High School
Columbus, OH

Story #10 – “Her did it!”

During my first year as a speech/language pathologist I was full of fear yet anxious to utilize what I had just learned in graduate school.

One of my students, a third-grader named Sarah, had a problem with confusing “her” with “she” in her sentences. “Her did that,” or “When her goes.” I tried to model the correct usage of the pronouns by casually repeating Sarah’s sentences when she misused them, replacing ‘her’ with ‘she’, etc. “Yes,” I’d say, “she did that!” Day after day I monotonously repeated these corrections, wondering if they were having any effect. Finally, around mid-year: the ah-ha moment!

As I repeated yet another correction, Sarah stood up and smiled broadly. She said, “Oh I get it! I know what you’re doing. You’re fixing my ‘hers’.” I smiled just as broadly back at Sarah. Modeling works! It was a memorable first reward as a new speech/language pathologist!

Kate Ross, MS, CCC-SLP
Middlesex, VT