Apr 29, 2009
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
California ESL teacher fired after explaining off-color words:
After all, Lieberman said, his students were all adults – and needed to know the meaning of certain words in order to avoid making embarrassing mistakes on the job or with friends.
"These were bad words the students didn't want to mix up with other words, like 'sheet' or 'beach,'" said Lieberman, a six-year veteran of the adult school…
Firing someone over this is absurd. The caption on the piece says he was fired for "teaching his students about how to swear in English," but it sounds like he was actually teaching them how not to swear in English. This is a cultural issue as well as a linguistic one. In Germany, for example, the word "sheisse" is thrown around much more casually than is its English counterpart ("shit"), so when German students come to the U.S. it's not uncommon for them to say "shit" in situations where it's inappropriate. This is something you'd want your English teacher to tell you, no? By the same token, I would have been grateful if a German teacher had told me I can't translate "I am hot" to its logical German equivalent, "Ich bin heiss," without it carrying a sexual connotation. I went around saying that for 3 or 4 years, completely oblivious, thinking I was making mundane small talk. In A Place for Us, Nicholas Gage's memoir about growing up in a Greek immigrant family in Massachusetts, he writes about his father intending to say "I can't" to one of his female customers, and having it come out, simply, "cunt." That exchange ended poorly.
Some people have said teaching swear words is justifiable because Lieberman's students were adults, but I'd argue this is appropriate and necessary for younger students, too. Lately I've been reading about the need for students from "outsider" cultures to be explicitly told the "rules" of the "insider" culture (where "insider" is defined as the dominant culture of the school — which is usually white and middle-class and English-speaking). I'll write more about that later, but I wanted to note this case because it seems like such a clear example of it.
