Yes. This really should be Funny ESOL FRIDAY, but since I FAILed miserably at blogging yesterday, it is Saturday instead.

In short, no, I sadly do not have anything nearly so entertaining as last week’s Hitler Sausage (which you should definitely go and visit if you haven’t already done so), but there are a few amusing annecdotes.

Master 13 (who I think is actually 12, it seems that Korean people calculate their ages slightly different to Western people) likes to draw. During some downtime this week he decided to draw cartoon versions of himself, his sister, me and the manager of the ESOL centre.

Master 13, Miss 15 and I were all very cute, smiley and happy looking. So was the first cartoon version of the manager. The second cartoon was the funny part. He had drawn her as a hideous looking zombie, with firey hair, a great big stick and speech bubble above her head shouting “STUDY!”

Amusingly, the manager is in fact very easy going, talkative and kind, and would NEVER turn into a firey zombie, wave a stick or shout at them to study! Hehehe! Unfortunately he kept his caricatures, so I don’t have a photo to show you, but I thought this situation was still funny enough to be worth mentioning!

For those of you who were wondering, yes, she did see her Zombie-fied self, and seemed to think it was really funny! :P

For the last two weekends, I have been doing Front of House and ushering for a musical variety performance put on by my theatre company. This was the first time I had actually SEEN one of their shows, since they only do a couple each year; I have appeared in two and was unable to attend the other one.

For the most part, things went well, and the performances were uneventful, however, twenty minutes before the final show was to begin, I was standing by the door getting ready to usher, when a large group of people all came towards me at once. I was so busy making sure they all had their tickets and programmes that I apparently missed something rather important.

Five minutes later, the bar manager, standing a little way away from me, starting looking at (what I thought was) me in an extremely strange way, and gesturing as if she were drinking something!

I had no clue what she was trying to tell me, but was then able to lipread her asking “When did he come in?” What? Who!?

As I walked over to her, I turned around to see (on the other side of the open door to where I had initially been standing) an elderly gentleman, who appeared to be fast asleep in his chair!

We concluded that I had missed seeing him enter because he had come through the door at the same time as the very large group, and we were unsure whether or not he had purchased a ticket. As we got closer, we realised he smelled extremely strongly of alcohol!

We immediately decided we better phone the production manager and see what he wanted to do about it. He eventually came down into the auditorium, and prodded the man to wake him up. He then asked if he was alright and whether he was here to see the performance. I was still ushering so I didn’t hear their whole conversation, but by the time I went to my seat (I was taking photos of the final show on behalf of several of my friends in the cast) he was still sitting at the back.

Five minutes into the performance, and in the middle of a song sung by the entire cast, we hear a single person applauding, very slowly, and at a totally inappropriate time. Three guesses who. Several minutes later, there was a HUGE crash! At first I wondered whether I ought to get up and go to investigate, but I figured that since I was in the middle of a row and the bar manager, production manager and the other FOH person were all still down the back anyway, I should just stay where I was and avoid disturbing the people next to me.

When I got up to go and speak to them at intermission I discovered that the man had left. Apparently the crash was the sound of him drunkenly stumbling over the rubbish tin next to the bar, and when he continued to clap at the wrong times and generally disturb the other people around (as well as the cast on stage, who were all wondering what on earth was going on, and several of whom had sent me confused text messages during the show, which I discovered afterwards!) he had been asked to leave, which he did, with what was apparently minimal fuss!

Oh dear! Yes. That incident definitely reminded me why I like performing much more than I like being in the crew! o.O

P.S: 7 more posts until giveaway time! :D

I have decided that rather than writing several short posts a week about the amusing things that happen to me in my attempts to teach English as a second language, I will save them up and publish them as one post, every Friday. Thus, Funny ESOL Friday. :D This week I have an EPIC one.

By way of background explanation, I asked Miss 15 and Master 13 to each choose a country. They would then go to the library, find some relevant books, read about their chosen country and then produce a short informative booklet filled with basic information. She selected Spain and he selected Germany.

In one of the books he had, there was a large section about German food, especially sausages. He thought this was interesting, and decided it would be clever to have a smiling, happy frankfurter (and his knife, fork and spoon friends) on each page of his booklet, accompanied by a speech bubble with an appropriate “did you know…” type comment. Ok. Cool. Absolutely fine. :)

One of the things I asked them to find out about was a famous person from their country. He selected Adolf Hitler. (Some of you can possibly see where this is headed.) I thought “Oh, ok, fair enough, he WAS a well-known German I suppose, and the information about him is suitable for Master 13′s level of understanding”.

I then pretty much left him to it. Went to help his sister with her booklet and prepare some work for that afternoon. When I came back to his desk to see what he had done, I was greeted with the following sight:

At first I thought he’d done it to be smart, and to make fun of the assignment I had given him, but then I realised that on no other occasions had I found him to be “that” sort of child, and concluded that it was entirely innocent. The frankfurter was simply a caricature of the person he had selected. (Btw, S-S is “Special Sausage” and does NOT refer to the Nazi group, this is purely a coincidence)

I was then faced with having to make a decision over what I DID about it. I didn’t want to make a huge deal out of it and lead him to believe that I was angry with him for dong something “wrong”. In the end I did decide to try and explain that is wasn’t really appropriate to include this kind of drawing in his booklet, and that he should cut it out and paste another picture over the gap, which he did.

When the supervisor came in, I showed her the drawing and asked what she thought, and she immediately started to laugh. The whole thing was so completely ridiculous. I could not have made this up if I had tried. I’m posting it because it’s just so WEIRD! I’m laughing about the circumstances, not about Hitler himself.

Yet another thing I never thought I would have had to explain.

If you’d been me, in this situation, what would you have done?

Funny ESOL Friday is NOT intended to be mean-spirited or unkind towards the students I teach, or to make fun of people who are learning English as a second language. As it progresses, it may well be just as much about MY comical screw-ups (of which there are many!) as anything else.