Humiliation: Stories

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Do you think he's gonna win it ? Language: English Words: 1,584 Chapters: 1/1 Kudos: 10 Bookmarks: 2 Hits: 2,271 Usually at the beginning of the year with new students I try a few of their words from their language. The often giggle because I can neither hear the sounds nor pronounce the words. I always put my hands on my hips and ask, "Are you laughing at me?" They always say no. I tell them that they are laughing because I couldn't pronounce their word because I couldn't hear their sounds or put the sounds together correctly in my mouth. I explain to them that language learning is funny. If you change a sound or use the wrong word, the meaning is changed. It is often hilarious. I tell them that when people laugh when they say something, they are not laughing at them but at innocent mispronunciations which sound odd or mean something else. I tell them when that happens that they should also laugh and tell them it must have been the wrong word; then they should ask how to fix it. I haven't had anyone come to me tearfully because they felt they were being made fun of since I started this more than 5 years ago. I think you could use the stories in this section the same way. However, it's fiction that’s very much driving the phenomenon of bringing "lost" stories of gay life from the past to light. Over the last five years, a trio of Irish writers have delivered stunning gay-themed novels set predominantly in periods of history that didn't welcome them – John Boyne (The Heart’s Invisible Furies), Graham Norton (Home Stretch), and Sebastian Barry (the Costa Award-winning Days Without End). In the theatre, Matthew Lopez's exploration of gay male history The Inheritance triumphed in London before transferring to New York, where it opened the year after a well-received revival of Mart Crowley's seminal 1968 play Boys in the Band. Last year, the latter was remade as a film for Netflix by Ryan Murphy.

I teach private English classes to mostly young Brazilian professionals. Class had just begun and I asked my student to tell me what she had done that morning and afternoon before our class. She began to tell me about her lunch plans with her family, but suddenly couldn't think of a word in English. She asked me for a moment to consult her dictionary, and then started her description again. She said, "We prepared an orgy, but we had to wait for my sister's boyfriend." I was silent for a couple seconds, but then a loud 'What???" escaped me. I tried not to laugh as I explained that I thought the dictionary had given her a wrong definition. I asked her to show me a picture from Google images. She had been trying to say dried salted cod, but her dictionary told her the English word for that was "orgy". I explained "orgy" to her and when we stopped laughing, she said, "Stupid dictionary! I'm deleting from my phone right now!". Indeed, Murphy has led the way with fictionalising queer history for a popular TV audience: having finished its third and final season last week, Pose blew open the drag ball culture scene of New York in the late 80s, and last year's Hollywood was a LGBTQ+-themed fantasy set in 1940s Los Angeles. Elsewhere on the small screen, It’s a Sin's five episodes have had a total of over 18 million views in the UK, while it earned near-universal raves on both sides of the Atlantic. Add to this recent queer-themed period films Carol and Call Me By Your Name, plus the French indie hit 120 Beats Per Minute, a love story set amongst the Aids activist movement of 1980s Paris, and it is clear that there is now a huge scope for telling queer stories in mainstream film and TV. Most recently, the internet exploded with behind-the-scenes photos of Harry Styles from the shoot of new film My Policeman, an adaptation of Bethan Roberts's 2012 novel starring the pop superstar as a closeted gay man in the 1950s. Vietnamese have a particular problem with pronunciation, in particular, the final consonants in most words. I told her what it meant to say a man is well hung here. She blushed and I think her husband probably got an ear full when she got home. I like to take new teachers into these classes so they cabn see the funny side of the job, and the Viets then go into a conversation role play that goes something like this:I was in a bit of a hurry, so I glanced at the girl and her well dressed mother and said the first name that popped into my head and seemed suitable for the girl. The Principal gave a loud introduction and left the class; I felt that she almost scurried out of the classroom; reminded me of the white rabbit of ' Alice in Wonderland'

Of course the participants have no idea why the new teacher is in fits of laughter at this, but when the lesson progresses and we get to the correction part, and the error is pointed out, and what the alternative means, the students first become very embarrassed, but this turns into giggles as they begin to realize what they had just been saying. The whole restaurant exploded in laughter; Steven turned red and had such a laughing fit that he nearly choked. His mother, a rather dignified lady, wasn't far from that stage. Turns out it was a traditional dish from his "minority" ethnic group.

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I then tried eating it. The "napkin" was actually a kind of cheesecloth (apparently edible after a fashion) heavily impregnated with corn meal. Kind of chewy, but I got some of it down. Had to keep from feeling too much the "round eyed" fool! Short Story Writing | Writers | Read Online | Writing Contests | Writing Software | Writing Journals | Writing A Book | Writing A Novel I teach at a private English school in Hermosillo, Mexico. It was Saturday, the five hour intensive class day, and I was trying to pull sentences out of my students to further explain the lesson on future simple. It was the weekend during Mexican Independence and I was asking the students what they had planned for the long weekend. One student told me a place they were going that I couldn't decipher the name. This is normal for me since I've only been here 3 months. I asked him again. I wrote "I will go to mericon" on the board. In an instant the whole class choired "NO!" and I swiftly reacted by slamming my hand on the board and wiping the last word I'd written. I knew this word but was so focused on learning the name of the place I had written the closest word I knew. However, "mericon" is a very derogatory insult for a homosexual person. The student then walked up to the board and wrote "Malecon". Ahhhhh. It was my first day teaching Kindergarten alone at a language school in South Korea. My boss was very adamant about the children not being allowed to speak Korean. So, like a good worker ant, I kept shouting at the student the whole time to stop speaking Korean (what a waste of time). One little boy was especially getting on my nerves because he was jumping up and down and speaking Korean (boss told me he was a handful). I told him very forcibly to sit down and stop speaking Korean. Next thing I knew, he went quiet and started staring at the floor. A minute later I took a peek and realized he had peed his pants! Any guesses what he was saying in Korean?

Fiction Writing | Blog Writing | Creative Writing | Essay Writing | Letter Writing | Poetry Writing | Technical Writing | Story Writing Halloween was advancing upon us where it is also highly celebrated in Panama, 9 degrees north of the equator. I had baked Halloween cupcakes for both of my classes, but had brought only cupcakes for one classroom the day before Halloween and it was for the second class not the first. I was in the first classroom and left for two minutes. Upon returning, I noticed that the aluminum foil covering the cupcakes had moved. Meanwhile, the students were on their way out. As I moved towards the cupcakes and lifted the aluminum foil, I noticed half of them gone. I was so dissapointed! I could not believe my students had eaten the other group's cupcakes knowing they were going to receive their cupcakes tomorrow. Well, they must have been good as the cupcake holders were in the garbage. The lesson I learned was to never let the students know you have sweets for them.The girls looked at me as if asking in the language of the Caterpillar' WHOOOO RRRRRR UUUUUUUUU..'and 'YYYYYYYYYYY' RRRRRRR , UUUUUUUUUU , here' I sensed the anxiety in the restless whispering in the room. In my first year of teaching English here in Turkey, I made all sorts of amusing mistakes. Here is one. I was teaching suffixes, namely -ish, as in "like". (Okay, I admit, a pretty lame point to be teaching but I thought it was neato at the time and I was very VERY green at that time) Later in the evening, after hours, I explained the odd reactions of the class to my Turkish friends and, to my dismay, I was given exactly the same response! And thus I found myself facing a large class of seventy odd students 'all these will study English? "I looked around with baleful eyes, regions of sorrow, deep scars English stress had entrenched the pale cheeks, dismal situation, worse and wild..to study a foreign compulsory language is torture , endless..Ah my drifting thoughts ..stop. .or pandemonium will prevail.

For the LGBTQ+ community, telling our stories and knowing our history is a matter of both self-discovery and survival. When I was an ESL student myself, struggling, like most English language learners, with phrasal verbs. Today I teach ESL, and I always share this anecdote with my students. I had recently started working as a waiter. At some point, on campus, while still in ESL, an American acquaintance approached me and asked me if I worked out. To me this seemed like an odd question to ask, but since I worked at an indoor restaurant, I replied that I did not work out. I worked in. When it comes to written – rather than verbal – evidence of working-class queer lives, this is often ambiguous. For Stephen Hornby's last play, The Adhesion of Love, he researched a group of working-class men from Bolton who set up a Walt Whitman appreciation society in the 1880s. They entered into regular correspondence with America’s great queer poet – and two of them even travelled to New York to visit him. In the play, Hornby has inferred that the men were what we'd now call gay. "If we look at the record that does exist of the Bolton men’s lives with the assumption that they were heterosexual," he says, "we're just left with a lot of puzzles and unanswerable questions. If we flip it, and assume they were interested in men sexually and emotionally, then all those puzzles disappear, and all the questions are answered." With his parents and a driver, we had lunch (like a seven-course meal!) in a surprisingly ornate restaurant in the countryside.But now society is becoming much more welcoming of queer people, there's a huge appetite to hear our stories. And there are so many amazing stories to tell. Debbie" or a similar sounding word in the Nanjing (200 km away) dialect means 'vulva' as I discovered from a more open-minded Chinese lady teacher. Oops ! Won't make that mistake again...... Language: English Words: 141,910 Chapters: 11/11 Comments: 209 Kudos: 836 Bookmarks: 134 Hits: 34,224 Well, I handed out the photocopied material to my adult students and began the exercises. 1. I dont have a watch but I think it is twelve-ish. Very good. 2. She is 45 years old but she looks youngish. During my first year of teaching in Dalian, PRC, I went with Steven, one of my students, to his "small" (pop.500K) city near Sheyang, NE China.