Thursday, June 19, 2014

Hockey = Hooker: A Spelling Mistake

At the beginning of the school year in April one of my classroom Japanese teacher's of English requested students to make posters about me.   She made 3 class periods devoted to doing the exercise.  First we brainstormed in teams.  With 40 kids, she broke them into 10 groups, 4 students in each with a total of 10 posters per class.  We have 4 classes so that's 40 posters we made in 3 weeks' worth of lessons.  On the second day of the activity students took turns asking me lots of questions.  What my favorites were, my hobbies, full name, age, work/life experiences etc...  We finished it up with some fantastic posters with my face drawn on all of them and information about me.  Some kids are extremely talented.

So I put up the posters, all 40 of them after the JTE checked them and I spot checked them.  Everything looked great and we filled a hallway full of "Big Booger" posters!  Kids, faculty, and even a few parents liked the idea.  The Vice Principal even put up images on the school homepage!  It was amazing.

But I was walking down the hallway and carefully looking at the posters when I came up on one.  My jaw dropped... I couldn't believe it.  Under the category of favorites, was HOOKER!!!!!  I was stunned.  I quickly ran down to the supply room, got a pen and crossed that out.   The student had meant to write hockey but actually spelled hooker!  So in essence it was saying my favorite thing was hookers!  That taught me to be extra cautious and pay close attention in the future for things like this.  This goes without saying but I am stating it for the record I don't like hookers.  I like hockey.

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