Flowery pronunciation

I recently taught a lesson on flowers, their parts and how they are the reproductive organs of the plant. It all seemed a straightforward lesson until one of my students read a word from the flower diagram.  I showed a picture on a powerpoint slide of a flower. There were arrows pointing to different sections of the flower and the  Ss had their TB's open with a named flower diagram in it.  My S read the word as  "pee tahl". This is L1 interference as he has a mental connection (pe = blood or rain, and al would have an ahl sound like "ahl bap" a spicy meal).
I corrected his pronunciation and got the class to repeat "pet  ull", but then I looked down at the diagram to see the word "sepal" (the green leaves that protect the budding flower) on the diagram as "petal"  which for all intensive purposes has the same kind of  form  (Consonant) CeCal, then I thought about the place name "Nepal" which has a completely different pronunciation as well.  Honestly, I have rarely if ever used the word "sepal" before but I knew that it was not pronounced in the same way as petal.  I wasn't 100% sure of its pronunciation, but it turns out I was a good guesser :)

My problem now is encouraging my Ss to be excited about learning and speaking English when there are confusing pronunciations like this which would activate their affective filters, and have them clam up.   I need to focus my preparation and think like my Ss so that I don't gloss over aspects of the lesson, thinking they would already know that, or know how to pronounce it.

Teaching about perverts and swear words

Before I begin I just wanted to say that I am innocent of all charges.  My purpose was to teach some science vocabulary to my students and that was all.  I just didn't allow for this shocking but amusing culture clash. The lesson was about life cycles of animals.  I started out with the life cycle of the butterfly. The TLC was the word "Metamorphosis".  Since science words are more often than not multisyllabic, it has been my plan since the beginning of the semester to break the words down into morphemes and teach my Ss those word parts. If they notice the word parts in a new vocabulary word then they can guess the meaning of it.

Anyway, back to "Metamorphosis". I wrote the word on the BB like so  meta morph osis and got my Ss  to read the word out loud.  I asked if anyone knew what the word meant, and one of the responses I got was "byeontae" which is "pervert" in Korean.  I thought he was just being silly or rude for the heck of it, but I confirmed with my other Ss, that in Korea, the word "metamorphosis" is a word used to describe a pervert.
It wasn't exactly the point of the lesson, but it did create an interesting cultural aspect to my class.

 Another answer I got was "body changes" so I wrote that one on the BB I explained that "morph" meant "form " and I wrote that underneath morph on the BB.   I asked the Ss, "If 'morph' means form, what do you think 'meta-' means?"  They guessed it meant "Change".  I drew a semi circle over the top of the two morphemes "meta and morph".  I explained "metamorph is a verb meaning "change form".  I asked them to guess at what  "-osis" meant and they had no idea, until I gave them the hint of it changes the verb into a........."Noun!"   I also explained that "-osis" meant "the process of", so metamorphosis means "the process of changing form." (Thinking back I think that metamorphosis would apply to transsexuals).

Moving along in the lesson we learned about animals that lay eggs.  I asked, "Where do the embryos get their food from?"   The answer was they get food from the yolk of the egg.  I asked my Ss, "What is a yolk?"  It was at that point that one of my favorite students flipped me off!  I was like what the heck is wroing with my class today?????  After flipping me off, she kindly explained that "yolk" in Korean means "swear word".   So instead of asking my Ss, "What is a yolk?"  I was actually asking them "What is a swear word?"

I guess the lesson here is random episodes of weirdness will attack your classes when you least expect it, and the best plan is to go with the flow, and maybe there is some good conversational fodder for the class.

So without any further yolking around,  I bid you all adieu

short week + long lessons = frustration

This week has been a short one because of Korean Labor Day, which means I have only 2 periods to teach the lesson instead of 3. This particular lesson is four pages longer than all the previous lessons. There is a lot of vocabulary in this lesson. It starts out with the reproduction of moss, and deals with seeds, spores, flowers and finishes with pine tree reproduction.
Something happened yesterday when all the teachers and students were outside practicing activities for the Children's Day carnival, which will be on Saturday morning.  The two Korean homeroom teachers were explaining the activity to the Ss, when a gust of wind blew up and sent a mini tornado of pine tree pollen all over the poor teachers.  About 20 students looked to find me in the crowd and yelled "spores".  I had been teaching them about sexual and asexual reproduction in plants, but they haven't learned about pine trees yet (It's pollen which is sperm, therefore sexual).  Thanks God for the visual aids :)  In addition to this I have been buzzing around my classroom acting out the pollination process and using a ppt of pictures explaining this and getting one S to ask another S the question.  (TSST)
Every week I have to make a homework sheet of review for the lesson.  Marking this weeks homework sheet gave me some really great feedback of what the Ss understood and what needed reviewing. I was able to go through this information in my next class, but this means I have to make up time next week which is also a short week.  I found this week to be very frustrating given that I had to do a GW activity and had precious little time to do so. This week has not been so great for some of my students, given the volumes of vocabulary this lesson had.  Lots of TT and IRF and not great lessons = VFT (Very Frustrated Teacher)