ESL for Everyone

Another 500-word short story, written in an hour. The prompt, 'teaching ESL', comes courtesy of Laura, who had to teach me how to teach ESL. Poor Laura!

In all the long years of her career, Candace never taught a class like this.

She’d taught at home and abroad, drowned students of all nationalities up to their eyeballs in grammar rules and exceptions to grammar rules, faced the slings and arrows of outrageous culture shock. But this was out of her world.

In most respects, this was a typical ELSA classroom: air-conditioned, whiteboard at ready, with students seated at the tables. The way those students trembled was not normal, even during exams. Nor was the way Candace trembled. The handouts in her grasp moved back and forth with a speed that made the air conditioner unnecessary.

“Gl’yerk,” she said, keeping her voice authoritative even if nothing else about her was. “Spit out a chair so Juanita has a chair to sit on.”

Gl’yerkefonynulria, Secondary Mind of the Eighth Queen of the Kil’rasdyan home world, complied with a stomach-twisting squelch. “Sorry,” she said, while Juanita hurried to the washroom for the roll of paper towel needed to clean off the stickiness.

Candace had to actively stop herself from going to the washroom for an entirely different purpose and by the looks of it, several students were having the same crisis. Nevertheless, she continued. “What did everyone do this weekend?”

Said David, a glasses-clad Chinese man, “I went to Stanley Park with my wife.”

“Oh, neat! What did you see there?”

“We saw the aquarium and…” David trailed off, due to great discomfort. The reason for this was obvious, for one of Gl’yerk’s tentacles had strayed and was caressing his glasses.

“Gl’yerk, it’s not polite to touch other people’s glasses without asking!”

The tentacle shot back to its pouch, along with several others that were straying too close to the other students, leaving only those that held her pen and pulsed coded pulses back to the primary mind. “Sorry,” said Gl’yerk sheepishly.

“It’s all right, it’s all right, just be more careful, okay?” Right. Five minutes into the day and she already almost made one of her students cry. This wasn’t something she’d like to make a habit of. “Anyway, we’re going to start off with a crossword puzzle. I want you to work in pairs for this, so I’ll number you off from one to seven, okay? One to seven. Pay attention to your number.”

Juanita had returned by this point and was busily mopping up her chair with Lulu’s aid. ‘One’ and ‘two’, they were.

Gl’yerk was a number seven, thus she was paired with Dmitri, who had purposefully chosen a seat as far away from her as possible to begin with. He inched towards her, face pale, teeth chattering, but the others dared not comment. Gl’yerk’s hearing frequencies were too good.

Candace handed the worksheets out. She stood back and hoped.

Gl’yerk considered the problem for a moment. Then, without further ado, she unleashed a tentacle at Dmitri’s skull, sucked out the required information, then photostatically transferred the answers onto the paper.

She beamed hugely. Dmitri fainted.