English Tuition Chronicles

Kate: Teacher! Teacher! I want to ask you questions!

She pulls out a thick encyclopedia-like book for kids. Apparently, it was one of those "Why-is-the-sea-blue?" kind of book.
She turns to this certain section and lo and behold, guess what it was about?
Shit or "excrement" as they like to call it. Seriously.
There was a questionnaire there that tells you whether you're healthy based on your crap.
It was written in Korean, so she translated them and began questioning me.
"Teacher, how many times do you go to the toilet? One time? Many times? Or never?"
"What color is your excrement? Dark dark? Brown? Or like, got other colour?"
HAHAHA. From there on I couldn't stop laughing.
Then she asked, "Does it go up or down?" I was like, "Huh? What do you mean?"
"You know, when you excrement (insert reenactment then she pointed to the picture), up or down?"
"You mean, does it float or sink?"
It's ironic that I, the grown up, felt so embarrassed talking about something as basic and natural as doing your business. What more, to a kid, who doesn't see anything, "dirty" talking about it.
I'm even being politically correct in my description here because I know that this isn't exactly a pleasant topic.
At the end of the questionnaire, I got a certain number of point that indicated I should eat more vegetables.
She also shamelessly told me her answers to the questions.
Sigh. The randomness of tuition lessons.

English is super difficult to teach. It's too ambiguous. There are words that can be used as a noun,verb and adjective at the same time. Then there are words with multiple and even unrelated meanings. Then there's the formal versus the colloquial usage of it. Then there's the million grammar rules that you have to follow. Language acquisition really is a complicated and (miraculous) process. It just becomes something "you know".

Teaching tenses becomes really tricky when tricky sentences come about. No wonder those new to the language are so confused. For example,

The event will be held on 25th November.
We will be holding the event on 25th November.

The change in subject, suddenly required a change in the way the verb is written, even though both indicated something (i.e. the event) will be happening in the future. We usually use the auxiliary verb "will be" to indicate future continuous tense. So we say, "She will be studying tomorrow."We then just add an -ing to the main verb. Or in the case of simple future tense we just say, "She will study tomorrow". Then now you have "will be" (indicating future tense) and "held" (past tense of hold) in the same sentence. I know it's like that but I don't know why! Amanda! Linguistics person! Explain please!

Me: So what does 'reply' mean?
Boy: Uhh. Bird is tired, so stops. Then bird "replies". (He then shows with his hands a bird RE-flying away)
-_-