Problem #4

Time: yesterday, around 5pm
Location: my school

I was teaching my middle school students. We were going through some verb conjugations with the past tense, using the textbooks.

"Ok, I'll take number one. Effy, you take number two, Hyaeji, you take number three...."

I let the kids look at their assigned numbers, and then I began going down the list, writing each person's answer down so that everyone could see what they should be writing on their worksheets.

When we got to problem #4, it was Nathan's turn to answer. "Last weekend, I teached my students," he said. I wrote his answer down and went on.

Around #6, Effy said, "Teacher. Number 4. Isn't it 'taught' instead of 'teached'?"

Oh man. I looked at #4 and then I looked at Effy and then I looked at #4 again. After a couple seconds I just started laughing. There was no denying it, I'd let the whole class write down 'teached' instead of 'taught' in their notebooks, and the person who'd called me out on it was a 15 year-old South Korean.

I told the kids that if they didn't tell anyone then they could all have a piece of candy, but I knew that was futile, so I just let them have a piece of candy for fun under the pretense of their silence.

Sure enough, 3 hours later I was walking down the hall and a student who's not even in that class turned to me and said 'teached.'

Immediately after class I talked to my American co-worker and asked him if 'teached' was a word. He said it wasn't, so I had him look on the internet. No luck there either.

I'm still not ruling out the possibility that it might be becoming a word. I mean, if Shakespeare can do it...