...to want to know your experiences of language students?

[woollyideas]

Having hijacked the other thread (sorry Eric!) here's one especially for people's observations, questions, rants, etc., about language students.

I'll kick off by asking what is your worst experience and what is your best experience of having language students in your home?

[woollyideas]

I had two Italian girls, 15yo, last summer who used to disappear into the bathroom for hours - and I mean hours - every couple of nights. There would be lots of giggling etc., but I had no idea what they were doing in there - together - for so long! I found out when they left. Their bedroom was full of empty spray cans of fake tan. The sheets were covered in the damn stuff and there was a pile of towels on the floor also covered in it. It doesn't wash out either. Well, at least they cleaned the bathroom after them because there was no hint of what they'd been doing in there!

Does anyone else get their students 'queueing' outside the bathroom door? In my family if someone's in the loo you politely leave them to it and go back five minutes later! It's disconcerting stepping out of the bathroom and tripping over a German!

[Grockle]

It's disconcerting stepping out of the bathroom and tripping over a German!

Wooly, your DD probably has a point.


I'm feeling like a prize cow now - having bitched and moaned about my chinese student, she burst into tears at the table tonight saying she doesn't want to go home because she'll miss me

She has followed me into the toilet before - the downstairs loo, so it was obvious that I was going to use the toilet. I had to ask her what she wanted and she said 'I need the toilet!' so I sent her to use the upstairs one. Why she thought she'd manage to go whilst I was in there already, I have no idea. She also likes to waltz into my bedroom when I am getting changed. I do shut the door but she seems to need to see me to say goodbye in the morning. And she sees pretty much all of me

[Indenturedserf]

I had a lovely German exchange student, only short term. He was very polite and I had some German hot chocolate at home which he said reminded him of home and I made it like his Mum. He gave us a really nice bottle of wine as a thank you gift ( he was 18, so not a little kid).

My friend had an overseas student for 3 months, drove her potty as he ate everything. She would bake a cake and he would eat the entire cake.

[woollyideas]

Ah yes, the entire cake scenario... Been there and had that done to me! But something even stranger, I baked a cherry madeira cake once and came back to a tin of broken cake - basically large crumbs - which had had every single cherry picked out of it (and a whole tub of glace cherries had gone into it!)

I have also come home and found a student in my bed because she wanted to sleep in the afternoon and my room 'looked the darkest'.

AIBU to want my bedroom to be, well, my bedroom?

Still, I haven't yet had someone following me into the toilet - yet!

[kerala]

Fortunately they have their own bathroom. Dont think I would host at all if we all had to share one.

Have hosted 3 years now - I find most students are decent, a few are vile and a few are really special people. DH and I wonder how we can ensure our dds grow up to be in special group.

I will only host teenagers/young people my worst experiences are with the old people. NEVER again will I host an over 25 the dynamic for us is totally wrong. We had a dreadful old bat from Austria once who never smiled, made conversation or asked us a single question about ourselves (though happy to bore on about herself ad nauseum). Maybe could have stood her for a week but we had her for a month and by the end we both wanted to kill her. Teenagers are way better they are used to being kindly but firmly bossed about and dont want to spend the evenings with you after dinner.

Best experience: Gorgeous Danish girl, thoughtful, intelligent could chat to her like a friend. Also some Brazilian girls who were here 6 weeks, they enjoyed playing with the DCs while I got on with jobs. And they babysat...

Worst: Apart from Austrian granny tarty Italian girls who I had to throw out of the house for smoking after I had specifically asked them not to. Room stank. They were very shocked that I actually made them leave though.

[yellowraincoat]

I teach english as a foreign language, have many stories. Best recently was a student who said, in a strong spanish accent, i spleet up weeth my geeerlfriend because i sheeet on her.

Couldn't hel laughing.

Sometimes, esp with spanish students, their english seems better than it is, cos words like obligation and supposition are the same in their language.

[onmythirdglass]

I supported myself and DCs with the help of language students when I was first on my separated from H. Gone down in history is the Bahraini boy who was on his own and in the West for the first time. He loved it! One night was party night and he wanted to iron his special clothes. "What are you wearing?", I asked. "Red, red, red!!" was the answer. Henceforth, any special occasion in our house requires red red red! (no matter what colour it is really). Other friends of his on the same exchange were less happy and one night I answered a knock on the door to find three Arab boys with their suitcases. "What do you want?", I asked. "We want to come and live with Akhbar at the House of Happiness and Tranquillity" was their never-to-be forgotten answer. Sadly I didn't have room, but when things at home are far from tranquil, I treasure that comment to this day.

[sophe29]

I grew up with students in the house for over 15 years and have hundreds of stories.
Faves are:

• a french girl (i think) coming in and saying how angry she was. Mum kept asking what was wrong, and she just got more het up repeating how angry she was. Turns out she was hungry!
  
• Numerous students who had to be shown to flush toilet roll down the toilet and not just fill the bathroom bin up - yuk
  
• lots of tiptoeing between bedrooms for late night liaisons.
  
• one very young girl who drank heavily for the whole stay, causing lots of difficulties with the language school and us generally at home (we war quite young and impressionable at the time) which culminated in my mum getting a call at 3 am one morning from the local nightclub to say she was passed out in a pool of her own vomit, could mum come and get her? She transferred the next day.
  
• It used to be fun getting all of them to get on as we often had 3-4 different nationalities. Once we had a very macho italian boy who announced on his first night that he "needed meat for my body" and that he only ate steak, whilst our new swiss girl announced she was vegetarian.
  

-Mum used to always insist that they cooked a typical national dish for us during their stay. Sometimes this was lovely however the majority of the time it was hideous as either the students in question had never cooked in their life or they chose such bizarre dishes. We had a succession of Japanese students who were all horrified that we had no rice cooker and just boiled the rice. One girl was so flummoxed by this she spent the whole time muttering"no rice cooker" in bewilderment.

• Again lots of Japanese girls who cried continually when they arrived because they were so home sick, only to cry continually that they were leaving.
  
• Im pretty sure my brother had 'dalliances' with a few of them too!

[EricNorthmansMistressOfPotions]

onmythirdglass that's amazing! House of happiness and tranquility :)

Today my adorable girls presented me with a beautiful home made birthday card and 4 cupcakes with candles in :) They are extra adorable because they are going home tomorrow :) Almost made up for the organiser being too busy to pay us for them today

[Grockle]

Sophe, do you think it was a positive experience for you? I sometimes worry that it's not ideal for DS(5) but then I think of all the things he is learning from our guests and hope that it will be good for him. I make sure he comes first and the needs of the students come after that but still, we often have to compromise and make sacrifices to accommodate them.

[Grockle]

Happy Birthday Eric!

I also love the House of Happiness and Tranquility. I am quite sure my house is not known as that

[woollyideas]

My house is probably known as the House of Dust and Messiness. I hope the home-cooked food and my general loveliness make up for it though!

[Grockle]

Mine is probably similar. Or the House of the Crazy Lady.

My student came home one night to find me balanced precariously up a ladder with paint splatters in my hair, a wooden spoon in one hand (I was cooking dinner) and a spanner in the other, trying desperately to fix the water gushing out of the boiler. Apparently, they have a housekeeper in their home and a handyman

[woollyideas]

I think lots of them probably come from 'well-to-do' families - who else could afford to send their children abroad for a month or three?

I think they're a bit when they see my teensy-weensy terrace house and realise I don't keep servants!

[emptyshell]

Worked on a language school one summer.

Noteable memories - taking a busload of Spanish teenagers to Weston-super-Mare. Now anyone who knows Weston will know just how faaaaar out the tide goes at low tide... the look on these kids' faces was priceless at where the fuck the sea had actually gone to!

Misheard lyrics singing along to the radio on the bus - that Bloodhound Gang song with the line "you and me baby ain't nothing but mammals"... well it's forever and all eternity known in my mind as "you and me baby ain't nothing but camels." They never did figure out why all the staff promptly started pissing themselves laughing when they were happily singing along.

We had some utter sweetheart Hong-Kong Chinese girls too. Took them to that eternal language-school destination - Bath (anyone who's lived near there knows you can't move all summer for language schools on day trips). Those girls seriously knew how to shop! They had it all planned out, which stores have branches in Hong Kong, the items they wanted, price differences between HK and UK to optimise their savings... I've got a brilliant photo somewhere of us all in front of the Abbey surrounded with their sea of shopping bags from the day!

Also used to work in a boarding school with a high proportion of overseas students - I still think about my Manchester United obsessed Japanese boys now!

[sophe29]

Grockle - I have mixed feelings about growing up with students. In some way it was nice and probably beneficial learning about about other cultures whilst we were young. However at the time my brother and I hated it. There was rarely any family alone time and if we had a particularly annoying student it seemed to split us further. My brother would retreat into his room and to this day is very spilt from us (not in a nasty way - he just doesn't get involved unless dragged into it). However this is probably normal for boys in many ways. Every summer, we would all be chucked out of our bedrooms to make space for them. We had up to 5 at some points and this was chaotic. But the money they brought in allowed us to have a roof over our heads when we were otherwise on the breadline. Thinking back now, I am so grateful to my mum at how hard she worked doing this.
I know that now, I am very protective of "family time" and although I love entertaining I get very fed up with people in my house past a certain point. Too many people in the house and I feel suffocated. Whether this was because of the students I don't know. Not thought about it before being in relation to having students growing up but might explain some of my intolerances.
I think now I would worry about having strangers in my house with young kids - that is probably a reflection of the times and the constant barrage of "strangers=paedophiles" that the media sends us all. That was never my experience growing up, but I suppose is a risk (albeit a slight one).
I just don't know. I don't think I was harmed by it, but I wouldn't do it myself tbh.
However....I can count up to 10 in 10 different languages!

[hifi]

sorry to hijack, theres no action on my tread,how can i find a reputable language school. preferably north london?

[Grockle]

Don't know hifi. Google? Ours are very obvious, with millions of students all over the place. Everyone knows the language schools and everyone has students. I am not sure I'd do it if I didn't know other people who do. It's very useful to have friends around who can help out if you are going to be home late etc.

Sophe, thanks for your response. I'd never make DS mice out if his room and he always gets to go swimming/ football etc so I try hard to make sure it has minimal impact on him, other than extra people round the dinner table.

[EricNorthmansMistressOfPotions]

Thought you might like to know that the organiser called me today and said she's taking the racist off her books :)

[bibbitybobbityhat]

Yabu.

[Grockle]

Oh, good news, Eric. Well done!

[Grockle]

Will they explain to him why? I wonder if he realized he was being racist. Some people seem to have no idea

[EricNorthmansMistressOfPotions]

He certainly knew, the way he reeled off the list of racist words with this 'dare you' expression on his face, he was waiting for me to react. I don't know whether she will tell him why, hope so!

[HumanBehaviour]

I first came here as a language student and looking back at it I was probably not the most pleasant one.

The first thing I said when I walked in to my host family's house was "Oh, it's tiny! How cute!", I now realise that this might have been offensive and it was not that small (four bed semi) but in my eyes it was tiny in an adorable way.

I never said please or thank you in the beginning as I wasn't used to doing it, it didn't mean I wasn't grateful though!

I also went out partying every weekend so came home drunk quite late at night, don't think my host family liked that much.