Language Barrier?? Yup, I suppose so.

This past week I prepared a classroom lesson on nutrition, and vitamins in particular, since one of the classes was studying foods in science class. I broke down the lesson into 1) identifying the vitamins (A-K- a fun alphabet game- where is vitamin F?) 2) learning how the vitamins help our bodies (vitamin C helps our immune system!) and 3) discussing what foods have each of these vitamins. This all followed up with a fun bingo game. With a few exceptions, I don't usually know which classes I will be visiting on a given day, so my lesson plans are vague enough to adapt on the fly to kids from 3rd to 9th grade. The vitamin lesson was a little more advanced than usual, but I ended up spending an hour with third grade anyway.

Vitamin K is a lipophilic compound involved in post-translational modification of blood coagulation proteins. Yes, I do understand all that with my molecular biology background, but my grade 3 class didn't stand a chance. I summed it all up by describing vitamin K as helping blood clotting. Does anyone familiar with patois see where this is going?

As I started to talk about vitamin K and it's helpful effects in making our blood clot, I received wide open stares from the students. I repeated myself. Same wide-eyed stares. I kept on with the lesson by asking kids what happens when they cut themselves, do they keep bleeding or does it stop? They said it stopped, and I said that's what vitamin K helps with. On we go with the lesson. There was even a blood clotting question in the follow-up bingo game.

It wasn't until my walk home that I realized my mistake. In patois, "cloth" (pronounced "clot") is a general all-purpose swear word, especially with partnered with certain words, many of which I will not mention here, but yes, blood is one of them.

Oops.