error

the lines below are from a cloze passage that i had to teach to a primary six class. see if you can find the error:


"if you dont give us your tree house, we're coming up to get it!" bill was the neighbourhood bully. all the children in the neighbourhood were afraid of him. anything bill wanted, bill got and this time he wanted our tree house. bill never had the pleasure of having a family that i had. his father was in prison for committing armed robbery and his mother was busty with two jobs, trying her best to make ends meet. it was probably tough not having parents around most of the time but it was just as tough being in the same neighbourhood with bill. even though i knew that putting up a resistance was futile when it came to bill, i still was not going to give up the tree house that easily. "let's see you get up then!" i shouted back as i retracted the ladder.


if you found the error, you will appreciate how amazingly hilarious and shocking it was when a student in class actually read the word out. at first i was stunned. then, after realising the typo made, i burst out laughing to the utmost confusion of the kids.

after telling them to correct the 'spelling' error, i was placed in a position where i was not prepared to be in. one of them actually asked me what the word meant. i was tripping over my own words trying my best to explain until i finally gave up, saying that there was not enough time and to consult a dictionary instead.

how to you explain the concept of generously sized boobs to pre adolescent primary school kids? it's just too confounding and difficult, trying your best to maintain innocence (though we all know that we give them to much credit in that area) while not trying to feed them with lies. when i teach sexual reproduction, i have no problem saying words like breasts and penis and testicles and vagina because it is in the pursuit of science (in fact i enjoy seeing them squirm in discomfort), but i was totally not prepared to explain these terms in a social context. it's just totally different.

oh and by the way, for you numb nuts who couldnt get it, the mistake was in using the word 'busty'. it should have been 'busy' instead.