Aunt Flo Pays a Visit

Being an ESL/EFL teacher is often not for the squeamish or the faint of heart. To teach EFL/ESL, you have to be willing to talk about every part of life, even things you may not want to talk about much outside the classroom. My adult pre-intermediate class, for instance, really really wants to do a class on disease. Three of the four students (the fourth is the wife of one of the others) travel to the United States on business frequently. Being at a certain stage of life, they worry about their health and are particularly frightened of having a medical episode abroad and having to talk with a British or American doctor.

This subject is going to be challenging because, even to English speakers, the language of doctors often seems like a foreign language. I think the first thing I teach will be the words, "Explain it to me like I'm a six-year-old." After that, I'll focus on terms like rupture, fracture, tumor, etc., medical words that ordinary people as well as medical doctors use. I will also try to use this lesson to introduce the concept of jargon.

Another embarrassing subject reared its ugly head with my adult elementary student today, a housewife and mother of two who is trying to improve her English so that she can accompany her husband on the occasional business trip. We had some basic finding-your-way-around-town vocabulary, including chemist's shop/drugstore/pharmacy. While I didn't do a whole bunch of drugstore-related items, I felt this was as good a time as any to introduce her to Aunt Flo.

Now, prior to becoming an EFL/ESL teacher, this was a subject I would tend to avoid at almost all costs. I think this attitude is fairly normal for American men and, I dare to speculate, men worldwide. Vaginal bleeding is just kind of gross, for women as well as men, and on top that, I have yet to meet a woman who liked hearing men talk about the subject. If I absolutely can't avoid the topic, I tend to favor euphemisms and circumlocutions. You might say that Aunt Flo has been my friend for quite some time now.

For my student's well-being, however, I felt basic menstrual terminology (nothing too clinical) needed to taught. I didn't want her stranded in an American drugstore, not knowing how to ask where to find feminine products, or to be unable to, say, ask the woman next to her in the locker room if she could borrow a tampon. I chose language for these items I thought was neutral-to-polite. Fortunately, she already understood "your period," which meant I didn't need to figure out how to get the concept of menstruation to pop into her head.

My main point was to make sure she knew that, in America, feminine products are sold in drugstores, pharmacies, and supermarkets, and how to ask, politely but discreetly, where to find them. In Taiwan, I gleaned from what little she told me about the subject, they're usually sold in a chain called Watson's, which bills itself as "Your Personal Store" and seems to sell the kind of non-drug items Americans buy at, say, Walgreen's or CVS. There really isn't anything quite like Watson's Stateside.

But I did also literally introduce her to Aunt Flo. I wanted to get across that this sometimes a topic people feel uncomfortable talking about directly, so I put the words "Aunt Flo is visiting" up on the board. I also made sure to give her the variation, "my cousin is visiting."

The thing about this is, I have no idea if this really how women talk about this subject among themselves. I know how men tend to talk about it, either very crassly ("Oh yeah, my girlfriend's on the rag again") or, like me, in euphemisms and circumlocutions. I don't really know whether women refer to Aunt Flo the same way men do. But I do know that every woman will eventually find there are times and circumstances when she needs to be discreet about the facts of her body.

I am also unsure as to where the term Aunt Flo really fits into the language these days. Is it humorous? Is it needlessly fussy? Is it a term older women use more than younger women? I do recall seeing a headline in Newsweek a while back about a new birth control pill that would eliminate the period altogether: Say Goodbye to Aunt Flo. From that, I surmised that the term is at least widely enough known and understood that it was worth teaching to my student.

At some point, I know I'll also face explaining the difference between a pill and the Pill. I hope it's not too soon.