"I am healthy to be, I don't know about yourself?"

Test-correction time is a time of red pens, stiff necks, and entertaining assertions from students who don't quite understand what they're saying in English (or maybe they do...?). Let me share a few of them with you:

"In Nauela, live many animals, rational and irrational."

"I like to eat rice and stove."

"How is ya'll's life in Mozambique?" (copied directly from a letter sent to us by students in Alabama. Sometimes when a student doesn't know an answer to a test question, they just copy any random sentence they find when they sneak a peek into their notebooks)

[in response to the question, 'what would you like to be after finishing school?'] "Quero fincar professora." Fincar is not actually a word but I think she meant to write "quero vingar professora" which means "I want to get revenge on the teacher."  Should I be worried?

My test was copied incorrectly onto the board by another teacher - there's no photocopier so we don't hand out paper tests, we write them up on the board - so when the students copied it onto their papers, instead of the response I was looking for, 'big dog,' I got a variety of responses such as:  "bong bing," "bing tong,"and "dong bing."

In response to the question, 'how old are you?' a student tried to write sixteen, but just wrote six, and spelled it "sex" (a common mistake). In addition, he wrote "I have..." instead of "I am..." (another common mistake, because translated directly from Portuguese, it would be "I have 16 years," like Spanish) so the result was, "I have sex."