A Delicate Discussion

Yesterday I was in class with my older students. They don't really see me as a teacher, instead more of a peer - which might get problematic over the course of the year, we'll see. But the atmosphere of the class is, on the whole, quite quite informal. This particular class I haven't gotten to work with for the past month due to a combination of vacations and the teacher's schedule. So, they are just still a little bit behind some of the other older students that I have in other classes who are actually making good progress forming simple sentences. So my tried and true intro at the beginning of class to get some conversation started is to ask, "What did you do this weekend?" I moved down the line of students until I got to D. and asked him the same question. With a thick French accent he responded, "I negotiate in my ex-girlfriend to make love." I had to pause to process what he said. My first impression was, "well this certainly is not the kind of thing we talked about in French class back at Middlebury." Second, I was utterly confused. What the hell does this sentence mean? So I direct a series of simple questions at D. asking things like, "Did you want to make love?" "Did your ex-girlfriend want to make love?" etc. But the other students in the class were getting a little rowdy by this point and kept interjecting their interpretations of the situation with words like, "Fighting" and "Pay". My jaw kept dropping, as the discussion turned into pandemonium, my imagination jumping to the wildest interpretations of D's negotiation process. I decided after a few minutes to cut my losses and move on, I still don't know exactly what he meant.