A surprising new pet and an English story

First, the story:
As any teacher of a new language could probably tell you, learning a new language has it's funny moments. My 7-week English class is winding to a close this week, and we have had our fair share of humor, for sure. It's kind of half and half, which is nice: they get to laugh at my occasional Spanish slip-ups, which I think actually make them much more comfortable to try out crazy English pronunciations, and I get to have my own little private English jokes, which I have to wait to share later with Andrew. Here is my favorite: we recently learned food vocabulary, and after having a little "market" with cut-out fruits and veggies, everyone made their own restaurant menu complete with drinks, main dishes, sides, and desserts. My most intense student, let's just call her Brenda (that's her real name), was the first to turn in her homework, as usual. Brenda is a very literal person. She needs to know the exact definitions of every word I write down. I could tell she had laboriously looked up lots of new words. Her list of drinks looked like this: coffee, tea, juice orange, sprite, fresh, cocaine tail, milk of chocolate... wait! Did you catch it? Cocaine tail? I turned to her and asked what she'd been going for with cocaine tail because I just had no idea. Her reply: I'm going to be mean and leave you hanging on that one to see if anyone was quicker than I was.

Our new pet:
Melvin, who is also in my English class and on the library board of directors, came into the library for this morning's board meeting carrying a turtle. He'd found it on the road outside. We let it wander around for awhile, and then he and Dyro made the rounds to all the neighboring houses to see if anyone would claim it. Long story short: I GOT THE TURTLE! All of my nurturing needs are now being fulfilled with our little Guillermo. I think he was starving because after a long, harrowing morning in the library, I brought him home and we gave him a rotten banana, a mango pit, and two worms from our compost bin. He devoured everything, which was a good show, getting all goopy in the process, and now he's sacked out behind the recyclables that I don't know what to do with on the porch. We have an enclosed porch, so we plan on making him as cozy as possible and enjoying life with a new pet.

Guillermo hitting the mango hard