Accents and Textas

Living in Australia, I'm surrounded by the accent. It's sometimes grating on my ears and other times I hardly notice it. Now that I've started teaching I get the frankness of children staring open-mouthed at me when I tell them I'm from Canada. It's strange to be considered the one with the accent. Don't they realize I speak real English and they're the ones who are doing it wrong?

Today I asked students to guess where I was from this resulted in the following:
Me: Where do you think I'm from?
Student 1: America!
Me: No, try again, it's really close to America.
Student 2: USA!

Okay, I'm going with the assumption that the second student either didn't hear the first guess or thinks "America" referred to the continent as a whole and wanted to be more specific. In any case I informed the class after more unsuccessful guesses (I did wonder why Canada never entered their minds, I guess we really are that far off the map) that I was Canadian. They seemed flabbergasted and the general response was to say "Wow..." in appreciative disbelief.

After I set the group's project for the hour I walked around the tables looking at their progress. When one student asked me for a "rubber" (*giggle*) I said: "Oh, the eraser is over here." At which some kids looked confused. To further the confusion, there was another exchange that went like this:

Student: May I use a texta?
Me: I'm sorry, what did you want?
Student: Can I use a texta?
Me: What is a texter? (I'm saying it incorrectly)
Student: You know, to colour.
Me (now completely baffled): A pencil crayon?
Student: No, a texta!

At some point another student took pity on me and showed me the "texta" in question. For the North Americans out there, it's a marker. In Australia, they have different words for different thicknesses of markers. "Marker" means a large tip marker, "texta" is medium, and "felt-tip pen" is fine tip. After this minor debacle I overheard this comment: "Well, she does speak Canadian."

Canadians back home will be happy to discover we have our own language! It's eerily similar to Australian and American but just different enough to be declared separate! I look forward to future word tangles and will update you all accordingly.