English is a Non-inflected Indo-European Language (from a work in progress on English teachers abroad)

They come from all over. Besides the recent graduates, there are elementary school teachers, beancounters, zookeepers, customs workers, divorcees, cinephiles, readers of the daily press, and writers of letters to the editor. Few were compelled to leave, none were compelled to stay in their home countries. You recognize them as those who speak a little too clearly, forming the words as if everything hung on a preposition. Telling a culture-shock story about life over there, their chins retreat into a tightening jaw: they’ve told it too often, it’s become fixed, repertoire. This time they won’t change enough to make it reverse compatible with you. They’ll be forced to say you had to be there, laughing for both of you at the undefined irony of misunderstandings. Their sophistication is a universal relativism that accepts all things. Life is what happened to them, not what they did.

They speak English. It is something they know without knowing what they know or how they know. The language is a mitochondrion mixed in with their being. To become teachers, they must have the precious commodity excavated and read back to them. In teacher training, they learn to see the air they breathe, and to show others less fortunate how to gulp it down. Now I understand.

The lesson must be about something. Break it down to courses, modules, tasks, reincorporations, semi-controlled practices, and at each moment you are doing one thing to the exclusion of others. This shows purpose and control. And while you explain the present perfect continuous or a tricky phrasal verb, they listen, understanding between 40 and 70 percent of your words, and taking from them whatever they need: the non-syllabic rhythms, the formation of a fricative. Why that word, made of those sounds and not others? It’s arbitrary—but also fully determined because you must use that one word. The signal separates from the noise, the acceptable sentences build themselves into the membranes of the ear. In order to speak it, the teacher must speak about it as if it were geography.

None of this may be said. In order to make the process less terrifying and to give us some agency over language, they have pedagogy and pedagogical talk, made up of these specialized terms:

Communicative, i.e. the communicative approach. Like dynamic, a meaningless adjective conferring instant credibility on its user. The implication is that the last twenty years have witnessed a renaissance following on dark ages during which teachers and students were too stupid to communicate. After an interviewee or teacher tells you about an idea, you can always nod seriously and say: “Hmm…but how would you make that more communicative?” There is no known face-saving response, no matter how dynamic you are.

Lexis. Vocabulary. By squinting slightly and calling it “lexis,” the inevitable tedium of memorizing long lists of words is transformed into a sleek methodology with a ring of Japanese engineering excellence. Vocabulary is not communicative, but lexis most certainly is—so students will pay cash money for it.

Idiomatic. Teacher talk for “Haven’t the foggiest.” A catchall response to tough student questions. Example: Student: “You told us always to use contractions, so why can’t I say ‘Yes, I’m’?” Teacher, chewing on his collar: “Ah…that’s idiomatic, I’m afraid.”

TTT. Teacher talking time. The disturbing echo of KKK is not accidental. To be avoided since it smacks of the scholastic dungeons of the past when teachers used to explain things. Making your students prattle about hypotheticals and their personal lives is just more communicative. The hidden wisdom of the ban on TTT is that it permits fools to be silent.

Elicitation. A communicative way of reducing TTT by making everything into a guessing game. Instead of saying “post office,” the teacher elicits by drawing a post office, or miming one, or interpretively dancing one until one student cries uncle and says: “Post office!” This technique helps get rid of unruly students who do their homework and ask tough questions.

Montreal Rant in G Minor

To the sexagenarian who keeps coming into my local supermarket and asking if they’ve found your debit card yet: It’s gone. You’re senescing. Welcome to the losing-stuff years. If there’s any money in your account, your bank will issue you a new card. If not, stay home. In any case, stop wasting everybody’s time.

To the guys who’ve been jackhammering and tearing up the road outside my apartment for the last 6 months, to no effect: I don’t hate you, I hate what you represent. A time in the future when my taxes will be paying for your deafening ineptitude.

To the student who texted me a militantly illiterate message demanding that I raise your grade: Fuck you. Your implication that a teacher of yours would have to be in any way spiteful to give you a shitty grade is comical. We all hit the wall sooner or later; for you, it’s junior college. Your essays are objective evidence that you are significantly dumber than those around you. Despite the monstrous stupidity running rampant at the average university, you will not even get in. Unless your parents are wealthy, you’re screwed.

To the glum Portuguese photographer who sits in the window of your little studio balefully watching the St. Laurent foot traffic pass your business by: I noticed you and, since I like to support the little guy, I made a mental note to get my passport photos done at your place. Imagine my shock when I found out you charge $13, while the big, nasty chain drugstore ½ block away charges $7. No matter how in focus and centered your passport photos are, I’m not going to frame them for posterity. I don’t know if you’re a thieving moron or a moronic thief, but I do know that you should be out of business. Bad luck to you and may you stub your toe in the darkroom.

To the e-Bay store that sold me Nike running shoes that turned out to be cheap fakes shipped to me in a cardboard box from China: Taste a black bear’s ass. Your site guaranteed authentic shoes, and included helpful tips for spotting fake Nikes. I see now that your positive feedback was typed exclusively by the right hands of 14 year-old boys who spend too much time in their rooms and have no need of arch support or a non-marking sole. I hope Phil Knight’s pocket calculator tells him that he can make more money by cracking down on you fraudsters and having the Chinese courts condemn you to suffer every prison movie cliché, except the escape.

To the retro and hipster shops on St. Laurent Boulevard: Stop amassing old junk from rummage sales and dumpsters and rebranding it retro chic by virtue of the fact that it’s in your store. Every time I look in I see the same badly scuffed vinyl records, dirty clothes and worn out kitchenware, watched over by the same tired hoydens with piercings. I’d have more respect for you if you just went ahead and sold vintage piles of dry and crumbling feces. If you’re not ready to lower your hypocrisy threshold to that level, at least take those melting records out of the window and invest in a mop and pail. Better yet, take out student loans, get an education and do something worthwhile.

To the Arabic market where I bought a bag of spices that turned out to be four years old: Inhale deeply from my cat’s litter box. I opened the bag just to confirm that the mixture would have the full aroma of North African desert sand. When you’re running a business, you have to take inventory periodically. When a product gets long in the tooth, mark it down, multiple times if necessary, but if nobody buys it you must accept the cruel logic of the free market and throw it away. Or I might know a few shops on St. Laurent who would take it off your hands, cheap.

Things I Learned While Reading Student Essays

Man has created the society in which we live in.

In Sunshine Sketches people are scared of changes, more people, having scared to take up less part in the society.

We have not yet evolved but evolving for the worst, which one day will be man’s demise.

In this books, issues such as social ineptitude, ignorance towards other races, family structure and even general hygiene are found.

The comedy has been showed on many different aspects in the English Literature, nor not too many writers use dark themes to establish a parody out of it.

The comedy is showed in the contradiction between the ironic events and the dark themes in order to let the reader considerate the facts of life.

I bring up the fact that humans do have a choice to either live on fear and hate to live or live on love and love to live.

Coming from a mathematical background, Lewis Carroll knew exactly how to attract fresh new admirers.

This brings me to ponder the following question: should we base ourselves on poetry to define one’s beliefs?

Shakespeare’s poems were often written to lovers, but it isn’t known if they were his lovers or others’.

A village—it’s more old fashion then new technologies.

Also religion, church, school, family dinner in small community it’s real values, not in big cities just wokring to make a living or get rich.

When someone thinks of a prison, people think of a place filled with bad people. There are reasons behind the actions and why these people are called or referred too as bad. But no one is entirely good or bad all of the time. Everyone has committed a sin, which isn’t a good thing, but others do it more often.

In Annabel Lee’s case we understand she was killed by perhaps a natural disaster and had more of a today’s Hollywood feel to her.

William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, and William Blake, three of the best poets that history has ever seen, strangely with their same names these three Williams have inspired many generations in a lot of there poems.

Love is a deep affection or fondness, it is a feeling of warm personal attachment to a person or to a living organism which occurs very slowly and softly.

Notes on Teachers

I’ve always thought the key statement about the futility of book learning to be the one in Plato’s Phaedrus. Plato has Socrates say that the invention of writing is unfortunate because a) Writing, unlike a teacher, doesn’t know when to be silent in the face of ignorance, and b) Students depend on writing to remember and so enfeeble their own minds. This is schoolmarm crankiness, but it also suggests a truth about the sad lot of the teacher: no longer the admired illiterate charlatan of a pre-Socratic sect, he becomes the custodian of an impersonal system of information retrieval. Knowledge is no longer magic, transformative of the knower, but a dry text about which we must be careful not to show too much contempt when the teacher is around. After all, he’d fail us if he knew what we really think of him. The conceptual gap between oral culture and cuneiform tablets is vaster than between cuneiform and iPod. As literates, we’ll never understand the perspective of an oral culture. We may as well try to think like a dolphin—or like Socrates. The anthropological and linguistic studies of oral cultures were merely self-referential works. Reading Homer is the closest we can come. And yet, even if we’re strong enough to disregard all spurious “traditions,” what we glean must necessarily be translated into our Gutenberg galaxy. Even Bill and Tedding back in time to hear Homer (who must have considered himself more teacher than entertainer) could not be more than an act of illiterate-tourism. As a humanities teacher, if I ask myself what one thing I would most like to teach my students, it would be hard not to express it as a didactic statement—and so not a “thing” but a “should.” You, the student, “should” make every effort to understand your direct and immediate relationship to culture, language, society and history, because if you do not, you will be enslaved effortlessly by the prevailing false systems of meaning. Something like that. Of course it would be unfair and outrageously self-indulgent to speak that way in a classroom. Besides, the argument has always lain open to criticism. Its most eloquent defense is also its shakiest: that such a belief has sustained multiple generations of secular humanists through centuries of brutal and psychotic Western history. Well then, the precocious student sighs with David Hume, why should future histories be anything like past histories? After all, my education is much more important than any bullshit mawkish theory of Western Civ.—this is my job prospects we’re talking about, etc. At any rate, that “lesson” is one that students must accept or reject for themselves after a long series of courses taught by like-minded teachers. We must accept that most post-secondary students will never face such favourable conditions. The other standard objection is that the teacher, as a demystifier and shareholder in Enlightenment Inc., must teach facts—verifiable things, not normative shoulds. So we have the text. The text is the prop in the teacher’s Keatonesque performance, to be taught and fallen all over by whatever exegetical blarney infects him. The student senses immediately that the answers—or even a molecule of truth—are not in the text. The correct answers are in the miserable dialectic of the teacher’s laboured questions, gestures, inflecting eyebrows, grinding teeth, carefully set shoulders (this is one reason why women, as superior readers of body language, perform better in Socratic environments). Pythagoras taught his followers that by imitating his motions, music and gestures, his students would gain insight into his mathematical doctrines and grow into priests of power. Today’s teacher offers a much more sad-sack model—that of a schoolteacher. The crushing systems of writing and information storage loom and lurk between him and his students. Even memorizing the text wouldn’t satisfy the teacher; he would still claim that you cheated and had failed to satisfy the unwritten criterion of proving that you’re not lazy…so why try? Anyway, it’s obvious he must have failed at something else even to be here—no wonder he hates you.

From the Poland Files: Industrial Espionage, Part 2

Between dodge ball and insect safaris, we used to tell Polish jokes, Newfie jokes—without context, without malice. We thought that newfie or polack must mean contemptible and nothing else…What a polack thing to do! Most of these jokes had interchangeable butts. There was a bizarre one about Italian cowardice, a holdover from more categorical times that had cocooned itself in the playground gravel to rise again for post-boomers to hear and make of what we could. The Italian tank with five gears—all of them reverse. Madame Beauchamp’s eyes ballooned as she confiscated my sketch of it. I’d seen a tv special on the war and drawn Mussolini sitting on the hatch, ass-backwards with a bottle of wine, watching his contadini get crushed under the tread.

After nine o’clock you could hear the bad guys on tv use words like spick, kyke, polack, wop…monosyllables that held you in a mysterious, thrilling, gnostic power as the hero glowered back.

I never heard the Poles defamed again until I taught business English for Electrolux in Warsaw. Unlike FSO-Daewoo, their HQ were downtown. I could walk down my street, dodging citizens’ unneutered dogs, cross the hulking bridge spanning the intercity trains, and make it to their building by 8am. There was the usual security clearance charade in the lobby. English teachers were not important enough to be given passes, so every time I came I had to present myself and ask permission to be let in—which I always got. If you ever need to gain entrance to a building in a foreign capital, just tell them you’re an English teacher.

The fifteenth floor was pure 80’s power office, all sleek blues and greys, needlefelt carpeting, roaming coffee trolleys and everyone smoking ha-ha-ha round the cooler. On the walls were framed vintage Electrolux ads to provide them with metanarrative. The 50’s housewife in full skirt grinning at her two-tone appliances. Pumps, outboard motors, luxomatic push-button vacuums sweeping up decades of dust: Nothing Sucks Like Electrolux. A man’s professional phone-voice boomed out in decent American English: “They have bought 12,000 H45-K’s…they will sell six! They have no idea what is going on. I told them to stop the lying. I said ‘Stop lying and pretending you understand what your job is and then I can start telling you what you're here for. Once we know that, we'll get back to selling because this is a business for the sake of Jesus!”

The accent, definitely not Polish, was hard to place. His voice trailed off as I got further away. The boardroom had a beech oval table and flipboard. I sat in a leather executive chair and reviewed my lesson. Verbs of motion: come, go, leave, arrive. To, in, at, towards. To is a preposition, come is a verb. Repeat after me: "To! Come!" I waited but no one came. A woman poked her head in the door, saw me, inhaled sharply and retreated. I was glad about not having to go through with another miserable grammar lesson, but then again I didn’t know what to do. Petty thoughts passed through my mind. Should I call my school? How long did I have to stay before leaving? Was I going to get paid? At last I packed up and headed for the elevator. On the way, passing the same office, I looked in and our eyes met. He was a heavyset blond man in a slate grey suit. When he saw me in my jeans, oversized shirt and long hair, he didn’t know what to make of me.

“And you are…?” he asked, as if addressing an invasive species.

“I’m the new English teacher,” I said. “I…my class was supposed to be in room 1501.” He cocked his head. “But there must’ve been a mix-up because nobody...came.” He shot a black look at his desk. Lifting his finger to keep me waiting, he called up underlings to report later for a bollocking. Smiling, he invited me into his office.

“You are an American?”

“Canadian, actually.”

Wistfully: “Ah…Canada. Beautiful country.”

“Oh, you’ve been?”

“No. Cancelled several fishing trips, though. Cigarette?” He flipped open a cedar box full of those Pure Virginia brown-paper cigarettes you pass by at duty-free shops. I took one and so did he. It was so strong I smoked it like a cigar until I left it to burn out in his crystal ashtray.

“I must apologize for my employees not turning up,” he told me. “Perhaps you’ve been here long enough already to know how hard it is to motivate them.”

“Well, this is my first day here….”

He smiled benignly. “No, please, what need you to cover up for them? There are historical circumstances, I would not deny it. But as we say in Sweden, history cuts both ways. You’re free to complain about outsiders coming to partition your country over and over…but what does this say about you that you keep getting partitioned, eh?” I told him I didn’t know. He laughed, his cufflinks shaking.

“I admire you but I don’t envy you,” he said. “A teacher in this country. And the stage is set for success, and the Polack needs English to connect with the rest of the civilized world, and here you are, ready to give it to him for practically nothing.” I laughed nervously. He swivelled in his chair to look down on the city.

“Polacks. Lazy. Drunks. Idiots. Stalin was a thug but he said out loud what otherwise can only be said in children’s games.” He swivelled back to me and stood to see me to the door. His bad mood was gone. “Nice to have met you. Hmm…Canadian. Fish?”

“Sorry?”

“Do you fish?”

“Not really.”

“That’s too bad.” He looked me up and down. “Well, you won’t find it so bad here. The Polish girls are very Catholic—they’ll do whatever you want. Time goes by fast, enjoy yourself. Easier to teach English than the Protestant work ethic!”