Two interesting lessons taught today, with entirely different subjects and meanings, but we'll see what we can do with them. The first lesson came out while I was teaching my morning class the finer points of the present perfect simple (PPS. eg "I have been to Bulgaria") and the present perfect continuous (PPC. eg "I have been teaching for a year") with a focus on the latter. It occured to me that, like most grammar, there's a yin and yang thing going on between the two.
It's not just that the PPS is all about the past and finished events, that's obvious and part of the rule (that is, unless it's negative and the word "still" is involved. Then it's about future intentions. But I digress). What's more important is the activity implied by the two when they're used as statements.
I came upon this while trying to think outside the box and add value to the lesson (Sorry about the management jargon, I've been fond of Dilbert lately and have been taking the wrong lessons out of it). I always like to put in a little social aspect to the lessons to make the grammar more meaningful than the textbook allows. While it's all well and good that the textbook talks about films and culture and various cities where speaking English would be nice, very little in it actually relates to students' lives. Common problem, I know, but work with me. For the PPC and PPS comparison, I came upon the idea of implied activity and inactivity.
PPS is a relatively slothy tense. It's all in the past. "Has been" is PPS. It may say great or terrible things about the mists of time, but it says nothing about where a person stands now. If I tell you "I have been to Bulgaria," you know something about the 23 years preceding that moment but nothing about who I am or what I do now. PPC, on the other hand, is active as all get out. If I say "I've been teaching in Bulgaria for a year," that implies activity. I may not necessarily still be teaching in Bulgaria, as the PPC "recent past" rule may mean that I stopped this past week, but I was an active little teacher right up until that point. For that reason, the class and I decided, PPC is the tense of job interviews and first dates.
If a candidate walks into a job interview and gives a grocery list like "I've studied at UCLA," "I've lived and worked in Alaska and call it home," and "I've spent time working in Bulgaria" the potential employer may think the kid is a bit of a nostalgic fool. It may still be a grocery list, but if a person says "I've been working in English since studying at UCLA," "Although I call Alaska home, I've been working and studying in different cultures and locations since I graduated high school," and "I've been working in Bulgaria for a year," he tends to come off as more active. Fascinating, right? Well, the same thing works in first dates, we decided, and although the students were more inclined to work with the job interview angle in their post-discussion dialogues, we decided that PPC was better when a person's trying to convey to a potential steady what a dynamic and interesting fellow/lady he/she is.
Breathless after these revelations, I took some time at the apartment before heading off to the teachers' meeting where no lessons were taught but we all got a good talking at about bringing our collective iron fist down on the more poorly-disciplined students. Then I went to my Bulgarian lesson where my tutor and I explored the the rarity of stories involving motherly love.
The discussion came up after reading "A Mother's Tear" by Angel Karalichev. Nutshell: A swallow, despite his mother's best efforts, is forced to stay behind through the fall and winter after getting his wing nearly burned off in a fire. Over some great, unspecified ocean, Mother Swallow asks The Wind to deliver a tear to her little swallowche under the more than reasonable assumption that the tear, symbolizing love, would keep the baby swallow warm. So The Wind travels nine days, finds the grapey garden described by Mommy, complains about the trip to Baby, and gives Baby the tear. Baby, overwhelmed, puts the tear under his wing and is able to relax in the nest.
After I'd read the story that was slightly longer than the nutshell version, my tutor asked me to retell a story about motherly love. I searched the story library in my head for mother stories and had a good bit of trouble. Fairy tales: Sleeping Beauty has an irrelevant mother. Snow White has a wicked step. Cindy has a wicked step. I can't remember if the L'il Mermaid had a mother but the family was certainly patriarchal. Hansel and Gretel depend on their father. Mama Bear is a supporting character in Goldilocks. Disney: Bambi's mother famously gets shot. Simba has an irrelevant mother. Belle has a kooky widower. The mother dies early in the only Pixar movie really about true parenting, "Finding Nemo." There's a queen in "A Bug's Life" but she's more of a ditz than anything. There really is a dearth of good tales about mothers.
One could blame this on the patriarchy and I might agree up until the 20th century. Then we get into avoiding severe melodrama. The way I see it, stories involving motherly love have a tendency to get weepy. Mostly because we all expect motherly love to the point of taking it for granted. In stories where that love is strained or threatened, the reconciliation is often under straining circumstances strong enough to whip the relationship back to the motherly norm. Usually this involves a deathbed.
So when mothers and their love are involved we get either tear-jerkers or sraight-up Hallmark classics. Not wanting to retell "Stepmom" or "Terms of Endearment," I fell back on the old warhorse and we talked about Gertrude's love for Hamlet. Interesting love, that. At the most strained, she sees her son as a murdering lunatic, but an act later she's cheering him on in a fencing match against Laertes. Powerful stuff, motherly love.
They all die in the end, but that's certainly not Gertrude's fault. It's that damnable patriarchy and Claudius' need to take over that role that does everybody in. "Hamlet" was probably written in 1602, anticipating Queen Elizabeth(and the rising British matriarchy?)'s death the following year.
And with the sudden realization that this is teetering horribly close to literary analysis, almost certainly going over the edge with the word "anticipating," I'll drop the subject and leave you with pleasant memories of mother swallows leaving their young behind but sending tears back home. We'll leave the whole "abandonment" versus "heroically staying behind" issue for later.
(I mean, seriously, did she have to leave? If the kid was supposed to survive the winter with her tear as a radiator, couldn't she have hacked it? Sigh.)
Posted by Rob at September 27, 2004 06:56 PMSharad may be a step beyond me. I think women are interesting because they bring something to the table. Something important. But what exactly that is (Other than food. Heh. Don't kill me) baffles me. Maybe Sharad has learned that it's really nothing, at least in his eyes.
As far as Maugham goes, it may be true for some authors, but if Hemingway and Fitzgerald were writing in search of a mother, that imaginary mother must have been one messed up individual. And, well, let's not even talk about Bret Easton Ellis.
The only solution I see is to form a fertility society like those in Eyes Wide Shut or the Da Vinci Code. But Society at large tends to frown on those. Sigh.
Posted by: Rob at October 1, 2004 04:24 PMOkay-- Somerset Maugham claims that the object of modern literature is the seach FOR a mother, if you want literary about it. I dunno, maybe Sharad is right and most women aren't interesting. What do you plan to do about it?
Posted by: Kara at September 28, 2004 07:10 PM