Wonder
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The moon of the light,
The sea of the blue,
Everywhere, everywhere, on the earth.
However, I saw the petals
Blowing in the air like stars
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I went to this class to do substitute teaching
One said to me that he did not want to learn English because he hated president Bush. I said I was surprised he got so political at such a young age. Another told me that they are not learning English, but rather “American English.” Yet another said to me that I was so stupid that I did not even know how to tell the whole class to be quiet. I told him that I have been trying to be smart all my life.
A girl just sitting in the front told me that there’s no need to learn English because she will kill herself when she is 20 grin
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In my teens, I bought a set of English-learning books that came with 7 audio cassette tapes to save my English. I read the books and listened to those tapes over and over but could not understand much. After that, there was no apparent improvement in my English, but the experience triggered my interest to learn the language. To this date, I still have those tapes though they are no longer useful.
Now students mainly use CDs to learn English. Amy*, a high school student, told me her school demands that every student subscribe to an English magazine that comes with a CD. However, no student – not even one, she said – uses the materials. Instead, some students use the magazine as a lunchbox tray, and most use the CDs to toss at each other as if they were Frisbees. Owning learning materials certainly is not equivalent to learning from it.
Lord, how we have changed. In terms of price, user-friendliness, durability, and sound quality, the CD is far superior to the cassette. The problem with CDs is that they are easy to produce – they are a dime a dozen now – and thus, less valuable. Besides, they often come out so fast and in such high numbers that students like Amy are eventually overwhelmed by too much information: they don’t know how to use the information and don’t know where to start under the cramming education climate. Naturally, CDs become Frisbees.
I flipped through the 20-something English articles in the magazine.  Most of them were quite good. I picked one article on fashion designing (Amy’s interest) and told her that every month she only needs to read one article and listen to the sound file from the CD. Of course, she may read more if she likes. Now she is the only one in her class to really use the magazine-CD.
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  • Apr 21 Wed 2010 22:40

  • Iron

When we first met, Paul* told me that he knew nothing about English.  I thought he was being modest.  Later I found out he was simply being honest.
Paul was chief of a government organization overseeing more than a hundred staff.  Busy as he was, he had never learned English and never needed to.  But that, of course, was then.  He told me that gradually he was being “confined” by his subordinates who more or less knew some English.  He felt belittled when English was needed.  “It’s like putting myself in a house without windows,” he said.
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  • Apr 21 Wed 2010 22:38

  • Time

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Time

Reading is a way to gain useful information and it can also be an entertaining activity. But for many who have been learning English for years, reading English is just pulling teeth. How could we access information or be entertained through a foreign language that contains so many words and cultural allusions we don’t understand?
Like how we develop Chinese reading skills, English reading takes time. Not just weeks or months; it takes much longer than that. You are slowly developing your reading ability but maybe you don’t feel it. Don’t stop if there are certain things you don’t understand when reading. Be curious and treat problems like long lost treasures. Just keep going and in the end you will breathe the fresh air.
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The Thin Line
 
Mat* was sitting in the corner of the conference room – as far away from me as possible.  The company hired me to teach them English tests.  Some students had great desire to learn; others, like Mat, were attending the class because their bosses told them to.
I walked over to Mat and asked him to read a paragraph for me.  He looked at me with those eyes, begging me to give him a break.  “Well…,” I said, “…maybe we can do it…some other time.”
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  • Apr 21 Wed 2010 22:34

  • Love

Love
When Carl was 2, his mother read him children’s stories before tucking him in. Then he was too young to understand anything about the stories, but he liked it.  The mother’s voice was better than any lullabies.
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The mother often had tons of workload in the office and needed to continue to work after office hours. She was always exhausted when it was around 10 o’clock at night, but reading Carl stories was the last job in a day – and also the most important, however silly those children’s stories were.
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I once met a French guy who told me that he did not like to talk to some Taiwanese whose English was not good.  Wait a minute, I thought, This guy’s English had a strong French accent and was very difficult to understand, and he complained about our people’s English!  And he taught English!!
Another time, I was talking to a Japanese client over the phone.  The connection of the phone line was good but something did not seem right.  The client talked on and on and on in his Japanese-accented English – and the way he spoke made me question my English ability.  Wait a minute, I’d been studying English hard and now this guy seemed to force me to adjust my English to suit his Japanese – or Japanese English, for that matter.  And, why did he sound so confident?  Where was that confidence from?Most students I met, on the other hand, fear English.  Likewise, it is a big question as to where the fear is from.  The statement “My English is not good” is being heard over and over again, and it has become tiring to hear it.  It sounds like asking for people’s pity.  Normally, you get it when asking for it.
But, just for a minute, and for the so many minutes that will follow, let’s pretend our English is good.  Think of the two great pretenders I met – the Frenchman and Japanese – who showed no fear when they talked; they didn’t give a damn; they simply expressed.  So when we speak, try to speak with force; when we write, write with ease, regardless of our English proficiency.  We don’t need to have good English to do so; no one does.  With time, that pretending will become reality.
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You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair--the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.
    -- Stephen King "On Writing" 2000
I have this writing course in which students read for 90 minutes and use 30 minutes to write their reflections on what they read. I don’t care what they write, as long as they write.
During the writing session, the students, especially Mark*, would ask me how to spell certain words. One time he didn’t ask me any spelling questions; he just buried himself in the desk and I could see his pen running fast on the paper – the pen virtually led him. Suddenly, Mark rose from his seat, charged toward me, and shot out his hand giving me his writing, his face pumping red.  “That was fast,” I said. It was not just fast; it was a lot. Normally, it takes a student about 30 minutes to come up with a half-page; there Mark gave me two full pages in 20 minutes.
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When we first met, she spread out a big piece of paper on the desk with the song lyrics of "Smoke Gets in Your Eye" she transcribed earlier and wanted me to read those lines for her.  Every word she wrote down was as big as a giant beetle: they were big and clearly written.  Then, she took out an antique recorder and awkwardly pressed the "record" button, and I started to read those lyrics for her.  In the MP3 era, it's neat to see people using this old gadget.
She became a regular in my class.  She raised questions, took notes, and read English out loud in class.  Her pronunciation was not correct yet every word was loud.  From time to time, she would operate her little machine to record class sessions.  Those tick-tick sounds of the machine showed so much of her urge to learn.
Sometimes she complained that the words in the class handouts were too small.  That's easy; I just augmented the font size of the words and printed the handouts for her again.  With font size 36, every word looked bigger even than her "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" handwriting; they were now big enough to be "exploding in your face."  She was happy.
She told me she wanted to talk to her great-grandson when he came back from the US.  The boy loved her, but there seemed to be a little communication problem.  “This year will be different!” She said.
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Josh* was in the reading room reading a thick book.  There were other kids in the same room playing computer games or chatting, but Josh didn’t seem to get bothered.  I went over to him and found that he was reading the English version of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” the fourth installment of the Harry Potter series.  It was surprising.  However popular Harry Potter was, it was difficult even for an adult to read, and Josh was only 8.  Curious, I asked Josh if he could understand the book.  He said: “Well…just some…”  He blushed.  I pointed at some words on the page to know if Josh knew them, and he either shook his head or guessed them wrong.  Finally, I pointed at “reckon” and Josh replied: “Maybe…it means ‘think.’”  Josh was right this time, though he was not so sure.
It’s easy to make out the situation: Josh focused on the words he knew – rather than whining on the words he didn’t know – to make sense of the Harry Potter story.  As I had just learned, it’s unlikely that Josh would know most of the words in the book.  However, those few words he knew gave him enough clues to somewhat brighten up the story.
On the other hand, many adults – especially smarter ones – often complain that there are too many words in English; they have this preoccupation that it’s important to know many words in order to read.  Probably those unknown words in a text make them feel insecure and reading becomes repulsive.  In the end, they end up reading very little because of the fear.  Uncertainties stop them from moving forward.
I don’t know what that is, but there must be something in the society that educates people to limit their perceptions – maybe it is the unacceptability of mistakes.  In the competitive business world, a tiny human error can cause an unrecoverable disaster.
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Joe looked stupid, but he wasn't.  When Joe sat there in the class, it seemed the purpose was simply to sit there: his eyes were wide-open, but his mind was obviously setting somewhere else, wherever that was.
But sometimes, maybe 3% of the time, probably on a whim, Joe was suddenly attentive and asking me questions, and I would grab those precious moments to answer them.  He could understand conjunctions or make sense of subordinate clauses in a matter of minutes.  When Joe was quick, he could be really quick.
One day, Joe’s father came to the cram school and peeped through the classroom window; there he saw Joe was spacing out again.  Joe’s father was furious.  After the class, right in front of everybody, he scolded Joe for not being attentive in the English class and for wasting the tuition fee he paid.  Joe didn’t take it well; he doubled the volume and yelled back – he was virtually screaming at his father, saying things like his father’s inconsideration and all that.  The father’s face turned blank.  He turned around, got out of the school, and got in his car.  Joe, still shouting and yelling hysterically, was one step behind.  He went over and kicked his father’s BMW repeatedly like a piece of junk.  Not saying a word, the father just drove away, leaving Joe there crying and screaming, with tears smeared all over his face.  We teachers and students were puzzled by the scene.
Other students told me that this happened a lot.  It always started with the father’s criticism to Joe, and Joe would get offended easily, but the situation had never got so out of hand.  Of course, gossips about the father being powerless or Joe reckless followed.  I don’t know; maybe Joe was tired of never getting credit for any progress he had made.
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