Once upon a time when my synapses fired on school frequently and my palaver was familial and familiar, I would drink beer and drink the wisdom of my sister and whoever might descend the hill from UCLA on a Sunday night. This convivial experience guided me throughout my time in LA and was the hardest part of leaving for my year off. Little had I realized how much I missed it until an experience this week. Now all readers of my locativedisplacement should recall my great success as an internationally recognized expert on Blake and explicator of his fearful symmetry, well Oliver had set a mock exam for the students and asked if I might take a look at it. Of course, I was happy to do so. He gave it to me, and surprise upon surprise, it had three sets of questions. The expected on Blake, a section about Black African English writers, and a section on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. What fun! I sharpened my mind and unstoppered my Blue Bic pen and set to work writing. I had at first intended to simply write one or two things. But it has been three years since I last wrote answers to an exam on literature, and such were always a joy at Bard. The questions Oliver set were very broad and I found myself giving several answers to them all. About the Canterbury tales, of which they read the general prologue and Pardoner's Tale, I wrote in response to the first question, Chaucer uses the tales as a literary microscope to critique medieval Europe, is this true. Well of course and what a fun question to write about. First, the use of the word microscope in the question encouraged one to think about the tales as experiment, a very fertile space of imagining what it is that Chaucer might be experimenting with. Anyway, I wrote about the use of writing in English, the vicious attack on corrupted church, selling relics and indulgences, but my favorite point was that I argued about his critique of the three estate system: clergy, nobility and peasantry. I argued that the very first way he introduces this critique is that the pilgrims are all introduced in class order, that is from the knight down, but when it comes to the telling of tales, that is randomized. And we think it might go in class order because the knight tells the first tale, but the rest do not follow and some even interrupt others. Thus Chaucer creates a utopia of storytelling in which literary creation makes everyone equal. It is sort of an invention of the individual and a radically egalitarian move. Especially because it fights against the genre C fits into, namely that in Boccaccio's Decameron it is all upper class who gather. Secondly, I argued that the poem opens by saying when weather is nice after winter "then longen folk to goon on pilgrimages / to ferne halles couthe in sundry londes" well these men and women are all made equal by becoming pilgrims, by having longings,but most especially by being dependent on the weather.
Anyway, I proceeded through the rest of the questions with equal eagerness. But then I was done and I wanted to keep talking especially about Chaucer and so on Friday when I handed over the exam I told Oliver that he should buy me a beer since I'd done all of this work. He agreed and at a little before one we were settled in a dive bar tucked into a remote area of Ngaoundere under a bare lightbulb with our 'trente trois' before us and some spicy bush meat in a bowl porcupined with toothpicks and for over two hours lost ourselves in literary discussion. Oh thank you Oliver, I must cry to this website, for being so well read. So that was fun. He Aldo requested that I write here his greeting to you. He said that since he knows me, and like me he knows and likes all those connected to me.
There are some new arrival here to the camp that I should mention, the Fredricks First came to Cameroon in the early two thousands to be pastor of an English language church here in Ngaoundere, and they were here for four years. They have also served in South America. Coming from Canada, they are both retired but rather astonishingly active for their ages. Val, the missus, had a nasty fall this week and conked her head and cinked her neck something horrible. Phil was gone all week on a trip to the Central African Republic and so there was a great emptiness all week. But the real successes this week were in my classrooms.
It began on Monday with the introduction of new vocabulary, occupations, and some new verbs. Mostly these were associated with jobs, e.g. A pilot flies, a doctor practiced medicine, or helps, or heals. I thought we might have to work all week on the vocabulary and the students lamented the sight of the filled chalkboard. But lo and behold my strolling in on Tuesday but they knew all the vocab it was excellent and meant that I had to whip together a new lesson plan. So I introduced three specific verbs to lose, to look for, to find. And from that moment everything changed. Suddenly people were losing things left and right in the past tense. They were looking for the lost things in the present continuous, and they were eager to find them in the future. All the grammar came together too, especially the pronouns that they've been struggling with. After all. If one loses and finds one's car, he or she does not say "I lost my car." "I am looking for my car" "I hope that I will find my car under the tree or next to the house" no, one uses "it" in the latter sentences, finally they realized that a car is ungendered. Ha. I decided to reward my fifth levels and brought in my iPad the next day. Now I have had a long term plan for trying to each a song, and looking forward to the execution of my plan I had several weeks back asked the students what songs they liked. A resounding chorus of "o na na what's my name" crashed through my ear canals. And mixed with it was a tribal chant of the name Rihanna. I thought perhaps I had been transported to a bacchanalia of some sort and hope that I had not stumbled among some set of mysteries, which upon my viewing I would be rendered limbless. Well, I went back and downloaded the song and also looked up the lyrics. I then took the lyrics and edited the choruses out and pasted them into a document. I wanted to save paper and so made two columns. But the lyrics, despite my editing, still exceeded one page. Then I remembered that we use A4 paper here, a paper that is a bit longer than what we consider normal. With the slight tweak, I had everything as I wanted it. I then proceeded to remove every mention of a personal pronoun or a possessive adjective and put in a blank underline. The song, incidentally, as I have discovered with all written texts, has a huge number of pronouns. You should try this task some time. Take s common song and delete the pronouns. It takes a long time. Then try to figure out what it says. If you are not familiar with the song beforehand it is rather impossible but can make for delightful ambiguities. When I printed these sheets, by the way, I used my flash drive and that is how it was infected. Thus when I put it back into my computer later I diseased it, I am still waiting on its return and have just learned the hard drive is destroyed so I will buy a new one of those. Armed with the lyric sheets, I went into class on Wednesday and demanded absolute silence. Then I pushed the play button. Alas, it was so quiet. The song which played so loudly in my chateau was a mere murmur in the vastness of the classroom. Rats I muttered. But no. As soon as my learners (that is what I a actually supposed to call them) figured out the song and realized I could make it no louder they huddled together and listened in silence, except for the chorus which they shouted forth. And after playing it, they asked for it again but instead I presented them with the sheets. At first they had no idea what I gave them and I realized that it was because they have no idea what happens in the song and do not hear words when they listen to it. But once I had them read aloud, they caught on that the song had actual words, and that they now had the words. Of course this created a further problem because I wanted them to write on the sheets of paper at which point they wanted a second copy in case they made a mistake. I was firm. We learn through mistakes and if you want an unmarred sheet you'd better listen closely. We then proceeded through a line by line listening of what is a very tedious song for me but which the students absolutely adored. Each time we came to a pronoun, I would stop and ask what they heard. Sometimes the pronoun was really clear but others, like elided "you" they really struggled with. But what was most beneficial is that there is a male singer in the first part and thus there are both he and she pronouns used. I made the students then tell me who the pronoun was. They quickly realized that when drake was singing about a she, that she was not Drake because Drake was the I. And from there we proceeded. I also demanded they tell me the grammar, thus they had to know if the pronoun was a direct object or a subject, or if the word was a possessive adjective. Having to do this with every single pronoun really iterated two points: word order in sentences, the importance of knowing when "you" is the subject or the direct object. Finally for each pronoun I made them switch the gender and give me the plural equivalent. The exercise took scads of time but the focus was really tremendous as well. It also gave me a chance to show the importance of understanding proper English and pronunciation so that we could figure out the strange word "wanna" and that it means "want to" I did this for all the words that are not quite English as well as supplying missing verbs of which there are several in Rihanna's love song pop genre. In both my classes we ran out of time and my students begged for class to continue. I just shrugged and said it was a one day exercise. The next day, Thursday, I went in and they all begged for music. I said no and we did a jumbled sentence exercise. I had planned the whole period for it as that is how long it has taken in the past. (this is where I write several sentences on the board and make the students reconstruct the order). Well with their mastery of pronouns, the students put it all together in half the time I thought they would. And so out came the iPad, whose red cover now makes them ever so eager, and we finished up working about twice as fast as the day before. I then played the whole song and did not even have to tell them to look at the sheets, they did so automatically, eager to know what Rihanna's song looked like. We still had some time so I asked if anyone wanted to sing. I had one volunteer and she did a fine job, and then I asked if anyone wanted to dance, suddenly the class energized even further and all started screaming at Nana. I gestured him to the front, and pushed play. I had, I should say at this point, made a discovery that morning. If I put a book behind the speaker, the song is much much louder. This is a lesson in acoustics. See the students are not the only learners in the classroom. Anyway, he proceeded through a just extraordinary break dance. For about a minute he gyrated and torqued and flipped and moved. At one point he moonwalked over to me and took my glasses from my face and mocked a pantomime of my teaching to the raucous delight of myself and his peers, when he was done, there was no shortage of volunteers. All of whom danced a different dance. This is crucial and I want to end on this point. In every other activity, young people, and adults to a certain extent, try to conform and look to see how others are acting and answering people doing so themselves. But in dance it is different. I don't know why, but the self expression and creativity was mind blowing. And I had untapped it. Thus in Friday, no only were the students attentive, but in doing the writing exercise (I have invented a week long activity of a detective story and they did part one, writing questions for the detective to use during the interrogation of the suspects, all of whom are identified by occupation) they continued to show creativity. The week provides a microcosm for the change in mentality. On Monday after the vocab lesson I had them ask each other questions by pretending to be one of the new occupations. In my example, I said "I like to go really fast, I am not afraid of high places, I like to be in the sky, I like to have a lot of control. What am I." then I turned over the example and every single student imagined him or herself as a student. But on Friday they were asking any number of interesting questions that related in specific ways to the specific suspect.
I was going to end there, but I want to mention my fourth levels who, even though I did not give them a song, nevertheless showed a huge leap forward as well. On Friday I had them write the story of losing something and asking others to look for it and then find it. I had them work in larger groups, four to six, and this might have contributed to the success. I was able to work with many people on one text that they had created and so we got through a lot of cruxes in the first part of class. The second I let some perform. And the group of my rowdiest put together a very funny drama about losing a pen, looking for it, thinking one person had it who in turn thought another had it. This went on with more or less comprehensible English, until it turned out that someone in the corner actually had it. Well all the people previous to this, who had joined in the search after being questioned, declared this man a thief and basically put together an impromptu tribunal. It was great.
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