Bon mot for the week

"I enjoy learning, but I dislike being taught."

Winston Churchill  (1874-1965)

Bon mot for the week

"A gardener does not 'grow' flowers; he tries to give them what he thinks they need and they grow by themselves."

John Holt (1923-1985)

We've heard from Mr Holt in this series before (here and here), and we might again. He was a pioneering educator whose writing became a major influence on me in my childhood and in my early teaching career. Here, of course, he was thinking of gardening as a metaphor for teaching.

Wise words on teaching the young

"We destroy the love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty rewards – in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else."

John Holt (1923-1985)

I've quoted John Holt on here a number of times before. He was a highly influential writer on the practice of education and one of the only truly inspiring figures that I can acknowledge as having shaped the development of my own thinking. I stumbled across this online the other day (almost certainly a rediscovery, since I read just about everything he ever wrote when I was a teenager) and couldn't resist sharing it.

Bon mot for the week

"To sentence a man of true genius to the drudgery of a school is to put a racehorse on a treadmill." 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1172-1834)

It is unclear whether it was teachers or students that Coleridge was sympathising with here.

And he might equally well have said "to the drudgery of office work".

Bon mot for the week

"You can count how many seeds are in the apple, but not how many apples are in the seed."

Ken Kesey (1935-2001)

Now, where did that come from?

Where did she come from?

I experienced another unusually vivid and memorable dream at the start of the week (I've had a bit of a run of them just lately).

As in the last one, denial of age and decay (and dissatisfaction with China?) was probably a large impetus: I once again found myself winding the clock back some 18 or 20 years, to when I was still in my twenties.

I was, in fact, back in the period of my life when I was a schoolteacher, my first job after university (that might have been in my mind, I suppose, because I'd recently mentioned it to a friend who's just started teaching high school in America). The school was understood to be the one where I had actually taught - although, in that devil-may-care way of dreams, its layout was nothing like that school; and none of the staff or pupils seemed to be the same. It was an entirely imaginary recreation of what my teaching experience might have been like.

Also, curiously, I was aware that I was just returning to the school after a year or two away. I'd had to quit that job abruptly because of a health crisis. I had half-heartedly considered trying to return there when I got better, but I don't think that was ever likely to come to fruition (my sudden departure was harshly judged by staff and students alike; I learned from ex-pupils I subsequently met in Oxford and London that there was a prevalent rumour I had AIDS). I suppose there must have been some wistfulness in me to return there; or at least to undo, to erase the horrific period of my illness. Over the next few years, I dreamt so often of having returned to the job after a year that I almost began to believe it must indeed have happened. (And in these early dreams, the school and its personnel were always accurately detailed, completely lifelike - unlike this most recent one.)

The dream seemed to start off as a wrestling with the question of whether or not I might return to the teaching life. I think I was not fully recovered from my ill health, and somehow only provisionally committed to a trial term, to see if I could yet cope with the workload again. It was the first day of term, so it was really a bit difficult to back out - but I did seem to be undecided, on the brink of succumbing to cold feet.

But then the dream suddenly branched off in an entirely unexpected direction - a rather pleasantly erotic direction. I found I was feeling a strong attraction to one of the older girls. She was not really very beautiful, but she had a poise and an intelligence that I found fascinating. However, I have always been sternly moralistic about the inappropriateness of romantic liaisons between teachers and students, and staunchly resisted these feelings. Well, I always have done so in real life. In the dream, my ethics proved much less robust. When the girl made it clear that she reciprocated my interest in her, I couldn't resist the temptation for long, and we were soon indulging in a furtive snog. Very nice it was, too.

That was about it for the dream. I soon awoke in a ferment of shame and self-loathing.

I would never have suspected it during my own school days (however, I went to a single sex school), but, I later learned, teacher-student liaisons are a surprisingly common phenomenon. I was startled to discover that many of my female friends at university claimed to have had such an experience, or to have had a schoolfriend who had. And a few years later, these same ladies mostly expressed shock and disappointment that I hadn't enjoyed such a relationship myself when I became a teacher. They joked that it was no more than an expected perk of the job. I was aghast.

I worry that it's really rather too easy to impress a young woman you're teaching - particularly in high school, and most particularly in a boarding school, where they may have a limited social life, limited access to male company other than boys of their own age (and boys tend to be much less mature at the same age; so, rather unsatisfying companions, usually), almost no access to adult males other than their teachers. Familiarity alone breeds affection: you tend to become fond of people you live in close proximity with, see almost every day. And the classroom can be an unusually intense, and an extremely intimate environment. Of course, they tend to admire you disproportionately as an authority figure and a fount of knowledge. And they feel grateful to you for imparting your knowledge to them, inspiring and encouraging them, helping them to get into university. No, it's not surprising that girls fall for their teachers.

I find it harder to comprehend how teachers allow themselves to fall for their students. If you do enter into such a relationship, you are unfairly exploiting a situation of unbalanced power (feminists might argue that there's almost always a situation of unbalanced power between a man and a woman, but it is particularly pronounced between a teacher and a student). And you can never really be confident how much the girl likes you, and how much she likes rather the idea of you, the role that you play in her life. I don't think many of these relationships have much longevity.

Perhaps I was lucky not to feel the temptation all that strongly. Admittedly, girls in their late teens are often in their finest bloom of prettiness; and they do generally seem to be much more 'grown up' than boys of that sort of age. The gap between a young teacher in his early twenties, fresh out of university, and a senior year student of 17 or 18 isn't so very great, is it? Well, yes, I find there is a huge gap in experience and attitude. University is a fundamental rite of passage for most of us, the point at which we begin to emerge into adulthood (although I'd venture that for most people the process is not in fact complete until two or three years into their working life). I couldn't really see myself being interested in a girl of 18 even when I was 20 and still an undergraduate, and certainly not by the time I was nearly 25 and working. (As I recounted on The Barstool the other day, I did briefly go out with a girl of 17 - when I was 31! - but it didn't work out; belated proof of my long-held prejudice.)

Moreover, I take teaching way more seriously than most people. I have a reverential awe for the function, and particularly for the notion of standing in loco parentis. You are not just responsible for your charges' education, but for their physical and moral well-being; it is a sacred trust, not to be abused.

I held myself to that principle, even though I was sorely tempted on occasion. Well, in four years, I suffered two very bad crushes on Sixth Form girls in the school where I was teaching. (We only had girls in the Sixth Form - the upper two years. I think that might have made our circumstances particularly difficult: if you've known a girl from an age where she is definitely too young for you to fancy her, I think you get used to not fancying her, to not allowing yourself to fancy her - even when she subsequently blooms into womanhood. That seems to be how it works with me, anyway.) The second of them I regard as one of the great loves of my life - we got to know each other pretty well over two years: she was a remarkable intellect, a remarkable person. And I did contemplate trying to initiate a relationship with her after we'd both left the school (the episode of life-threatening illness rather scuppered that plan; although I think I'd stepped away from it anyway - not wanting to bother the poor girl at this great transitional phase of her life [reading history at Cambridge], feeling that she could do better for herself than a physically broken down, penniless and unemployable wreck like me). But while she was a student, and I was a teacher, I kept my affections in check - never acted on them, never gave any indication of them (well, I hope; I think she suspected, towards the end).

The only person I could confide in about this moral torment was my best friend on the staff, another novice teacher I would later come to think of as The Arts Entrepreneur. Ever the cynic, he was sceptical of my supposed high ideals, and suggested it was perhaps only embarrassment, the fear of getting caught that was really restraining me. 

He proposed a taunting hypothetical to test my resolve - The Secret Tunnel. Imagine, he said, that there was a hidden underground passageway connecting your room here to hers on the other side of the school, and that you could visit her at any time you liked, with no risk of detection - would you still cling to this supposed sanctity of the teacher-student bond?

It was a very difficult question! Thank heavens it was only hypothetical.

An especially topical 'Sunday Poem'

Well the wind has relented today; but for most of this week it has been howling down out of the north-west at 15, 20, 25 mph. And every one of those miles represents a degree or so of windchill.

Feverish with a cold, and struggling to sleep anyway through the ominous resonating of my building, fragments of this piece by Ted Hughes kept popping into my mind.

I think I'd first come upon it as a teenager. I then chose to use it a few times in poetry classes I taught myself when I became a schoolteacher for a while a few years later. Wonderful how obstinately poetry resides in the memory, when so much else is lost! I hadn't read this poem - or even given it a thought - in at least a dozen years; but I found I could recall it almost word for word.

Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,

The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,

Winds stampeding the fields under the window

Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky

The hills had new places, and wind wielded

Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,

Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as

The coal-house door. Once I looked up -

Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes

The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guy-rope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,

At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;

The wind flung a magpie away and a black-

Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note

That any second would shatter it. Now deep

In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip

Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,

And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,

Seeing the window tremble to come in,

Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

Ted Hughes  (1930-1998)

Bon mot for the week

"The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do."

John Holt  (1923-1985)

It was a pleasant surprise to stumble upon this familiar name during my online meanderings a couple of weeks ago. I discovered Holt's books in my local branch of the W.H. Smith's newsagent's/bookshop when I was in my early teens (there was a brief period of my life when, for some reason I now forget, I was going home from school by bus every day; but, facing a wait of nearly an hour, I consumed entire books while browsing the shelves in Smith's). His How Children Fail and How Children Learn left a particularly deep impression, and may well have had a decisive influence on my becoming a schoolteacher after university.

Another example of why I don't like working for Chinese universities

I've just finished a month of business training seminars for a major state-owned enterprise. Although this SOE has its own - enormous - 'training campus' to the north of Beijing, and thus could quite easily (you'd think) arrange such training for itself, it chooses to sub-contract to an outside supplier. That supplier, in this case, is a small commercial English school based on one of Beijing's better-known universities (the exact nature of the relationship with the university itself is unclear; often such commercial entitites seem to be essentially autonomous, and are merely paying some kind of fee to use the university's name and facilities to enhance their 'credibility'). Why anyone would choose this particular school is quite baffling to me; but, evidently, quite a lot of people do. It must be down to guanxi. Or because they're CHEAP.

I've worked for them many times before, but.... they are as outrageously incompetent as every other Chinese school - and especially every university or university-based school - that I've worked for here (I bitched about this course right at the outset).

Latest case in point: they've just asked me to provide a mark for each of the students on the course.

Today - after the course has finished.

No mention of any requirement or expectation for the students to be graded was mentioned before the course started, or during the four weeks that it was running. Hence, I didn't run any formally assessed exercises, and didn't keep many notes on the students' performance in class. I could come up with some marks retrospectively, but, you know, it's not easy. This is really the kind of thing that you should PLAN FOR from the outset.

But 'planning', you see, just doesn't happen in China. Not in the education sector, anyway. People just bumble along, improvising their way as haphazardly and inefficiently as possible. You are never told whether you are expected to grade students.... UNTIL IT'S TOO LATE. You are never told how to grade them (10-point scale, 20-point scale, percentage, A-to-E letter grades... Greek letters... half-marks... +++ or -?, etc.). You are never told why they are being graded. And, worst of all, you are never told the expected range of marks (if I think 85% is an "outstanding" mark, but the students or the course organisers are going to be disappointed if anyone scores less than 90%, I need to know that; and if, as here, there are several different trainers teaching different components of the course, we need to try to make our grading fairly consistent - we shouldn't have one guy giving everyone scores in the 80s and another giving a spread from 65 to 95 and another giving beta pluses and alpha minuses).

I weep and chew the carpet in frustration at this kind of mind-blowing incompetence.

Oh, and they haven't given me a mark sheet or a name list either...

I miss teaching literature, but...

There are consolations at times.... when you reflect on how poorly most of your efforts are received (or on how poor most of your efforts are?!). It is a thankless task.

[This from Graph Jam - another of the great Internet time-wasters!]

The weekly haiku

Sculptors can give up,
Discard blunt chisel, brittle stone.
Teachers must endure.

Mr Grindtooth again

I'm doing a business training course for a Chinese state-owned enterprise this month.

It's arranged through an 'English school' run by a Chinese university (god help me!).

Thus.... a course is thrown together in a headlong rush, by people who know nothing whatsoever about teaching or course planning, and without any consultation with the poor bloody trainers who will be delivering it... without any level testing or needs assessment of the intended students... and, as far as I can discern, without even any meaningful discussion about the course structure or purpose with the people responsible for booking it.

Still, I don't have to worry too much any of this headless chicken stuff because at least "all the course materials will be provided" for me.

They provide one book.

It's a self-study book rather than a classroom workbook.

Most of it is based on listening activities, which work particularly poorly in a classroom setting (and they've given me a very large group for this course; nearly twice as big as you'd hope for in an intensive business skills-focused course). Moreover, it's very high level listening material - content-rich, employing some sophisticated vocabulary, and delivered in a variety of non-standard English accents, many of them Eastern European. It's just too darned difficult for most of my students. 

[It has become something of an article of dogma in TESOL circles that foreign learners should be exposed to 'authentic English' in all its richness and variety. Cambridge Exams are particularly keen on this use of European non-native speaker accents for their Business English Certificate. I see the virtues of this in principle. Unfortunately, in practice, I've just about never met a Chinese English speaker who can cope with it at all. Their comprehension just falls apart if they're listening to audio only, and being confronted with a non-standard accent and idiomatic vocabulary.]

And even if I did make use of all this inappropriate listening material and adapted the other exercises in the book to classroom use, it's only about 12 to 15 hours' worth of material. I have 28 timetabled hours to fill.

So, the book is all but discarded, and I have to create most of the activities and materials myself.

But the school likes the feedback I'm getting so much, they're asking me to do a course for a different group of students on the same topic next month.

Oh dear: it is supposed to be exactly the same course, using exactly the same book.

But at least it's only 15 hours this time.

Just ONCE before I leave this country, I'd like to work with someone who actually gives a damn about course design. I fear it's never going to happen.

This is (one of the reasons) why I do not like working for Chinese universities.

Bon mot for the week

"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."

Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918)

It makes a fellow proud to be an Oxonian!

I have just learned that a couple of weeks ago, alongside the famous 182-year-old Boat Race, England's two oldest universities inaugurated an Inter-Varsity Stoat Race.

There's been a Goat Race for a few years now, so I suppose this was a logical progression. Unfortunately, Cambridge appear to have established an ascendancy in goat racing. Oxford, however, stormed to victory in the first-ever Stoat Race on March 26th, thereby establishing a crucial early lead in what I am sure will go on to become a long-running and historic sporting series.

Then again, we won the first Boat Race too, but then got stuffed in seven out of the next eight; and we haven't held the lead in that series for 82 years now.

I take an especially keen interest in these novel forms of sporting contest, since I went to the college which originated Tortoise Racing. This is the kind of creativity that distinguishes the truly elite academic institutions. Beida, Tsinghua, and Fudan are never going to muscle their way into the 'Top 30' of the QS Rankings until they start cultivating this sort of wild undergraduate frivolity.

Dying in harness

I was reflecting the other day on my first career as a schoolmaster (nearly twenty years ago now: it seems another life, someone else's, not my own).  Much as I loved the job (or certain aspects of it, anyway), I was mightily relieved to have escaped it, when a spell of serious illness forced me to retire in my mid-twenties.

There's something insidiously comfortable about that lifestyle: the steady routines, the short working hours and long holidays, the sense of separateness - of being insulated - from the outside world; and the sense of mastery too, of having absolute dominion over your classes, absolute (well, nearly) freedom to do whatever you will with them - unsupervised and unchecked by anyone.

But there's a deadening inertia about it, too.  There's not much in the way of a career path - unless you want to take on major administrative duties (at the cost of reduced contact time with pupils) or pastoral responsibilities as a live-in housemaster in a boarding school.  It can be quite difficult to change schools.  And, after a while, you become so attuned to the characteristic eccentricities of the school and the staff you're currently working with that change begins to seem too effortful, too irksome a dislocation.

It's not uncommon to find schoolteachers (particularly in the private sector) who have spent their entire working lives in the same school.  In fact, the deputy headmaster at the school where I taught had himself been educated there, and thus - apart from the brief interlude of university, which I gather he hadn't much enjoyed - he had spent his entire life in the same place.  I found that baffling and horrifying.  But I could see that - without a bold and decisive step, and perhaps a willingness to embrace a period of unemployment - this was a path that I myself was heading along.

For me, it was ultimately the routines - the very orderliness and predictability that some people find so reassuring - that started to make the job seem irksome to me.  The repetitive cycle of the timetable oppresses the soul, I found, makes you feel like a hamster on a wheel.  Each week is the same as the one before, and each term, and each year.

There's not even that much variety available to you in what you can teach (in English literature).  Shakespeare is, of course, compulsory for all; but the number of his plays which are at all accessible for children of 14 years old or so is really pretty small.  The longer, more complex works like Lear and Hamlet have to be reserved for advanced studies at 16+.  With the juniors you're stuck with Romeo & Juliet or Julius Caesar, and perhaps Macbeth or Othello; and maybe Henry V or Richard III for a history play, and As You Like It or The Taming Of The Shrew for a comedy.  And that's assuming that your school has sufficient copies of all of these, and that all available copies have not already been appropriated by your more senior colleagues; in practice, you may only have three or four to choose from - and you have to do two with each year group.  When 'The Scottish Play' came around for the third time in four years, I found myself thinking, "Not again!"  And I didn't want to be feeling like that about Shakespeare, going 'stale' on such great writing through enforced over-exposure.  And so I resolved to get out, after at most one more year.  (But, as Fate would have it, a near-death experience got me out of it rather sooner than that.)

Philip Larkin has a fine short poem, Schoolmaster, on the theme of spending a whole lifetime in such a narrow sphere, and how such an environment erodes your sense of identity, your independent will.  It closes with the chilling line:  He had dissolved.  (Like sugar in a cup of tea.)

Unfortunately, I can't find that one online.  But here's another good one.  Some online sources appear to attribute this to Larkin, but I'm pretty sure it's actually by Vernon Scannell.  The style and sensibility are very alike, though; I'm not completely confident in the identification.

Ageing Schoolmaster

And now another autumn morning finds me
With chalk dust on my sleeve and in my breath,
Preoccupied with vague, habitual speculation
On the huge inevitability of death.

Not wholly wretched, yet knowing absolutely
That I shall never reacquaint myself with joy,
I sniff the smell of ink and chalk and my mortality
And think of when I rolled, a gormless boy,

And rollicked round the playground of my hours,
And wonder when precisely tolled the bell
Which summoned me from summer liberties
And brought me to this chill autumnal cell

From which I gaze upon the April faces
That gleam before me, like apples ranged on shelves;
And yet I feel no pinch or prick of envy
Nor would I have them know their sentenced selves.

With careful effort I can separate the faces,
The dull, the clever, the various shapes and sizes;
But in the autumn shades I find I only
Brood upon death, who carries off all the prizes.

Vernon Scannell  (1922-2007)

Film List - another quotations quiz

Following on from my post earlier in the week about whether - and why - there have been relatively few movie lines to emerge as lasting 'classics' in the past decade or so (which included a link to the AFI's Top 100 Film Quotations), here is a personal list of memorable quotes that I've sometimes used in teaching "film appreciation" classes here in China. [Just under half of these made it into the AFI list; I think I'd take some of these over some of theirs!]

See how many of them you can spot...

[I'll add the answers in a comment below next weekend.]


1)  “I'm gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.”


2)  “I know it was you, Fredo. I know it was you.”


3)  “Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here – this is the War Room.”


4)  “Top of the world, Ma!”


5)  “Is this the end of Rico?”


6)  “Rosebud.”


7)  “So, you think you’re a rebel?”  “You could say that.”   “What are you rebelling against, Johnny?”   “What have you got?”


8)  “I coulda been a contender.”


9)  “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Smells like… Victory.”


10)  “There’s too many, Shane.”


11)  “That was amazing – the best shot I’ve ever seen.”  “The worst! I was aiming for the horse.”


12)  “Round up the usual suspects.”


13)  “Are you looking at me?”


14)  “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr DeMille.”


15)  “Heeeeere’s Johnny!”


16)  “There are times when a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”


17)  “No, it wasn’t the airplanes that killed him. ’Twas Beauty killed the Beast.”


18)  “Lunch is for wimps.”


19)  “A boy’s best friend is his mother.”


20)  “Oh, my god – it’s full of stars!”


21)  “You ain’t heard nothing yet!”


22)  “Sometimes, nothing can be a real cool hand.”


23)  “In this country, first you gotta get the money; then you get the power; then you get the women.”


24)  “You’re a big man – but you’re out of shape. With me, this is a full-time job.”


25)  “You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”


26)  “It’s 104 miles to Chicago; we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark – and we’re wearing sunglasses.”  “Hit it!”

The thing about this selection, you see, is that the majority of them - a good 70 or 80%, I would guess - are at least kind of familiar to most people in 'the West', certainly most people from English-speaking countries (yes, even non-film buffs; even people who don't watch films at all!), and any serious cinema enthusiast could probably name the film and/or character for getting on for half of them at least; but here in China... well, even the most 'obvious' and well-known of these lines enjoy just about zero recognition.  Even with films like The Godfather - which everyone here has seen - the great lines and the great moments just do not enter the popular culture as they do elsewhere.  Perhaps it's partly a language problem: people are often watching these classics of foreign cinema dubbed into Chinese; even those who are trying to listen in English will frequently lean heavily on Chinese subtitles; and even those who rely purely on the original English soundtrack, and have good enough English to understand it fairly well, still find it very hard to really absorb and remember things that they hear in English (absorption and retention of content from reading seems to me to be usually much better, even though overall comprehension levels might be quite poor; I wonder if that's really so, and why it might be the case).  I don't run this kind of quotations list as a 'quiz' with classes here, because everyone would score ZERO; I try to use it more as an Internet-search 'treasure hunt' kind of thing.

[Note also that I wouldn't vouch for the absolute accuracy of the wording in each of these quotes.  When we're talking about the prominence of a line in popular culture, frequent repetition outside of the original context will often introduce small changes here and there - and these changes may even occasionally be slight improvements on the original.  It's an impossible task to try to verify each of these.  Online sources are not to be relied upon: they are usually based on transcriptions by a movie-watcher, which may be flawed (often, I suspect, influenced by how the fan thinks they remember the line from previous viewings), or become subsequently corrupted in further copying.  Even supposed extracts from 'original scripts' are not all that authoritative: how do we know that these sources are the actual screenplay?  And, even if they are, will they record little changes that were - consciously or unconsciously - introduced by the actor in delivering the line on film?  No, it's a futile effort to try to find 'definitive versions' of these quotes online; I'm not even convinced about that AFI list being completely spot-on for all of them.  I think the only way to have a chance of achieving that level of 'accuracy' would be to listen to each of the film extracts - carefully, more than once, and ideally in the context of the whole of the original scene from which they come rather than the extremely abbreviated soundbite extracts you find on YouTube.  And I just don't have time for that.

So, please don't carp at supposed small inaccuracies.  In this context, I think it's enough that a line should be recognisable.]

ANSWERS now added in a comment below.

Sunday Linguistics Corner - the teaching of English

A couple of days ago I attended a talk by Dr Chris Hall, of York St John University, on the topic of 'Embracing Hybridity' in English language teaching.

He raised a number of interesting points, with most of which I found myself in fairly violent disagreement.  So, I thought I would outline my objections and responses here (because nobody reads the blog on a Sunday!).  I shall try to be brief.  I'll probably fail.

No 'Standard' English?  

Is 'Core English' a better way of thinking about it?

Dr Hall was espousing what seems to have become the 'new orthodoxy' in academic linguistics and EFL teaching circles over the past couple of decades: that it is misguided (and damaging) to cling to the notion of a 'standard English' amid the plurality of English varieties, 'world Englishes', that exist today; that it is, indeed, linguistically 'imperialist', since the 'standard' we most often attempt to adhere to is British (or US) English, with little attention or respect accorded to other varieties.

My response is that if you completely abandon any idea of 'standard English', you are also abandoning standards in English - throwing the baby out with the bath water.  The evolutionary tendencies of language are mostly centrifugal - the movement is towards diversification and divergence (and/or, all too often, towards a degeneration in precision, flexibility, usefulness): the road to Babel.  I believe that language teaching (in any language, but especially in English, since it has become established as the world lingua franca today, and might, I think, in a few centuries, become the sole world language) needs to provide a centripetal counter to that tendency, to establish a fairly stable centre which can help to join language varieties together, stop them diverging so far from each other that they become mutually unintelligible.

You can 'depoliticise' your ways of thinking about and talking about the teaching of English, without giving up on this 'core mission' to identify and perpetuate the crucial 'common ground' in the family of modern Englishes.  I accept the points that one should not be intolerant of colourful local variations in the use of English, should not be too slavish in adherence to a 'standard English', and should not over-correct learners, criticising them for unimportant 'errors'.  However, the position of linguists like Dr Hall threatens to lead to an ultimate permissiveness in language teaching, where we are required to honour the 'validity' of every single utterance of English from every single speaker and never 'correct' anything at all.  Without correction, there is no learning; and the naturally divergent tendency of languages could run completely amok.

I believe the idea of allowing all English speakers 'ownership' of the language is being dangerously overextended by the likes of Dr Hall.  Yes, it's psychologically helpful for learners of a language to develop a sense of confidence and empowerment in their use of the language, not to feel embarrassed or inadequate because of idiosyncrasies or 'defects' in the way they use it.  But it is possible for a sensitive teacher to engender that sort of confidence without entirely abandoning 'correction'.  There are core standards in the English language we should try to adhere to.  Divergences from this core, while we can acknowledge their potential attractiveness or usefulness, need to be identified and restricted in the basic teaching of English.

That, perhaps, is the key point.  Most of the practical examples Dr Hall gave towards the end of his presentation were directed towards enhancing students' communicative effectiveness in specific situations, and developing strategies for overcoming the particular difficulties that may be encountered between two non-native English speakers talking to each other.  These are techniques you would only introduce with fairly advanced students.  I'm not sure how far it is possible or useful to push back this 'approach' into the very earliest stages of learning the language.

In order to be 'politically correct' or 'politically sensitive', the English teacher today has to be able to 'correct' without diminishing a student's sense of self-worth, and has to be able to refer to a body of core standards in English usage (to which adherence is encouraged, although divergence need not be completely denied) which are not tied to any national chauvinism.

I don't teach 'British English'.  I don't even speak it (or write it) any more.  After many years of living overseas in mixed expat communities, one loses a sense of connectedness to one's home country and becomes very 'internationalised' - both in general outlook and in use of English.  When Chinese students ask me the differences between British and US English, and ask which I will teach them - I chortle!  What differences?  The differences are trivial, unimportant (if you can absorb that -or/-our divergence in spelling, you've got about 50% of it down) compared to the massive commonality between the two varieties - and compared to the massive commonality in all major varieties of modern English around the world.  And it is that common ground - rather than the regional variations - that most of our attention is directed to in teaching English, at least at the more basic level.

Therefore, I believe we need to establish a 'Core English' we wish to try to maintain as a stable centre linking the vast family of modern Englishes together - but strip it of any identification with one particular variety of the language or any sense of national superiority attaching to elements of it.  We can't expect that 'core' to remain completely stable over time, but we need to try to maintain it as a unifying reference point, and absorb new divergences into it only cautiously.  British English may have furnished most of the current 'core', because Britain was where the language originated - but that is an historical curiosity, of interest only to philologists; it has no relevance in the English classroom.  In future, the 'British' elements of Core English will become less dominant - and less and less readily identified as British - as fresh input from all over the globe (primarily, of course, from America which is now culturally dominant in the world, even though its number of native English speakers is relatively small; but potentially from every other country too) slowly modifies the 'core'.

I think I'm usually at the more permissive end of the spectrum in teaching English: I refrain from correcting very much, and praise students' communicative effectiveness regardless of any technical flaws in their English.  But I do think there are flaws in English usage - flaws which can be identified, and which should be resisted; flaws which, though they may not prevent communicative effectiveness, nevertheless tend to obstruct or diminish it; flaws which students, ideally, should become self-aware about, and should seek to eliminate or restrict.  The extreme position of linguistic theorists is that all varieties of language usage are equally valid - not just all major national or regional varieities of a language, but each individual's unique usage, their idiolect.  That, as I said earlier, is the path to Babel.

We can acknowledge that flavour, flavor, and flava are all widespread variant spellings of the same word in different language communities/situations; but flavur, flaivor, phlava & co. are just plain WRONG.

There has long been a divergence in the academic study of language, and particularly in the analysis of grammar, between a descriptive and a prescriptive approach: the former merely attempts to catalogue and categorise how language is used, accepting the indistinguishable 'validity' of all new variations; the latter tries to identify an ideal core set of rules, and is usually resistant to linguistic innovation.  Although I don't believe these two approaches necessarily have to be completely exclusive, I suppose I'm in the latter camp.

Why is linguistic innovation to be resisted?  Well, for one thing, I believe that, even if such variations are potentially useful changes or additions to the language, there is a danger that if we accept them too readily, they'll start coming at us too frequently and too fast - the 'Babel effect' can become overwhelming.  More importantly, I worry that large numbers of such innovations, probably the majority, are not in fact useful; and we need to apply some sort of filtering to try to restrict the entry of these non-useful novelties into wider usage.

I am not at all opposed to linguistic innovation per se.  I don't advocate that language should remain unchanging.  I welcome much innovation in the English language, particularly the absorption of vocabulary and idioms from other languages.  But I apply three criteria in appraising the value of new usages: aesthetic appeal (is this neat, is it elegant? is it an intrinsically attractive word or phrase, or a particularly striking way of expressing something?), sophistication (does it enable me to say something I couldn't say before? does it enable me to say something better than I could say it before? does it at least provide a useful alternative way of saying something?), and clarity (does this express an idea effectively, or is there too much risk of obscurity, lack of recognition, imprecision, ambiguity?).  So many new English usages seem to fail on all three counts.  One might hope that such apparently valueless usages would wither and die naturally; but there's no harm in fighting actively against them, to hasten that end.  And alas, the evolutionary process in language is not particularly meritocratic.  Most people are lazy, slovenly, unself-critical in their use of language: they are subconsciously attracted to usages that are superficially simpler or more 'convenient' (but may in fact not even be that), or sometimes, perhaps, they are simply attracted to novelty for the sake of novelty.  The general trend of the English spoken by 'the masses' is, I fear, a predominantly degenerative one.  It is usually only a minority of intellectuals - the practitioners of literary or academic English - who introduce and promote improvements in the language.

Ah, there I go being all elitist again!  Come and have a go, if you think you're hard enough.

[By the by, Dr Hall had a lot to say about 'China English', and so have I.  But I think I'd better leave that to another quiet Sunday...]

List of the Month - Elements of 'Englishness'

I'm currently doing a series of trainings with the Beijing staff of a UK-based professional institute, and the emphasis is supposed to be, rather than on merely teaching them some English (since they're all pretty good already), on stretching their English by confronting them with some unexpected and challenging reading articles and discussion topics, on seeking to motivate them to use English more (both inside and outside of the workplace), and..... to give them some geographical, historical, and cultural background on the UK so that they will be able to relate more easily to their colleagues in the home office.

The latter has been stressed, by both the British and Chinese staff I've liaised with, as a primary goal of the course; although I fear this is somewhat misguided, or at any rate over-optimistic, since these guys - like every other group of mainland Chinese students I've ever worked with - seem have a massive incuriosity about anything outside of China.

Nevertheless, I'm doing my best with this seemingly hopeless task. I'm actually rather enjoying writing a series of 'cultural briefings' notes for them to digest and discuss once a month or so. Before I took on this project, I'd seldom consciously reflected on what it meant to be 'English' (or 'British' - and that's a whole bag of worms in itself!); so, I've often been surprising myself a little with some of the ideas I've come up with on this.

Here are some of the main points I've isolated so far:

Elements of Englishness

Rooting for the underdog

Are we the only nation on earth that invariably supports the likely loser in a contest, when we have no special reason to affiliate ourselves with one side or the other? It seems a strange thing to do. I have facetiously suggested that perhaps we do this because it mimics the masochistic experience of following our own almost invariably disappointing national sports teams.

Being 'sports mad'

We were, for curious historical reasons, the birthplace of most of the world's major organised games, and managed to export them all over the globe via the influence of the British Empire in the later 1800s. I think only the Americans rival, or perhaps exceed us, in their enthusiasm for sports - but their self-invented games haven't travelled nearly so well.

A sense of fair play and good sportsmanship

I think this is probably the aspect of our culture of which I feel most proud - the veneration for the spirit of the game, the conviction that how you play the game is more important than winning. There's a remarkable amount of 'self-policing' expected in many of the British-invented sports. Americans and others may have imbibed some of this ethos from us, but it was originally our idea.

Making a virtue out of failure

Again, I think there's a likely relationship with our admiration for underdogs to be found in our celebration of 'noble failures'. It does seem rather perverse that the disastrous Captain Scott should be the most venerated of our Victorian/Edwardian era explorers, or that the defeats at Dunkirk and Arnhem should loom largest in our shared narrative of World War Two.

The "Bulldog" spirit

The keynote of our national character seems to be this ideal of tenacity and resilience, a fighting quality that perhaps has less to do with conventional bravery than with a stubborn refusal to accept defeat. It is epitomised by our defiance of Nazi Germany during World War Two, and personified in the bulldog-like physique of our rotund and jowly wartime leader, Winston Churchill.

Reserve

Most of the stereotypes the Chinese, and other nations, hold about us are largely inaccurate, I feel; but this one is still mostly true. We're just not a very outgoing people; our emphasis on privacy (both in a reluctance to impose upon others, and an unwillingness to share our personal thoughts and opinions) tends to make us rather socially restrained. I'd like to think that this is changing slowly, as people travel more, become more 'internationalized'. But when I first hit the road in the 1990s, this difference soon became very apparent to me; you can sit in a bar in Britain for hours at a time without entering into any substantial conversation with another customer, or even with the bar staff; that just doesn't happen anywhere else in the world I've been.

Chivalry

We don't wear hats that we can doff any more, and the feminists are slowly beating us out of our drilled-in-childhood instincts to open doors for them or offer them our seats; yet courtesy towards women still seems to be at the core of the English/British sense of polite behaviour. I'd be curious to know how many other countries/cultures really push the 'women and children first!' policy in a disaster as much as we do (or how much we'd abide by it when actually faced with such a crisis!).

Individuality, eccentricity, idealism

We do revere the oddball, the obsessive, the 'great British eccentric': we have way more than our fair share of such exceptionally gifted and determined individuals, both in the useful field of technological innovation (Trevor Baylis, James Dyson), and in useless ones like setting Guinness World Records in pointless activities like brick carrying and beermat flipping. We also have a proud tradition of radical social and political innovation: abolishing slavery, improving conditions in factories and prisons, developing universal free education and healthcare, etc. I like to remind people that all of the most radical ideas associated with the French Revolution had actually been anticipated during the English Civil Wars nearly 150 years earlier.

Disdain for the French

Well, they ask for it. The Parisians are probably the most disdainful group of people on the planet: they even disdain the rest of their fellow countrymen. The rest of the French pass on that disdain to the rest of the world. And the rest of the world disdains them right back, with interest. Of course, we do it better, or at any rate more, than anyone else, because we have the additional (dis)advantage of being their close neighbours. And we have a longstanding territorial dispute (Britanny - that's obviously ours, right?), which led to 100 years of fighting with them. And in more recent times, De Gaulle was a complete arsehole. However, I suspect this historical antipathy may have been softening in the last few decades. We Englishmen have always had a bit of a weakness for French ladies (and I mean always: Shakespeare's Henry V got all soppy over a French princess!), and we probably resent French men primarily because of the better access they enjoy to French women. Lately, we've been warming up a bit more to French men because they play such darned good football: the success of Thierry Henry and other French players in the English Premiership over the past decade or so has done a lot to restore some cordiality to cross-Channel relations, I believe.

To be continued (possibly).....

How not to do it, in PowerPoint

This week, I find myself helping a number of groups of software engineers to prepare PowerPoint presentations about their company or its products.

You might think that people who work with computers every day would be pretty au fait with all the common programs that are part of the Microsoft Office Suite - but that would be a dangerous assumption.

Well, maybe it's not so much unfamiliarity with the program that's the problem (I think most of my charges today probably knew their way around it at least a little better than I did) as not having the slightest idea how to use it to present visual information.

Here are just a few of the (fairly obvious, in any language?!) DON'Ts which I encountered today:

Don't use unnecessary text on your slides

(I saw one today that began "This slide includes...")

Don't include things which are far too small to read: either enlarge them, or remove them altogether

(This applies particularly to labels on graph axes and keys to colour schemes on charts, etc. When you lift graphics like this from a Web page or a Word document, they are usually tiny; they need to be much, much bigger if there is to be any point including them on a slide; but most of the time, you really don't have to - you can explain the significance of the colour scheme in your spoken accompaniment to the slide.)

Don't have more than 4 or 5 bullet-points maximum on any slide

(The record today was taken by a guy who had a list with 14 items crammed on to one slide. Either simplify a list like that by cutting it down to the 4 or 5 most important points; or break it down into 2 or 3 separate slides.)

Don't leave a lot of white space on your slides

(Quite a number of today's students had their entire list of contents - for example - in the top left quadrant of their slide, and were going to leave the remaining two-thirds or more of the space entirely empty. You only need fairly small strips of white space around the edge of your slide; try to make the content on the slide as big as possible.)

Don't make it a struggle to read your slides

(Choose high-contrast colour schemes and large font sizes. Try to keep the text to a minimum [use headlines or bullet-points as much as possible: single words or short phrases rather than extended sentences]. Leave generous spaces between bullet-points, etc.)

Don't include too much detail - particularly complex tables of statistics, bibliographies and Web page references, etc.

(It's much better to give out information like this on a printed handout.)

Don't attempt to put on the slides everything that you intend to say during the presentation

(If you do that, you will struggle to hold your audience's attention; why should they listen to you, if they can just read your slides instead?)

Pretty elementary stuff, you'd think, but..... I could probably make a decent living just from teaching this!

A study tip for my Chinese readers

In a spirit of seasonal magnanimity....

Here is the number one piece of advice that I have given to (and had ignored by) my Chinese students over and over again in my years of teaching here.


Learn how to use a dictionary properly when 'learning' new words.


The Chinese education system stresses rote-memorization (I suppose it's the only way to learn the character writing system), and many Chinese do indeed have impressively well-developed memories.

Unfortunately, rote memorization is not a good way to learn vocabulary in another language. Many of my students have bragged to me about how they can "learn" 10, 20, or even 50 new words at a sitting. They are sadly deluded. No, you can't.

The problem, as I touched on in my last War on Chinglish post (further highlighted in the comments) is that errors so easily creep into dictionaries and word lists, and such errors are then quickly hardwired irrevocably into usage if students rely on parrot-like repetition of lists of definitions as their only means of assimilating new vocabulary. Often the definitions they learn are not outright wrong (though often they are), just incomplete or misleading. But most Chinese students will never become aware of these shortcomings because they don't refer to English dictionaries very much, or pay attention to how the words are actually used in the authentic listening and reading passages they encounter. For rote learning, students want to have a simple Chinese equivalent for each English word - and, much of the time, no such equivalent exists. And so, for example, we find Chinese students unable to distinguish between give, send, bring, take, carry, and see off because they are all identified with the single Mandarin word song, 送.

Trying to learn long strings of words is a waste of time. However good your memory is, new words won't 'stick' if you try to absorb too many at one time. Focus your efforts on a more manageable number. I usually recommend 5 or 6 at one time as a sensible maximum to attempt.

Learning one-word Chinese 'equivalents' of English words is a waste of time, and will lead you into numerous Chinglish errors. By all means, try to relate new English words to your native vocabulary (especially when you are a beginner), but be wary in doing so; always try to refer to an English-only dictionary as well. In order to truly 'know' a word and be able to use it appropriately you need to know not only its basic meaning but its range of meanings and the circumstances in which it most commonly appears; rules of use, common collocations, its synonyms and how it is distinguished from them. You can only get that from an English dictionary, not from an English-Chinese dictionary.

I usually also recommend my students to try the following exercises every time they're learning a new word:

a) Copy out the English dictionary definition of the word.

b) Try to write a definition or an explanation of the word in your own words in English.

c) Following example sentences in your dictionary and/or textbook, write a few sentences of your own which clearly illustrate the meaning of the word.

d) Try to write further sentences in which you can imagine you might actually use the word yourself.

e) Read these sentences aloud, to practice saying the word (and begin assimilating it into your listening & speaking vocabulary).

Do try this, please. It really helps.

Just memorizing lists of Chinese definitions of new English words does you more harm than good.