Finished the first Lesson, Lesson 8, with a polemic on the past tense1.
I wonder what this might have been.
Young-Toby grew up as part of the not-taught-traditional-grammar-at-school generation.
While he’s teaching others, he’s himself learning about the pluperfect and other tenses from Harrap’s English Grammar — a small blue plastic covered book that I would like to show him anxiously consulting in a toilet cubicle, in between lessons, though I have no definite memory of this. (I do remember that some schoolboy had pasted some porn up on the cubicle wall.)
Milena’s idea for the school is that Czech adults, her main customers, will have no requirement for TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) qualifications in their teachers. What they’ll respect is an English degree.
When she introduced young-Toby on his first day, she said, ‘This is Toby Litt. He comes from England. He has a degree in English Language and Literature from Oxford University.’
She did not say that the language bit mainly involved rote-learning Anglo-Saxon poetry and bluff-reading Gawain and the Green Night.
However, young-Toby still feels able to give his students polemics. He speaks with energy. He’s already figured out that it’s important — really important — for students to see you care. That you want to anticipate their mistakes, and help them avoid them.
Sometimes you have to be stern.
A close friend of mine, teaching Modernism to BA students, regularly used to ask them — in about week 2 or 3 — if they’d done the reading?
If they all said they hadn’t, she would give them a talking to about wasting their degrees, and she’d end the class after five minutes.
The following week, they’d all have done the reading.