Blog #4: Is this How Language Really Works?

By Quan Cao, ELL Outlook™ Contributing Writer

Autumn is a season unique unto itself and unlike any other season. It comes upon us with little warning, and yet it stands out as another summer fades away and another winter looms on the horizon. Buoyed by an artificial turning of the clock, an early morning frost, a soft drizzle lifting the afternoon vapors off the hot asphalt of the highways, a bright rush of red and orange in a quickly fading sunset, autumn coolly ushers in a SAD (seasonal affective disorder) moment. We were discussing this morning Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl and Gregorio Lopez y Fuentes' A Letter to God.

The first short story is a nineteenth-century sad tale of social dysfunction, a tearjerker story of a little girl forced by her father to go out on Christmas Eve in the cold dark of night to sell matches on a street corner to unsympathetic and carefree strangers. The second is another sad depiction of poverty, a poor farmer named Lencho who wrote to God asking for help after his crops were spared by the locusts but completely decimated by a hailstorm.

We talked about the demands of an agrarian culture that depends on the vagaries of the weather and the whims of Mother Nature. We then contrasted Lencho's illiteracy and faith in God with our modern, secularly blind faith in our institutional responses and the media's shaping of our understanding of events and situations in an urban jungle with its own rules, laws, and codes of conduct that are often kept secret from outsiders and visitors.

As usual, the conversation reverted back to the greed of humankind and our natural ability to torture ourselves and to cause ourselves pain. When Lencho takes his letter to the post office, the Postmaster reads it and goes around the office to raise the money to help the unsuspecting farmer. When the farmer gets the reply from God with only 75 pesos instead of the 100 he had asked for, he angrily sits down and writes God another note, asking him to send the rest of the cash through another means instead of the mail since he suspects the mailmen of thievery and crookedness.

The Little Match Girl's story is even devoid of that small chuckle. The child labor and hunger that were so characteristic of England's preindustrial urban dwellings exposed the blatant child neglect and abuse that still occurrs in many ways in today's sweat shops, migrant camps, and cocoa fields. My students chimed in to share their own stories of beggar slums in Rio and child pornography Web sites from Romania and Thailand.

This morning, in particular, we seemed to hit a learning moment concerning the invincibility of youth and the virtual reality my students have created for themselves. As I looked around, the changes of this past year in their "separate peace" reality of an American university classroom have affected them little: the Middle East wars, the daily domestic violence crimes, the celebrity marriages, the institutional and seasonal rituals of another election, and another batch of self-defining messages advertising yet another virtual reality. Nevertheless, my students still sense and feel their invincibility in an all-knowing, omnipotent, uneasily insecure sort of way. Are they part of this 1.5 NewGen that has one foot in the new culture surrounding them and another in the past they are disconnected from, yet unwilling to let go? Are they part of the 0.5 generation that will never feel completely at home? Are they part of a 2.5 NextGen that is yet to be defined and that will not have time to define itself because change just happens so quickly that the 3.5 Gen is already pushing them aside?

I guided the conversation to focus on the pace of change overwhelming each and every one of us, away from the notions of right and wrong, better and worse, and the dichotomies of my country/your country, us and them.

At the end of the hour, embedded in our discussion of ideas and feelings, we had practiced 10 new phrasal verbs associated with the term "hand," gone around the world and back, and decided corporal punishment is not all bad but still unacceptable. They had shared some fresh scars and some old wounds from an unfinished childhood and an evolving acculturation. Most importantly, they verbalized some aspirations for a new world and their new life.

If you have any comments about this article or questions for for the author, please send them to: alex@coursecrafters.com.