For a collaborative speaking exercise, my advanced students turned to page 77 in their textbook to consider a list of five things that can affect a couple’s relationship. The students were supposed to converse in pairs about the possible effects that money, communication skills, shared interests, cultural background, and parental approval could have on a relationship. I have only two students in this class, a boy and a girl, so the pairing was easy. The students knew the routine, but neither jumped in. “Why don’t you start,” I suggested to the boy.
“Start by asking her opinion or giving mine?” he queried with his gentle laugh, and both the girl and I told him that he got to choose.
Girl and boy are probably the wrong terms for these young adults in their early 20s. They are both still living at home while wrapping up their university degrees, one in engineering and the other in primary school teaching, but they handle all kinds of difficult situations every day as adults would. Nevertheless, they seem youthfully innocent in their English-language skills. They are clumsy adolescents, all feet, tripping over themselves. To their eager youth, I am the indulgent grownup, sitting back while keeping an eye on them but ready to encourage with pointers. If a correction was the equivalent of picking them up off the ground after a misstep and a fall, then I did that, too, reminding them of their oft-repeated errors. About other, harder-to-categorize faults, such as awkward word order or going to clumsy lengths to express a simple thought, I bit my tongue. It was just their Spanish coming through. One doesn’t learn to think in English because a stick is applied. It has to come naturally, I believe.
So they talked, and I listened. They were in their usual places, directly in front of me, dutifully going through their routine. Outside, evening had come, dark and drizzly, streetlights on, sidewalks shining wetly, people eager to be at home. Weren’t my students eager to be home too? The boy was commenting on parental approval, saying it is important, but that it would be difficult to end a relationship if that were the only trouble. Difficult but necessary, I understood. Then the girl talked about money, the boy responded, and so they covered the five points with very little elegance or dexterity. Their workaday output seemed both commendable and pitiable. Is that how hard work always looks? At least when compared to someone getting better results with a natural flare?
My mind wandered to a 13-year-old from another class, by far the best student I’ve had in years, though she is so quiet and unassuming that until recently I hadn’t understood how fantastic her brain is. She is not someone to wow you with verbal tricks. She gives straightforward answers in a voice more tentative than assured. Quite often when I ask her class if they are familiar with a word or phrase, she, like the others, does not know it. So it is not her ample vocabulary that impresses but her astoundingly apt use of all manner of description and the connecting words for reasoning. Once she learns the language, she uses it unerringly. I hadn’t tested her writing skills, though, so one day, I asked her to write an essay at a level above hers. The essay she handed in to me the next class had almost no errors. Even better, it flowed beautifully and made complete sense. Her language felt effortless. I suspect that this student thinks in English better than many of her fellows do in Spanish. A beautiful mind. I like my advanced students, but I esteem this student.
My two advanced students finished their speaking exercise. Before we went on, I asked the boy about his comment on parental approval. “It sounds as if you might call off a relationship just because your parents didn’t approve of your partner.”
“Well, I mean, you have your family for all your life.” (Your whole life, I corrected silently. Most of my students don’t distinguish between whole and all. Except, of course, my 13-year-old.)
I nodded, thinking of less docile responses to a parent’s unwelcome judgement. In Alice Munro’s short story “Apples and Oranges,” the young Murray, just out of college and home to take over the family dry goods store, hears about Barbara, a new employee, from the disreputable Delaney family. She is a looker, tall and well-developed, Murray’s father warns him. Murray meets her, and when she freely disparages her no-good brother, he is impressed by her lack of family feeling, so different from his own burdensome ties of obligation, decency, and loyalty. He falls in love.
She is like Lorna Doone, but with a rougher tongue and stronger spine, he thinks, certain (and correct) that his mother won’t like her. Parental disapproval, however, does not dissuade Murray from Barbara but cements his admiration for her. Lorna Doone, not some ill-bred daughter of a villainous tribe but a flower springing from a swamp. The heiress not of a fortune but of independent thought and free feelings. Is my 13-year-old likewise other than the simple Spanish teen she appears to be? Is there perhaps an English novelist or Welsh poet in her family tree, an Irish essayist or Scottish author of romances? Why not? They say that blood will tell.
“Wouldn’t you think,” I said to my two students, “wouldn’t you expect parents to back off once they see their disapproval doesn’t change their child’s opinion of the partner?” My students looked sympathetic. But it turned out they thought it more reasonable for the lovers to give in than for the parents to. For the child to side with the parents and abandon the partner. Blood is thicker than water, my students might have reminded me. In Spain, anyway, where they are the knowing adults and I am still the fanciful, naive child.
