The unit was on climate change, and the exercise was an article with gapped sentences about the effects of rising temperatures. The vocabulary under consideration was verbs expressing duration, and the two words causing the greatest confusion were last and stay.
Before we checked the exercise as a class, I paired students to compare answers while I listened in. Ideally, the students would explain their choice whenever answers differed.
The exercise was not a success. Rather than give reasons, students simply stated their answers: “I said stayed.” “I used lasted.” Then they moved on, tacitly agreeing to disagree.
One sentence in particular stymied the class: “Recent wildfires in the western USA have both covered more ground and _____ for longer.” Four choices were given. No one opted for rested or taken, but they divided over lasted and stayed. “Talk it over,” I urged.
“Lasted is better,” said one student to her partner, who merely replied, “I think stayed is better.”
Another student, a pale, anxious boy, said, “I chose stayed.” He offered his reasoning, struggling to find the words. His partner shrugged and said he’d used lasted. Period.
The pale boy sat silently.
This was not the first time he had diligently tried to follow instructions only to be met by the wall of his partner’s bored attitude. His pale skin was pinkish, and he had freckles and auburn hair. He was younger than the others by a year and quite nervous, almost skittish. He stammered when he spoke, but he did speak, unlike some of his classmates. He paid attention when I talked. Naturally, I liked him, and so I smiled encouragingly, just as I had at the beginning of the term when he’d left his class materials at home.
“Bring them every day—both the class book and the handouts,” I’d told him.
That reminder had been a mistake. What I had thought a friendly comment about the use of handouts, he had heard as a public scolding. He was overcome and skipped the next class.
As the father explained when he called, the boy had felt that he’d failed me but also felt he had not been to blame. Oh? The father said it was due to a mix-up over which parent the boy was staying with that week. He and his wife were, he added, separated.
In the next sentence, he mentioned being home with his wife, and while I was still trying to get my head round that and square it with his separation, he revised his sentence. “My new wife,” he said. Then clarified that he and the boy’s mother were not separated but divorced.
Ah! I thought. I was glad for the clarification, because getting your head round one statement and squaring it with another—well, round and square can be a fun puzzle, but sometimes can cause trouble.
I reassured the father that I understood. Students often forget their books, I said, and I don’t hold it against them. I was sorry if I’d given his son the impression that I was chastising him.
“He’s a sensitive boy,” his father said.
“Of course,” I agreed. I liked this boy with his soft, precise voice and pinched mouth, both worried and determined.
“He suffers from anxiety.”
I assured the father I would be especially understanding. His son shouldn’t worry.
The boy returned to class, but he seemed to worry just as much, despite my best efforts.
I watched the boy and his partner, then the other pairs. Perhaps I’d spent enough class time on the exercise—to force the issue felt like flogging a dead horse, one already bored to death in the traces.
Besides, if the ultimate goal is for the students to chase around in their field of flowering English and unerringly nibble at the sweetest clover, then their explanations for their choices were extraneous. Fluidity doesn’t arise from reasoning but from intuition. How many English speakers know why they say make rather than do, or why they frame a sentence to use last rather than stay? They don’t. Like the gamboling colt, they don’t reason but sense. That flower is the sweetest. That verb is the finest.
And yet, though the exercise seemed at that point like a rough wagon to lug along, it wasn’t a waste of time. Having students explain their answers meant they’d use English constructions such as I thought or I decided. Even surrendering to the impossibility of expressing their reasoning, they would still say I used or I put—small advances up the mountain of learning English, where repetition is what you need, not reasons.
I studied the pale boy. He was as diligent as ever, but he never relaxed. In pair work, he never asked his partner a question or urged him to explain his reasoning—never once asked why. He’d have done well to. The other boy sauntered easily up the mountain, unencumbered, while this boy struggled for footing, dragging the wagon behind him.
This was several years ago, but when I came across my notes from the incident, it all came back. Yes, the new boy, shy and slightly defensive, the older boy he often partnered with, the younger’s attempts to carry out instructions, the older’s ease at shrugging them off. My reminder to bring the materials. The boy missing class. The father calling. Our conversation and my lingering question about the father’s worry—how much stemmed from guilt? And then my own thoughts about pegs and holes. Round pegs or square ones? Round holes or square ones?
Any peg in any hole is a triumph, and any peg stuck halfway is a problem. Where do you start to fix the problem? Enlarging the hole or whittling the peg?
Maybe I mean no peg in any hole is a triumph—all is luck. The size of the hole, the shape of the peg, the strength of the blow that drives it in.
I’ve had other students since who forget their books at home for the same reason. The switch from one parent’s house to the other’s often results in books and homework being left behind. Most students accept these trials as part of their experience. None has shown the same shocked, worried face as that boy. One or two have even learned to turn the situation to their advantage—no need to invent a dog with a ravenous appetite when you have a pair of unhappy parents. Pegs and holes, you might say.
As for dead horses—my mistake. They hadn’t been dead at all, only uninterested in climbing the mountain with the heavy load.
Before long, the anxious boy quit—broke free and returned to his stable. The others had greater staying power and lasted the year with varying degrees of improvement in their English.
In June, they ambled off, none in a hurry but none with a backward glance. Some returned the next year. I was ready to point out choice patches of sweet clover. But what for? Would any of them notice that I got both stay and last into the same sentence? No, they wouldn’t notice. Or care.
And maybe they were right not to, although they also didn’t care about their missing classmate. They may not even have registered his absence. But again, maybe they were right not to worry—too much of that, anyway.
