What's Wrong with Learning
The question has been obsessing me those few months I’ve passed as a first year student of English: Why English? What was supposed to be an idyll transforms itself into a mere path of a monotonous habit : going to the university, assisting to courses, listening as carefully as possible to the lecturer teacher, doing exercises and having finally as a reward or a blame a mark. What should I do to break this narrow prison and free myself?
I thought it over several times without succeeding in pushing the mist away from my mind. I entertained the question once again and I finally found out an interesting parallel with the idyllic human relationships. What if the whole thing was nothing but a special love story? And therefore, in order to understand the matter with the language, let’s try and enlighten the mysteries about human love stories…
First, the meeting.
The story may start this way: “As I was wandering about under the sunny sky of the pretty small city of –let’s say- Cergy, I fell into her eyes’ tender trap. She was smiling, I was out of breath. From her eyes came out such a brilliant light that made my heart melt instantaneously…”
Sure enough, nowadays, especially in Cergy, only fictive stories start alike. In general cases, you’re sitting well in your pupil’s or student’s chair. You exchange with her small pre-made sentences about superficial subjects that are the business of neither of both of you. After a while, you try and share some laughter with her. If you know how to manage and succeed in making her laugh as naturally as possible, the rest of the story is then written in thousands of pieces of paper of old books of the romantic period.
Pretty soon, comes the tender and unique moment of the first kiss. In many aspects, it is very close in intensity to the first shared gazes, with much more self confidence in the former case. Life with one another is the most likely to start after that moment.
Now let’s argue the girl (or the boy) is the language you’ve met once in your life. That may be early in boyhood or later. For a reason or another you’ve chosen to explore it, to know it in every incline, when it talks about fairy tales as well as when it has to do with a daily flash. Generally, the first steps consist in discovering and owning a few words from this weird new way of talking. That might make your pride among your young fellows: “Hey George, can’t you guess how we call a ‘fish’ in English?” and there you jump up with the right answer. Everybody laugh then at such a bizarre sound and all agree you’re a great ace. Pretty soon, armed with enough confidence, you decide to embrace this well loved curiosity and share life with it just as a lover shares life with his so praised mistress.
And here begin the problems, might say some sceptical readers. As for me, I can’t qualify those changes like “problems”. A campfire may start with a small little dry branch you’d found wandering on the ground by some serendipity. It is nice to see how it enlightens your moonless night. But pretty soon, it’ll require more wood to consume. To which request you can answer by the negative lazy attitude and see how death gets its right upon your warm fire, and thus have a nice cold night and get up in the morning with blue frozen toes and a nasty wet nose. Or else, you may stand up before the fire looses its breath, go and look for some pieces of wood. The reward is worth the trouble. Your night will last warm and enlightened. Your dreams will remain sweet! Have you but wisdom enough to take the second choice… Your wood is your patience; it is you virtues in purchasing away the threat of a monotonous habit. It is your growing power in breathing the air of every new fresh breeze with ballooned lungs.
A pair relationship might struggle, one day or another, with the same troubles. Everybody, according to his own situation should know how to clear up the muddy waters… As for the concerned matter of the language, the simile is close enough to perfect. Grammar exercises and the usual running after the dictionary for an infernal and cyclic new list of unknown vocabulary: that is where difficulties consist. Added to that, the narrowness of the academic process of evaluation succeeds at choking the last chance of leisure and pleasure. At length, the student’s good will is out of order. What was seen as a blessing at first becomes a cursed big challenge.
“Patience” is perhaps the blessed key word missing in this last paragraph. You need patience in order to stand monotony’s roars. One should be creative enough in order to wriggle free from the ‘too automatic’ way of learning we’re imposed at school. There is not one window through which the way of freedom begins but a million. Grammar is a subject we can deal with through exciting readings. As for English poetry, sure it is a boring subject when its concerns go to the Renaissance period; it switches itself into a delightful hobby as soon as it deals with the Beatles’ songs. We all have time enough and wisdom to think the matter twice. As for me, that is what came to my mind one of those nights as I was walking outside in the deserted streets of Cergy. I assure you I was sober. Was all that nonsense or did it hold some truth? Take a keyboard and drop a comment!
Aziz B.
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