What’s in the Past?

I have to do a practicum on teaching the simple past. We have to teach it inductively, the course being geared toward the communicative approach. The idea is that a deductive approach, so beloved of engineers, is more of an approach that emphasizes reading and writing, and most people learning English nowadays are not doing it in order to afford themselves the pleasure of Shakespeare. It stands to reason when, after all, the pleasure of Shakespeare is lost on the average native speaker. People want to learn English because people who know English are more likely to be rich. And so I am doing a practicum on the simple past, and since most people are learning English because people who know English are more likely to be rich, then I must have communicative goals and approach the whole business inductively.

So my objective will not be that when I am done with the lesson, the students will know the simple past tense, but rather that they will be able to talk about the dead.

And what could be more congenial? Really, without the simple past history would be awfully confusing; it is an extremely useful tense. And when you speak about the dead you can speak of:

Johann Sebastian Bach
Georg Frederic Handel
Ludwig van Beethoven
Carl Maria von Webber
Dimitri Shostakovich
. . . and any number of chaps.

Lets try some actions!

“Handel was a genius, I kneel at his grave,” said Beethoven.
Bach composed the best music.
Beethoven triumphed over silence.
Shostakovich flouted Stalin.
Pavarotti sang better than all the present company bar none.
Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and precipitated the second world war.
Richard Weaver wrote a book, and I read it.
Yeats languished because he pined after Maud Gonne.
C.S. Lewis loathed The Wasteland, and disapproved of James Joyce.

Of course, I could talk about regrets instead, and work in some of the poetry of W.B. Yeats. That could be the semi-structured activity, find all the past tense verbs in this poem:

When You are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

—W. B. Yeats

. . . perhaps a little bit too difficult, but it has a wonderful review of the present tense in the first stanza.

Next I’ll have them work in pairs telling each other about missed opportunities, and I can teach them that missed opportunities are a special form of regrets.

Ah the past tense! So full of opportunities.