Paul E. Doniger wrote:
> Richard, et all,
>
> My students are just as (more?) likely to respond: "Okay, the parts
> about Huck lying WERE pretty good. I remember when he GOT caught by
> that woman, Mrs. Loftus, because he DIDN'T [perhaps without the
> apostrophe] know how to thread a needle." And these are mostly smart
> kids who have gotten a decent education in a good school district.
This looks like an uphill battle to me. You're trying to enforce a
convention that is pretty counter-intuitive, especially considering that
the English verb system is often taught as little more than a
two-dimensional, time framing mechanism.
> I've tried all these methods, and I've reminded them that literature
> always occurs NOW, etc., etc., etc. I mark their papers with constant
> reminders (and I make them LOG my comments and use those logs in their
> portfolios), but there are still only a few who have started to change
> how they write about literature. Obviously these methods aren't having
> much of an effect.
But it doesn't occur NOW. That's the point. It doesn't occur at all.
It's just a story imagined. See it as a story, not a series of events
bound in past time - just like a film - it can be rewound and
experienced again and again, in the here and now. (In fact, it also
happens in the future, in exactly the same way. Spooky.)
> Any other ideas?
Role play and report: one group of students act out ~ or up ~ an episode
from work while others write it up telegraphically in real time. A third
monitors and "corrects" to enforce the convention, which is, after all,
arbitrary.
The arbitrary nature of it is probably a major problem. You may be
appealing to logic, but they find none, but trust you because you're the
teacher.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Paul
Omar
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