Today I swore I heard brains exploding in my 4eme class, which is a class I picked up during the second semester here, because we were desperately short of English professors. I am not saying these students aren’t smart, but it is clear there have been many gaps in their learning of the English language. I once heard during a graduation ceremony speech that knowledge is what you remember after you have learned everything. I know these students have learned all the words written in the books here, but they haven’t remembered it; whether it is because they are lazy, illiterate, or their teachers didn’t explain it well, well there’s no way to know. Not that I can blame these poor kids, I mean I am just now learning the true meaning of English grammar and that is this: it would be very good friends with Jacques Derrida, more or less father of deconstruction, the theory which boils down to everything means nothing, more or less. So here I am faced with Derrida’s BFF, a native English speaker (myself), and 70 some Beninese students who speak French and Biali, with a smattering of other languages, teaching passive voice.
I didn’t even want to teach this lesson, because as far as I am concerned every English professor I had in college if they were in graves would be rolling over. “Don’t use passive voice,” they said. “Be direct, use active voice,” editors mumbled. Of course as you might imagine from my first paragraph I nodded politely at these comments, made a mental note, and I would read my work searching for passive voice, not knowing exactly what I was even looking for. Anyone who knows me knows I can’t hide confusion, so basically for those who know me, imagine me with that face staring at sentences trying to discern active voice from passive voice. This is probably why when I looked around from the board at my students faces, we both just looked at each other like this was the most ridiculous thing they have ever seen.
Learning passive voice requires one to know how to find a subject, a verb, and objects, but also knowing the difference between subject pronouns and object pronouns. Also you need to be able to identify tenses—present, present continuous, past, present perfect, future—and know the past participle for verbs, which for most is its verb base with ‘ed’, but of course there are all those irregular verbs, whose past tense is different than their past participle. After all this don’t forget all the conjugations for the verb “to be.” Did your brain just explode? Welcome to 4eme and to how I finally am learning English Grammar.
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