Kizzy Moore and Miss Scarlett

Sometimes, I hate the places my mind goes.

I don't mean that in some ugly gutter sense. But I hate the tendency of my mind to reach for the complicated and fussy instead of the simple and easy to understand.

An example of this happened in my adult elementary class (two middle-class housewives) this morning, when I got into explaining the future use of the present continuous. In a nutshell, the present continuous ("I am working", etc.) can be used to indicate the future when there is some sort of clear connection to the present--that is, when you have already decided what you will do, or a plan has already been made.

Well, I got myself a bit flummoxed trying to explain how the usage of this is different from the "going to" future ("I'm going to visit my aunt tomorrow"). In reality, I think there is little-to-no difference anymore, but some people think the "going to" is for less definite plans.

Somehow, we ended up working with the example of "I am getting married in the morning" vs. "we're going to get married soon". And this made me think, of all things, of the scene in Roots in where Tom Moore comes to rape Kizzy the night before she is to be married, because Kizzy begs the master not to do it because "she's going to be married in a little while".

Okay, the connection wasn't so random. I've watched my DVD of Roots about five times since I bought it over the summer. I've discovered it's a great thing to watch when times are hard and you feel lost in the world, because it's all about people not forgetting who they really are and knowing where they really should be going.

But today, I made the mistake of trying to explain Roots to my students. Back in a primitive age when people thought white polyester leisure suits were the height of fashion, Roots was a phenomenon worldwide. So I thought there was at least some possibility that it might have been broadcast in Taiwan at some point.

I found out that it hasn't--apparently, back in the 1970s, little or no foreign television was broadcast in Taiwan. I guess this shouldn't shock me, since Taiwan has become a democratic society only within the last fifteen years. The Kuomintang probably would not have wanted a story about people striving to be free to tear across television screens in Taiwan the way it did in America and the rest of the world.

I did, however, discover in the course of this conversation that one of my students really loves Gone With the Wind. She mentioned "an old movie about the Civil War," with a heroine whose name began "Sca-"--and so I immediately put Gone With the Wind up on the white board. Oddly, she is not the first Chinese person to tell me this. One day during my CELTA training, we did a game where students had to come up with different words beginning with the same letter in various categories, and one student, a Chinese woman who couldn't have been 5'1", burst out that here favorite film was Gone With the Wind. I don't want to seem racist, but it is odd to hear this sentiment expressed by someone who so plainly is not a little flower of Southern gentility.