Of Mouses and Men

To the modern EFL teacher stationed abroad, a laptop computer ends up serving as many things. First of all, it's your poor man's post and telegraph office, since virtually all your communication home ends up being my e-mail. In this age of Skype, it's your long-distance telephone, too; today's EFL teacher can stay in constant contact with the world back home, so long as he has a working laptop and a reliable internet connection. Now that CDs are going the way of the Milly Vanilly, your laptop becomes your jukebox and stereo, too--as well as an invaluable resource for lesson planning. Thanks to YouTube, your laptop becomes your television; I've been able to watch everything from obscure documentaries on the Crusades to Sarah Palin's latest gaffe. And, now that iTunes and a million similar services are starting to offer video sales and rental, it can even be your cinema. Take away an EFL teacher's laptop, and you take away his whole access to the world back home.

I may have the joy of undergoing such a discovery--albeit for a short time. Tonight, I had a class observed by my director of studies for the second time. I have an evening class that would strike most teachers back home as somewhat unusual but that I am told is fairly typical for in-company work. This class has a rotating cast of characters. When I came to teach it for the first time, I was told I would have ten students. So far, I have met five, and of these, only one comes almost every time (he has missed class a couple of times because of business trips abroad but is otherwise a very committed and diligent student). The others come only when they really have nothing better to do--or at least, that what's their spotty attendance seems to indicate.

This leaves me in something of a quandary when it comes to planning lessons for this class. Often, the class ends up being a one-on-one, as only my regular (whom I shall call Roman) shows up. But since I never know in advance when this will be the case, I feel compelled to plan two different lessons: a one-on-one lesson in case only Roman is there, and a group-oriented lesson in case other people come. When only Roman is there, I try to avoid introducing major new topics or grammar, so that the other students don't miss anything essential.

Tonight was a Roman-only lesson. I had a lesson prepared to work on indirect discourse and what might be called future-in-the-past situations. In case you missed it in freshman English, indirect discourse (also known as reported speech) occurs whenever we tell what someone else said, but don't give a direct quote with quotation marks. The sentence John said, "I'll do it" is direct discourse; if we write instead John said he would do it, we have shifted to indirect discourse. Future-in-the-past situations are such gems as would in the sentence He realized he would never see her again.

For Russian speakers, indirect discourse and future-in-the-past situations can be challenging, because Russian does not shift tenses when moving from direct to indirect discourse or when dealing with a future-in-the-past situation. In Russian, you can actually say John said he will go to the store, even if the going to the store occurred in the past; in English, of course, this is not possible unless the going to the store will happen sometime in the future. Russian also does not have a tense shift for future-in-the past; in Russia, He realized he would never see her again would be rendered as He realized he will never see her again. Doing this backshifting with tenses is not intuitive to Russian speakers and requires careful explanation and practice.

I chose to focus on these topics for a one-on-one lesson because, in an earlier one-on-one lesson, Roman had specifically requested it. He has been to Canada before and will be going to America shortly and has found difficulty dealing with these situations before. I had a fairly creative lesson prepared using a song by the Andrew Sisters that had a lot of indirect discourse. I knew it would be a hit.

Unfortunately, when I booted up my computer, the touch-pad it has in lieu of a mouse chose tonight to fail. I couldn't move my cursor enough to get the song playing. After about a minute of fumbling, I was forced to shift gears and give Roman the lesson I had prepared for a whole group.

A broken touch-pad shouldn't cause major problems, but it will be damned inconvenient for me. Because of the way my room is arranged, I am pretty much forced to use my computer lying in bed; I have gotten very used to watching films with my laptop lying on my chest, the screen a few scant inches from my face. I have a table on which I could rest my laptop while using the Internet, but I lack a chair to sit on while I browse--hence, my modus operandi of leaving my laptop my chest.

All of this means that, until I can find some way to reconoiter, or can get my school to give me a chair for my room (a process I expect to take a while given how long it took for the school to get me a wardrobe), my laptop will be essentially useless. I am hoping I can buy a new, optical mouse and figure out a way to manipulate it with my fingers so that it works, but doing this is likely to be unbelievably inconvenient.