Irony

The past few days I have been sitting in on English classes getting a feel for the level of the students and the general pedagogical method over here. In general I’ve been surprised to find that the kids don’t speak English any better than your average American high schoolers speak French. I definitely had this hyper-self-critical notion that American schools were so much worse than the rest of the world at teaching language, but now I’m hearing that at least among European nations France is also known for is language-teaching deficiencies. I suppose it’s hardly surprising that the two most self-aggrandizing nations in the Western world don’t bother teaching their youth “useless” foreign tongues.

I spent the first half of the classes I attended introducing myself in simple English and responding to students’ questions. Questions ranged from the simple—Where are you from? (being from New York consistently elicited mild awe)—to the seemingly simple yet really quite unanswerable—Where do you plan to live the rest of your life?—to the outright complicated particularly in simplified English—What did you study in school? (“Anthropology and South Asian Studies” received blank stares, “culture and India” worked a bit better, “digging up dead people in India” was a crowd-pleaser).

The second half of class I simply observed, and man were these classes boring. In one class a study-guide question relating back to a short story was, “What adjective does the father use ironically? Using the context and its formation, deduce its meaning.” This of course launched the teacher into a 10-minute lecture on the meaning and use of the word “irony” itself, which seemed to me impractical for a bunch of 16-year olds who have trouble forming a proper statement in English let alone discerning literary devices. Then, to make matters even more hopeless the teacher asked the students to properly intone this ironic line of dialogue (which incidentally was more sarcastic than ironic to begin with). I’m not sure what she was going for being as I don’t think there is a standard in English for proper ironic intonation, but she inevitably asked me, the native speaker, to demonstrate it for the poor kids, so I just went with an over-the-top sarcastic voice. I’m sure the kids went away with a significantly diminished respect for American English…