Tenses

I was teaching the Present Continuous to my students the other day. It's been a while sine I touched my rusty Tenses chords and I was rather apprehensive about the whole thing. Everything was going pretty well, the students showed signs of comprehension and profound understanding of the subject matter.



Suddenly, one of them stood up and asked me a question which I swear could've put the great Sphinx of Oedipus to utter disgrace and shame. He asked me why is it so important to distinguish when an action is carried out i.e. he was asking me why the hell do tenses matter so much? All the great Pharaohs of Egypt couldn't have answered that one, I thought silently. Obviously, this student could not fathom the complexities of the English verb tenses, maybe because his own first language (like almost half of the other languages in the world), does not care much whether an action is performed now, yesterday or tomorrow. What does it matter if you eat now, ate yesterday or will eat tomorrow, as long as the food goes into your system? At this point, I totally felt sorry for him and his bewilderment.

So I mustered up all the intelligence I had, gathered from my years of training as an ESL teacher and came up with a diplomatic answer (I am after all a UN part-timer). I said the English are very particular about when an action is performed because they are very particular about time. I gave an example of one of their previous lecturers, an Englishman, who was always very punctual and particular about time. I didn't want to give that ever-so-cliche answer that my teacher gave me when I asked her, "Because the rule says so". I wanted my answer to strike a note in his mind, and he will remember it forever. He seemed quite satisfied and nodded his head in satisfaction.

The truth is, I dread moments like this, when my students would ask me "Why?". I'm a bilingual, born with two language systems stuck in my linguistic blueprint. There are times when I just cannot explain why a rule is so because my judgement of what is right or wrong in terms of English, is purely instinctive because it is already there in my innate capacity. Like how most of us cannot explain the rule of our mother tongue. Still, I try my best to come up with a logical explanation for each of my students' questions.

But then again, when is language ever logical?