Readers Theaters with Love and Mouses

 The only problem I can really solve is English illiteracy, but even then, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. Take, for example, the readers’ theater review I was asked to do at a middle school in Taiping. I planned to not say anything negative with a few weeks left before the contest but the lead EFL teacher there rubbed me wrong. My pedagogical competence took over.  I have to learned not to go where I'm not wanted. 

     The assignment at the middle school in Taiping was simple; watch the troupe perform the skit I had been sent a few days earlier. It was only a few weeks before the contest so I promised myself I would only comment on pronunciation and intonation abnormalities. It was easy to have that policy in Yun-lin a few weeks ago as the skit the children did was one I had heavily edited and returned three months ago; they had done their homework, saw "The Wizard of Oz" movie, and had been practicing it all but the intonation and pronunciation. 

     My job was simple and to the point, but, I was to discover,  the script sent for the day's assignment had terminal problems, namely, the passive  theme of a teacher correcting her students' grammar in the course of finding the 'thief' that stole one's lunch was misguided. Why?  Because though  'count' and 'no-count' nouns was the stated premise, the examples used for humorous interludes were 'singular' and 'plural' irregular forms.I sat and listened to the troupe do their skit, making marks on my copy about pronunciation and intonation abnormalities. 

     Amazingly, the discrepancy in the script's 'instructional objective' didn't become apparent to me at first until one on their staff took exception to a question I had concerning one snippet of musical chorus someone had added, "We will we will rock you," directed at the mouse or mice that nibbled at a student's lunch. My concern was detoured to the 'teachable moment'; "Mouses" which was corrected to "mice" unnecessarily because only one was the culprit. I understood the concern of the black-masked EFL teacher, and by intuition knew it was she that had written the script in the first place, and understood her intention. That's was when it dawned on me the erroneous inside joke. 

     The teachers, actual and characterized, were incorrect. 'Mice' is not a count or no count noun; it's the plural from of 'mouse.' A regular count noun can have an 's' or 'es' added to make it plural while a non-count must have a measure word put before it to count; for example, 'a glass of water'. The plural of 'glass' is 'glasses' but 'water' has no plural because it is a non-count noun. In the same way, 'mice' is the plural form and needs no measure word to make it countable. Most of the ten teachers present at the audition, of the teachers sat stunned, others insulted that I corrected them. I explained that, correct grammar wasn't the issue to the judges, anyway, because of their own deficiency in English as a Foreign Language; there would be no native-language English teachers on the judging panel and their error wouldn't be noticed, I said, but that only drove the foot into my mouth deeper. 

      

The next day, participating in the assembly at the school in Tong-Feng Middle School in Nan-tun went off without a hitch or incident; nothing to write a blog about. I listened to a troupe's meaningless regurgitation of what love is with the choruses of "I Will Follow Him" and "Go On" from Titanic sung; not worth analysis. I then heard four classes do the Little Peggy March song chorus with varying degrees of primitive choreography. The kids looked happy. Their eyes widened when I was asked to sing it and I did so including the verses and the coda. I looked happy. The teacher in charge asked me to say something about NYC, a place she visited in '07. I compared it to Taichung, the latter always better with regard to newness, cleanliness, and quietness, and students' interest in learning EFL. I wasn't exaggerating. 

     

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