In the early days of this blog, I wrote this:
<prescript date="2013">
This morning in a trail for an Eartha Kitt program next weekend I heard this:And at the words bras dessus bras dessous a synapse clicked [There she was just a-walkin' down the street singing Doo wah diddy diddy dum diddy doo. Snapping her synapses...?]. It was not the tedious 'Aha, bras dessus bras dessous MEANS "arm-in-arm"' (the sort of knee-jerk 'equivalence' that often condemns learners to endless tongue-tied ratiocination - which I've summed up in this image:C'est si bon,
De partir n'importe où,
Bras dessus bras dessous,
En chantant des chansonsI've probably uploaded this to TESconnect, but here it is anyway. )
</prescript>
In a revised version of this post I later wrote
<prescript date="2020">In a trail for an Eartha Kitt program I heard once there was a song that I had never heard in the original (although C'est si bon ...<parenthesis>
(one of those "translations" that give up the effort of actually translating, and just throw in the odd snatch of the original – Volare is another example)
</parenthesis>...is a commonplace on the lounge circuit in an English version):And the phrase bras dessus bras dessous took me back to my French classroom in the early '60s (possibly '63-'64, otherwise '65-'66...<autobiographical-note>
Not in the intervening year, when we were consigned to the attention of an assistant, who – much to our annoyance at the time – insisted that we learn and use the symbols of the IPA. I was later to realize that – unless total immersion in the environment of the target language was possible – IPA symbols were an almost essential ...<parenthesis>...tool for learning a language.
(and that "almost" is a craven sop to the sometimes vocal language teachers who are happy to pander to the needs of students who can't use a decent [that is, mono-lingual] dictionary)
</parenthesis>
</autobiographical-note>
...). The particular memory was of Cedric Baring-Gould's mime of walking arm in arm. My reaction was not a simplistic "Aha – bras dessus bras dessous is "the equivalent..." (whatever that means in the context) "....of the English" ...<parenthesis>...."arm-in-arm".
(the assistant had introduced us to the less formal la main dans la main [in Françoise Hardy's "Tous les garçons et les filles de mon âge].. or "was to introduce" – all these parentheses are a bit too involved even for me...
</parenthesis>
The question O que é? triggers the name of the object, [HD 2025 – in that Portuguese-teaching diagram] without recourse to the arduous and time-consuming and unnatural and error-prone left-hand route.
As I wrote in that earlier post:My memory was of the mime performed by my French master 50-odd years ago. I've mentioned Cedric before, here. I can imagine his shade smiling down with a look of smug satisfaction (like the one he used to show the difference between 'No vacancies' and 'Complet' [HD 2020: arms folded for the latter, hands upraised for the former]).</prescript>
I'll never forget BG's figure hunched over the enormous reel-to-reel Grundig that he always carried from class to class. (The assistant had one of the new cassette players, but BG swore by his magnétophone).
In a more recent reference to Monsieur I added
<autobiographical-note>He – Cedric Baring-Gould...
<meta-autobiographical-note>... – ... used a huge Grundig reel-to-reel magnétophone. He schlepped this multi-kilo apparatus, day in day out, from classroom to classroom, realizing – unusually for the time – the importance, in modern language teaching, of giving learners the actual sounds of native speakers. Today's MFL (modern foreign language) teachers have recourse to YouTube for examples from real-life foreign speakers, thus avoiding curvature of the spine; not so for poor old Cedric.)
[the reason, incidentally, for my choice of college, as a former pupil of his had been the first in my school to go to Cambridge]
</meta-autobiographical-note>
</autobiographical-note>
L'envoi
At this time of year, teachers of all kinds may need the fillip of these posts: your pupils will remember some of their teachers for the rest of their lives, the good as much as the bad. If you're good, what you do (probably more than what you say) will let your pupils take away from your lessons much more than you think.
