I proctored one of the national exams today. It was a more formal affair, though I still had to deal with cheating, on a lesser scale.
What freaked me out, though, was the unexpected ceremony attached to it. The exams, in a sealed envelope, were handed to one of the students taking the test. In a very ordinary manner, as if he'd done this a hundred times, he opened the envelope, took out one of the exams, then held it up for everyone to see - and received a round of applause.
I'm still at a loss to explain why it's done that way here - what the symbolism is. It's just so...bizarre.
I helped Ebi with English today after treating him to some past primavera and peppermint tea. He needed to know the difference between "lay" and "lie". (I thumbed through dictionaries and grammar books for a while before finding an adequate answer.) When is a proper usage of "which", and pronoun usage. All of them incredibly hard for non-native speakers, and very hard even for native speakers. We're so used to language as we use it, and not how it's SUPPOSED to be used. And in studying Portuguese and Changana, one finds that this gap is much narrower in other languages than English. English rules have been applied for the wrong reasons and are only changed after long, arduous processes. Portuguese grammar is downright easy. Changana is hard but not impossible, and English is just unbearable.
One exercise he had tonight was to determine whether a noun needs an "a" or an "an" in front of it. The main exceptions are words starting with "h", "u" and "o". Words that have a root in "one", typically take "a"; words that have a root in the Latin "one" ("uni-") also take "a", and words that have Latin roots starting with "h" are usually "an", if the accent is not on the first syllable. And then we got to "herb". My Portuguese-English dictionary has the IPA spelling including a pronounced "h". But I don't say it that way, and neither do many people I know. So what's right? He's only got the questions, not the answers, so I may never know. Also, what's the difference between "Responsibility for children's lives" and "Responsibility for the lives of children" when a pronoun refer to "children" in the predicate? More importantly, who cares?
Peace
John
