how not to teach english

Owing to the considerable ineptitude displayed by students of my college towards anything remotely related to the English language (apart from the odd pornographic paperback), the Academic Council, in another glorious demonstration of its infinite wisdom, decided to create a compulsory course titled , ahem ,' English for Communication '.

You could almost hear all those multi-national companies, some of whose job interviews were apparently akin to listening to a noisy foreign radio channel , breathe a collective sigh of relief.

Fast Forward to the present : Prof M walks into class, bowler hat and all, the quintessential relic of colonialism. "Good Morning gentlemen", he booms, with a look around to check whether there may not be a petite young thing slinking somewhere in the background. After the traditional roll-call ( we may as well be in the goddamn army) , we settle into the usual rigmarole, ".....and today we shall see what a topic sentence is ...... "

If I write my end semester the way I've written the first three paragraphs, I'll probably fail the course. a) lack of a 'topic sentence' (he also has a special name for it , the 'umbrella' sentence , talk about metaphors) b) no concrete 'controlling ideas ' ( whatever those may be) c) sentences which more than double the 'average sentence length' (that sacrosanct constant , the English equivalent of the speed of light)

As I was sitting in class, i was repeatedly reminded of the scene in Dead Poets Society, when Robin Williams instructs his students to tear up pages which describe how the greatness of works of literature can be ascertained by plotting a graph and finding the area under the curve(and by the way, can you do that, saba ?) . Hello, Prof M, " We're not laying pipes, we're talking about poetry "

And though this course is merely meant to equip everyone with the barest essentials, it would greatly help if it is treated with a little less rigidity, because English can be fun, even without resorting to cheap imitations of British accents, or jokes of a scatological nature(oh yes, old Prof M is quite the dirty old man)

This is not meant to be some kind of polemic, and Prof M, though hardly one to inspire me to stand atop my desk and quote 'Oh Captain, My Captain' , does know his stuff. If only he was a little less phoney......