Lethe and lesson management

You are what you remember, not what you experience.

At least according to Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Laureate and author of last year's outstanding book - Thinking, Fast and Slow.

This partly came to light when he conducted a study on people undergoing colonoscopies.

The first group underwent shorter procedures, and the second group longer ones.

When asked to rate the total amount of pain they had experienced (this was before colonoscopies were routinely accompanied by anaesthetics), surprisingly the first group recorded a worse experience.

How could this be if they experienced significantly less time under procedural duress?

Desire paths

"All buildings are predictions.  All predictions are wrong."

So says Stewart Brand in How Buildings Learn.

I feel the same about metaphors - they are all wrong.

They change how we think about the things they describe, and thus the things themselves.

I understand, however, that not only do we need them, but that we cannot function without them.

 Therefore we need to question the assumptions upon which they are based, the connotations they foster, and they effects they produce.

In that spirit, and the one described by Brand, I wonder if we in ELT might get rid of fossilization.

The past perfect

Which of the verb forms is the least useful?

This may sound like a strange question, but there is a sense with ESP generally, and BE specifically, that language must submit to calculations of utility and expediency.

If you teach IELTS, for example, reported speech is a luxury item but the passive is essential.

Thought of in these terms, the past perfect seems a candidate ripe for omission in a crowded, time-conscious schedule.

 In his seminal book The English Verb, Michael Lewis restricts his discussion of it to little more than a sentence.

It is less useful, it seems, even than the future perfect, and that's pretty low down the useful list already.

In the context of the grammar-lite BELF discourse we are moving towards, the past perfect is a clumsy, wind-up gramophone  in a world of sleek iPods.

Partly, this could be because we generally use it to avoid ambiguity, but that ambiguity only arises if we are sloppy to begin with.

Instead of stating they had eaten when I arrived, it can be simply said that they ate before I arrived.

The correct adverbial cuts out the confusion and dispenses with any need for the past perfect at all.

So, it's a sentence-bloating, learner-messing waste of time.

Or is it?