On Time and English.

When we learn English tenses we begin with the simple present tense before we proceed to the past tense and future tense. Seemingly a logical sequence - the present being the instant, the past being the history, and the future being distant.

Present tense tops the three because in the present is where we live. But why the past tense overrides the future? It is justifiable if you imagine someone dying, as miserable and doomed as he is, he still has a present (however insignificant), and the past would suddenly be crowned with a halo (for the past is still, or even more intact with the present being so castrated). Oh no but the future - sad to say but it is less than insignificance. It is nothing. It is totally out of the question. If someone has to die and he has to have one last thing in his mind, it has to be his past, not his present, not his future.

My point is, everyone has a past, but not everyone has a future. So presumably teaching the 6-year-old children tenses in this orderly manner is reasonable (I would not say correct) because like the dying old, the 6-year-old also have a past, however brief it is. So it is probably easier for them to grasp the concept of 'yesterday' than 'tomorrow' which they have to imagine would be coming.

I bet most if not all schools teach English tenses in the same sequence. The tradition stands as it is. We never ask why. We take the conventions of education like birth, as if children have to be born and they have to think this way. What if our predecessors were wrong to begin with. What if we are ourselves a mistake to begin with. You see when we teach children tenses, we convey to them a scheme of thinking about our perception of time and the values of it. It is not only about the modal verbs and past participles. It is about ideology.

Some students mess up tenses. Some professionals relate it to some kind of learning disorder, some parents associate it with laziness. Possible. But I cannot help thinking perhaps it is not the tenses that they screw up, it is the notion of time which as a whole comes in terms of abstraction and ambiguity that strangles them in a labyrinth.

Here is what I have come up with in the chapter on tenses in an English usage textbook:

The past perfect continuous - We use the past perfect continuous for an action which began in the past and continued up to the past time or beyond it.

The future - To talk about something in the near future which we can see as a result of something in the present, we can use the 'be going to' structure.

It is very important in English tenses to differentiate the state of an action and a time if you are to comprehend or express a meaning accurately: whether it is temporary or permanent, before or after or until...

One day I was doing revision on the present tense with my students.

"You use the present tense when you talk about situations which are permanent, say, 'my mother is a woman,' or 'the sun rises in the east.'" The next thing I knew was their aroused skepticism against my statement.

"No, my mother is not a woman. She is a man."

"What about those gay couples?"

"The sun will rise in the west when it is the end of the world."

The fact is I was not pissed. I was quite convinced at the thought of Almodovar's movies in which the mother may not always be a female and that your son may be a woman instead. But well, I did not invent those grammatical rules.