Jules TP-7

Last Friday, I met with Ahmed for our next tutoring session. He expressed a desire to enhance his reading skills, but he's not so into the fiction so I found a nice essay called "The Fallacy of Success" by the Englishman G. K. Chesterton. Though the essay was written in 1909, the core ideas in it still ring true: one can't succeed by reading a book about success; one has to gain mastery of the specific field that they choose to pursue. Aside from the topic, the essay provided several rhetorical devices that I was able to examine with Ahmed.

First, I read a paragraph of the essay aloud, making sure to enunciate carefully and pay special attention to my tone and cadence. We then defined the words that Ahmed was unsure about. He took a turn at reading the next paragraph, and then we defined more words. After we had covered all the vocabulary, I let him take it from the top, and we discussed the meaning of the passage. There were a couple of instances where the author used sarcasm and irony, and I was happy that Ahmed picked right up on these devices. The specific phrases we examined went like this:

"We live in a time of science and hard common sense, and it has now been definitely proved that in any game where two are playing IF ONE DOES NOT WIN THE OTHER WILL. It is all very stirring, of course; but I confess that if I were playing cards I would rather have some decent little book which told me the rules of the game."

Ahmed got a kick out of the humor. This led to a conversation about how one places extra emphasis on words when they are being sarcastic. For example, "Americans never make mistakes when it comes to foreign policy" vs. "Americans never make mistakes when it comes to foreign policy". Our communication (and humor) is full of facetious talk in America, so I thought it was a pertinent topic to introduce. I directed him to finish the essay before our next meeting, and lent him a book which should be indispensable to any speaker of English: The Elements of Style by Strunk & White. He was encouraged to hear that even native speakers have trouble with some of the intricacies of the English language.