你們好！It's story time!

In my previous post, I mentioned something about etiquette for athletes. I imagine the rules are largely unspoken and common sense- things like don’t trash talk your coach or your teammates, be congratulatory of the other teams efforts, etc. Anyways, all of this got me wondering about codes of conduct in other professions… professions like teaching. Take for example the story below (I’ve already told you about this Jessie):

It was a dark and stormy end of second period; dark because Dr. B had the black curtains covering his windows, and stormy because 老師 (my Chinese teacher) and I were at odds. We were having a bit of a disagreement about Chinese poetry and the benefits of teaching it to students at our level. I was most frustrated by archaic nature of the vocabulary and the total lack of grammatical structure in the poetry and didn’t see how it was supplementing my knowledge of the language. Older Chinese poetry is highly structured and abstract… and when I say abstract, I mean really abstract. It is basically a bunch of characters thrown together without any regard for necessity of verbs or prepositions (rather, they’ll be there, you just wont know it because there are no inflections in Chinese and word order is so important in telling you whether something is the direct object or the verb or an adjective or a measure word, and so on) to give the poor reader any inkling of what’s going on. Now, to be fair, if I had a little better grasp of the language I might be able to extrapolate some meaning because I would know all the different connotations and denotations behind the characters. But I don’t. And it is very frustrating. And there is no grammar!
Anyways, back to the story. So 老師 and I were arguing about this, and she is talking about how this is the way that poetry was written back then and that we see this kind of blatant-disregard-for-grammar-style in English too. This stumps me, so I ask for an example. She then proceeds to talk about how there is no grammar Shakespeare. About this time I notice poor Dr. B (my English teacher) behind us listening to our conversation, about to have a stroke. I realize that there is no changing老師’s mind and I proceed to thank her and head to my next class before it became necessary to call and ambulance for Dr. B.

Now, I think this story illustrates a conflict in traditional teacher codes of conduct. 老師 was obviously giving me some bad information regarding Shakespeare. Of course Shakespeare observes rules of English grammar! His structures may be a bit twisted at times and his language difficult to understand, but grammatically his works are sound. 老師, a non native English speaker, didn’t catch this but it is something that Dr. B, an English teacher, would have known and preached. So in this situation, what was Dr. B to do? Should he say something to老師 and risk embarrassing her in front of on of her students or should he keep his mouth shut and allow this kind of misinformation to run rampant? Luckily for him, I know my way around a few Shakespearian works, so I caught老師’s gaffe rather easily, though I chose not to say anything to her about it. I think that knowing me and knowing that I would probably not be taken by老師’s assertion that there is no grammar in Shakespeare factored into Dr. B’s decision to stay silent. But what if he hadn’t known me, or hadn’t known that I wouldn’t be touched by the misinformation? It is a tricky situation, but I would hope that he would have stepped in and said something eventually. It may not have been wise to have done it just then when 老師 was standing right there, but I see little harm in setting the record straight once she was out of earshot. And perhaps his position as a teacher of English and native speaker would have been enough to escape offending her. I don’t know. Any thoughts?