A Visit to Mom's □□ English Class

　　Since our family moved to Connecticut two years ago, my mom has been studying English very hard. Every Tuesday and Thursday night she goes to the □□ English classes at E.O. Smith High School. This program is run by the Education Department of Connecticut. Even though the classes are for free and no one is obligated to come, my mom nearly has perfect attendance for two years and never misses out any homework. Compare to my mom, a housewife, I am much less self-conscious about studying. If there is no obligation or penalty in the class, I probably won’t do any work. Therefore, such eagerness of my mom has gained my attention a lot. I began to be very curious about her English class time after time, wondering what kind of English class could make her so happy that every time after the class, she goes home with a delightful face.

　　Thinking about “spying” that class many times, I still didn’t make a actual move at all in the past two years. There was something that bonded my feet, or in Walker Percy’s word, the “preformation” (589) had stopped me from going. Right, I have already pictured that class in my mind even before I actually sit in it. After having almost eight years of English classes, I have to admit I was too confident about my experience. I thought I know all kinds of English classes, but I don’t. There is a Chinese saying said that a frog living at the bottom of a well won’t see the whole sky. It seems I was that frog.

　　Then recently, Walker Percy’s essay “The Loss of the Creature” brings me a new point of view. He shows us how we are limited or influenced by the “symbolic complex” we planted into our head prior to the new experience and it is rather difficult to “recover” from it (588-600). He gave an example of sightseeing Grand Canyon. Grand Canyon is “difficult to see” because it has been “appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer’s mind. Seeing the canyon under approved circumstance is seeing the symbolic complex head on.” (Percy 589) Any experience can be similar to the sightseeing. I suddenly realized I should at least try the class once and see if it is what I imagined, either like my high school foreign language class, tedious and full of grammars; or like a free-style English class that learn English through games and activities. Otherwise I couldn’t judge whether Percy’s opinion is right or explain why my mom are so motivated for that class. Since either type of class mode is easy to tolerate for me, I finally walked to the class with my mom this Tuesday. I am challenged by Percy’s “Grand Canyon” to see a whole picture of a new event.

　　There are three levels in this □□ English program. Students are separated into different classrooms based on their levels. My mom is at the advanced level class, which seems good for me because I won’t feel too bored to sit in class for three hours learning easy grammar and spells. But as soon as I entered the classroom, my heart was sinking: except my mom and I, there were only one student arrived on time. What a kind of class is that The “fun” image of this class in my head was now fading away, and according to my past experience in high school, I could predict it would be worse if other students didn’t show up. Just as I was thinking about to leave, Miss Jane, who is the teacher of the class, gave me a big smile and warm greeting. I knew I had no way to leave then.

　　Four more students came in, and the class began. There were no signs of lecture or big cardboards for games. Instead, Miss Jane asked each of us to tell a story about what happened last weekend and read the assigned composition from last time. From my expectation, the class should at least begin with the teacher’s lecture. I couldn’t help to wonder what would we learn from such class if there weren’t an organized instruction or process. In this class, most of students are over thirties. As the students began to read, my patience was really challenged, for it was painful for me to understand those heavy accent English. Being a Chinese, I also have accent and I have been listening to many non- native speaker’s English. But I still couldn’t stand the extreme ones. When is this class going to end My mind was already flying out of class. At that point, I could hardly connect “sovereign” to this class, already forgetting what is my purpose for coming.
　　I didn’t response when Miss Jane called me. It is my turn, but my head was all blank. Suddenly, embarrassment made me afraid to look into her eyes, realizing my original purpose to come here is to experience a new event and to see if I can break my “preformulation”. Everyone was working so hard and concentrating, but so far I still treated myself as an “outsider” or a tourist. Such behavior was exactly described by Percy to explain how to sovereign is lost. Even I didn’t notice, the “symbolic complex” (Percy 589) in my head has already prevented myself to really get into this class so far. If I really want to achieve a “sovereign study”(Percy), the first step is to become the member of this class and join their discussion. At that moment, a lot of words just flashed through my mind, I began to talk and talk, telling everyone how fun my trip was during the weekend. Miss Jane sometimes asked me questions, sometimes corrected my grammars. All my uncomfortable had gone, just like magic. I became to understand Percy’s opinion a little bit more. We have to put ourselves in a active position and jump out of the circle of our judgment to achieve sovereign experience. Seeing a whole new picture of an object or event is not always easy. In order to do so, recognize our limit and preformulation is important. If we don’t even recognize it, the symbolic complex will never be broken. For me, taking the first step takes time and courage. It worthies.

　　After I get rid of my judgment towards this class, the following part was surprisingly smooth no matter how hard is to understand other students’ accent, or to adapt Miss Jane’s super slow English. Maybe I couldn’t bear them before, but now they were complete new for me. This is a true sovereign experience once I accept I knew nothing about this class. Sovereign experience needs us to explore and discover. When we look at object in a different direction or aspect, we can find out there are plenty of thing what we don’t know. To me, this English class has the same potential to be explored. I put myself as a new student to this class, not only observing, but also joining the entire class. We talked about different topics, did a lot of exercises that I’ve never seen before. Whenever we spoke, Miss Jane will correct our grammar. It was really a surprise that I never noticed my mistakes before until Miss Jane pointed out.

　　This class was really long. But these three hours had completely overthrown my expectations. Everything in this class was unique, different from my previous experience. I could say this English class was a real good one for my mom This is a class just designed for □□ ESL student by practicing speech skills and learning grammars through speaking and writing. Most of the students are busy housewives taking care of their babies. It is very important for them to learn English efficiently but it’s hard for them to have chunks of time to read books just like we young students normally do after English class.

　　But understanding why my mom likes this class is no longer my gain at the end. The most important and valuable harvest is to understand how to achieve a sovereign experience. When I read Percy’s essay at first, sovereign study was only a fancy word with a blurry definition to me. Even though theoretically it sounds easy to break the prefomulation in our head, we may not see ourselves clear enough to even realize it when we are in the certain circumstance. Those symbolic complexes will influence us to think automatically and unconsciously. But if we change a way of thinking, everything will look different again. This class is a great opportunity to let me realize how to recover from the loss of preformulation practically. I learned what to do when exploring a new event or subject eventually. Active participation is really the key to enjoy sovereign study. And acceptance and understanding will be formed as we experience new things without a loss of sovereign.

　　I really appreciate Percy’s essay, which inspired me to find a way of recovering sovereign experience. I think I “recovered” successfully this time.

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