Teachin

When Peace Corps staffers came to visit my site, they took some action photos. Here's class 12B. Aren't the students just precious in their uniforms? The classroom itself is one of the school's older classrooms (our school has built several new buildings within the last year, but the old buildings date from the early 90s). Every classroom at the school has a board of some kind (the new ones have whiteboards!), desks, and pictures of the Cambodian monarchs. Class size is generally between 30 and 50, although at the junior highs it can be as high as 60 or 70. Students don't change rooms like they do in the States. They sit in the same desk for 4 hours each morning or afternoon while teachers rotate through. There are no advanced or remedial classes. If a student is at a lower or higher level than his or her classmates, it must simply be accepted.



The concept I'm getting ready to teach here is past perfect progressive, nearly the most useless verb tense in the English language (had been [verb]-ing). Possibly surpassed only by future perfect progressive (will have been [verb]-ing).

But the students must learn all the tenses, so we teach the common ones and the uncommon ones. English sure has a lot of tenses. Do we need them all? Discuss.