Habits

Simple life forms become more complex over time; a life of complexity yearns for simplicity. Beautiful artwork is food for the soul. Respect can become a habit. 

My students expressed these ideas in the paragraphs they wrote about our trip to the Akron Art Museum last week. They all enjoyed themselves and seemed to get something out of the experience, even Van who exceeded her own minimum standard of three sentences.

“I guess there are ten,” she said, “but they are short, simple sentences.”

“Did you do that so you wouldn’t make any mistakes?” I asked, half joking.

She nodded with her usual mischievous grin.

Luz Alba’s prose was the most poetic, discussing how artists express their “states of mood” through vivid colors and abstract scenes. Hers was the phrase about art as soul food, a line that brought to my mind Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and music as the food of love.

Santos, the newest addition to our class, had a lot to say about the origins of life and how one artist in the museum’s collection portrayed a kind of evolution from single cells to human beings amid a watery background. 

“It remind me of a book I read,’ he said, pronouncing it not like ‘red’ but as the present tense. “First, there is one cell, then two, then three, and up and up and up.”

His English is a bit more limited than that of my other students, and he uses a lot of hand gestures to get his meaning across. He also repeats himself a lot, unable to produce the nuanced vocabulary he knows in Spanish.

One of Van’s ten sentences commented on Luz Alba’s sense of humor, and I asked her to elaborate.

“What kind of sense of humor does Luz Alba have?” I asked. “How would you characterize it?”

All four of them stared at the white board where I had corrected Van’s phrasing from ‘a good humor’ to ‘a good sense of humor.’ Silence.

“Would you say she has a wicked sense of humor?” I wrote wicked on the board. “A mean sense of humor? A rude sense of humor?”

I wrote each adjective on the board as I said it.

“It’s kind of like,” Van ventured, “she not mean, but kind of ...like, getting you in trouble.”

She punctuated her comment with nervous laughter, as she so often does.

“How about this word?” I wrote mischievous on the board. “What does this word mean?”

The silence lengthened.

“This same as word in my country, I think,” Santos finally said. “It mean kind of dark, unknown.”

“Okay,” I said. “Not exactly. Dark? Not really. Anyone else?”

“I think it mean,” Yuwei spoke up tentatively, “kind of like....naughty.”

“Yes!” I wrote naughty on the board. “Perfect! Mischievous is not being bad, exactly, but rather naughty.”

Yuwei smiled big, but no one seemed to really understand. From a brief conference in Spanish, Luz Alba determined that Santos had been confusing the word with mysterious, which sounds almost the same in both English and Spanish.

I needed to clarify.

“Remember at the museum,” I began, “in that room where the Chinese artist had colorful banners hanging on the walls? And there were all those pieces of pottery and ceramics on the low table? When Luz Alba came in, she reached into her pocket as if she were going to get out a coin and said to Van, ‘You want to make a wish?’ with a totally straight face. Remember that?”

Everyone was smiling and nodding, clearly remembering and getting the point.

“She was being mischievous.” I said. “She wasn’t being bad, exactly, but was joking about doing something bad.”

This somehow brought up the word inhibit, which I partially defined in opposition to uninhibited, a word that describes both Luz Alba’s personality and my own.

“We do not block our emotions,” I said. “We do not inhibit ourselves. We express ourselves freely.”

Van mentioned how she often confuses inhibit with another word, but couldn’t think of it just then. We collectively came up with inhale and inhabit. 

“They’re so close to each other, aren’t they?” I wrote inhabit directly underneath inhibit. “But their meanings are very different. It’s weird, isn’t it, how that prefix in means a negative in one word, but more of a positive in the other.”

Once again, I sympathized with the difficulty of learning English vocabulary that comes from so many different origins. A rule that applies in one situation is irrelevant in another.

Our lesson then moved from vocabulary to distinguishing between plurals and possessives in words that end with an s. Santos had a little difficulty with these, as well as with third-person verbs that end in s. Once that was covered, he had another problem to tackle.

“I have a question, Sharon,” he began. “One my teacher tell me, when he talk to patients, he say they have four things they need teach a child. When a boy reach 14 years old, he need these four thing, and he go off and be a man. These are responsibility, solidarity, honesty, and respect.”

I wrote those words on the board, not sure where he was going to go with them.

“When I talk to patients,” he continued, “I tell them, only teach these four habits. Habits? Is the right word?”

Now the conversation took a more philosophic turn.

“I don’t think those things are habits,” Van said. “Maybe values...”

“Yes, I agree,” I said. “Responsibility, solidarity: those are more like values than habits.”

“Yes, but,” Santos was clearly not satisfied with this and needed more of an answer. “is right? I can say to patients these are habits to teach children?”

“Well,” I said, unsure of how to proceed exactly. “I would say there are behaviors you can practice that express these values, and if you practice those behaviors enough, they will become habits. And these are probably good values, and the behaviors that express them are good...”

“Habit is something you do over and over?” Yuwei asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“And child who behaves like this is good child,” Santos interjected. “His habit is good, so his values is good.”

Luz Alba interrupted to say she doesn’t fully agree.

“In my town of birth,” she said, “I knew a man, all the way from elementary school, high school, all my life. He was a good person, all the time good. I went to college, then came back, and he still there. Only now, he was...narco traffic. You know this word?”

Yes, I had heard of narco traffic. I wrote it on the board.

“Narcotics,” I said, writing out the full word, “are drugs, like cocaine and heroin.”

Yuwei and Santos nodded their comprehension. All faces were solemn.

“Yes,” Luz Alba continued. “I come back from college and learn this man, there had been a bank robbery, and he kidnap all the people in the bank, and then..”

She trailed off, but pointed her index finger and curled her other fingers into her palm, pumping her thumb up and down in the motion of firing a gun.

“Oh,” I said, rather horrified. “He murdered them? He was on drugs?”

“No,” Luz Alba said. “He only sell the drugs. He not take them. But he sell them in the cartel, and he always need more. So he was good man, but his habits were not good.”

“It seem like good habits are hard to keep,” Van said, “But bad habits are so easy.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” I said, surprised at Van’s insight, as well as her uncharacteristic willingness to speak up in class. “I keep trying to stop biting my fingernails. I quit smoking a long time ago, but can’t seem to quit chewing my fingers.”

We eased away from the seriousness of Luz Alba’s example, but the idea of habits kept coming up.

I ended the class with some worksheets on verb tense that I wanted them to do at home for next week.

“When you’re looking at the chart and working on these exercises,” I said while everyone gathered their things, “remember that the name of the tense isn’t so important. I don’t care what you call it; I only care if you use it right.”

“I know all this,” Luz Alba said, looking a little frustrated. “I remember all this and do it okay on paper. It is when I talk that it is hard.”

Van agreed that she gets verb tenses alright on paper, but has a hard time using them well in conversation.

“Yes,” I said. “I understand. But the more we practice them, eventually they will become a habit.”

I pointed again to the word habit on the board. 

We all have bad habits, whether it’s biting our nails, drinking too much coffee, or checking our cell phones every five minutes. Santos told us it takes only ten weeks to solidify a new habit, a timeframe I am skeptical about. I guess the trick is being consistent for that ten weeks, then being diligent about keeping up the practice.

This class on Thursdays has become a habit, one I have to work fairly hard to keep. I never know exactly how it’s going to go, but we always get to some kind of meaning together, whether I’ve over prepared or arrived with nothing. 

In the complexity of learning English, my students understandably long for simplicity. In the simple task of volunteering for this class, I encounter the endless complexity of negotiating the nuance of communication. And together we build a habit of meeting on Thursdays, practicing our language skills, and respecting each other’s opinions. It’s not the easiest thing I’ve ever done, but it’s easier than trying not to bite my nails.