The Tense of Regret

Yuwei frowned at the white board, and I knew I hadn’t succeeded yet. 

We were working on some verb tense exercises I had given my ESOL students a week earlier. They had sentences and short narrative paragraphs wherein the verbs had been replaced with spaces to fill. My students had to choose between simple present or simple past, present or past progressive, and present or past perfect, depending on the context.

For the most part, these exercises were easy for my students. Yuwei mentioned while we walked in together from the parking deck that these were similar to exercises he had done in his fourth grade English class.

That oblique criticism made me question the appropriateness of assigning them, my ability to gauge my class’s needs, and, indeed, my qualifications as the teacher of this class. 

I usually feel like an impostor in this class. Sure, English is my mother tongue and I have a master’s degree. But my degree is in creative writing, not pedagogy. Truly, my only qualification for teaching this class is my willingness to do it without pay.

Nonetheless, I sallied forth with the rudimentary verb conjugations. I had no choice, really, because I hadn’t prepared any other lesson. 

And, honestly, when I was studying French, I spent countless hours filling page after page with verb conjugations, even while I was in upper-level courses. Tattooing the minute details of different tenses onto my memory made it much easier for me to express complex ideas in French prose, ideas like how Camus and Sartre differed on Existentialism or how digital technology influences culture.

It turns out that the other three students--Van, Luz Alba and Santos--really appreciated the exercises and had lots of questions about them.

The sentence that was vexing Yuwei grew out of a question Van brought up. She was having difficulty differentiating between the present and past perfect tenses.

“If I say, ‘I am at the grocery store,’” she began, as I wrote her words on the white board, “do I follow it with ‘I have been here for five hours,’ or is it ‘I had been here for five hours’?”

“Good question, Van,” I said. On the white board, I left a blank space where the verb should be in the second sentence. “Which one is it?”

I paused while everyone stared at the board and furrowed their brows.

Yuwei was the first to speak up.

“It is have been,” he said, “because the first sentence is present tense.”

“Yes! Present perfect indicates something that began in the past but is still happening, is still true right now.”

I went on to use the example of ‘I have lived in Ohio all my life,’ a sentence that indicates I still live in Ohio as of the moment of speaking.

“That’s a funny one, right?” I said, noting Luz Alba’s somber expression. “Because it’s using lived, which sounds like past tense, to indicate something in the present. Weird, right?”

Luz Alba nodded, clearly vexed by this apparent contradiction. I explained how French uses the simple present to express the same sentiment and asked if Spanish does as well. She and Santos both nodded.

“So, in English, it’s the tense of the helper verb, have or had, that indicates whether the action is still ongoing or completed.”

“So, when do I use the other one?” Van asked.

“Okay, so the past perfect is about going further back in time when you’re already in the past,” I said.

I drew a horizontal line with an outward-facing arrow at each end on the white board. 

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I use this visual strategy a lot when I’m tutoring American students who have trouble getting verb tenses right, and I’ve noticed lately that many of the ESL students who come for tutoring benefit from it as well. I started using the linear drawing with Asian students, especially, when someone told me that Chinese has no verb tenses at all. Time is indicated purely by context clues in Chinese. My head nearly exploded when I heard that. 

“This is the future,” I said, indicating the arrow at the right end of the line, “and this is the past.” Here I indicated the arrow at the left end. “And this is now,” I said, making a mark on the line just before the right-hand arrow, “when you are telling your story. This is the past, when you were at the grocery store.” I made a mark a little to the left of the ‘now’ mark. “And this,” I said, making a mark a bit more to the left, “is even further in the past, when you had been there for five hours.” 

I paused to let that sink in. Most brows were still furrowed, but heads were beginning to nod in burgeoning comprehension.

“So you use the past perfect when you are already talking in the simple past, and you mention something that happened even further in the past: ‘I was at the grocery store--in the past--and I had been there for five hours--even earlier in the past.’ Get it?”

Van actually looked happy; I think she may have understood this tense for the first time in her life.

“So what about this one?” I said, writing two more sentences on the board. 

I was feeling very encouraged by how unexpectedly well things were going. I love playing with verb tenses and explaining how they work. We had spent a lot of time in French class working on if/then causes, which require great agility of verb tense. 

I wrote on the board: If I had had time, I would have stopped.

“What’s going on here?” I asked.

Silence.

Van cocked her head to one side and ventured a guess. “Does it mean you would only stop sometimes, only when you had time?”

“Not quite,” I said. “Anyone else have an idea?”

Santos had a little half smile on his face, as if he were enjoying the discussion, but he kept quiet. His English is not quite as good as the others’, so I’m not sure how many details he was catching. Luz Alba shook her head.

Yuwei frowned.

“This is called the ‘tense of regret’ because it has to do with hypothetical situations in the past that never really happened,” I said. “It’s saying that if I had time back then, which I didn’t, I would have stopped, but I couldn’t.”

After a moment, Yuwei spoke up.

“Isn’t it the same to just say, ‘if I had time, I would have stopped’?”

“No, that would be wrong,” I said. “‘If I had time’ means you are talking about a real moment in the past when you may or may not have had time. ‘If I had had’ means that I never did.”

I wrote the sentence ‘if I had time, I would stop’ on the board to illustrate the difference between it and my original example.

“This sentence indicates that at some very real time in the past, if there was time, you stopped, and if there wasn’t time, you didn’t stop. But this sentence,” here I pointed to the had had/would have stopped combination, “indicates a hypothetical situation, where you never did have time, so it was impossible for you to stop. Does that help?”

Yuwei continued to frown at the board. Van’s brow furrowed, and her head cocked to one side. Luz Alba studied the board with an intense expression. Santos continued to stare at the board with a bemused little smile.

“I don’t see the difference,” Yuwei said, through his frown.

“So this one,” I said, pointing to the simple past tense combination, “is about reality. There was actually a time when you were, say, driving through the countryside, and there were little roadside markets here and there, and if you were on schedule or ahead of schedule, you would sometimes stop to buy something. Other times, you wouldn’t stop because you needed to get somewhere by a particular time.”

I let that settle in the silence for a moment. Beads of sweat trickled down my back. I felt I was losing them.

“This one, on the other hand,” I said, pointing to the had had/would have stopped sentence, “is not talking about reality at all. It is talking about the fact that you never did have the time to stop anywhere, even if you wanted to. That’s why it’s called the tense of regret.”

Van cocked her head to the other side and said, “I think it the word if that make it hard. I think saying ‘when I had time, I would stop’ make more sense.”

“Okay, yeah,” I said, happy at least part of it was becoming clear. “The word if here is what indicates the idea of sometimes i stopped and sometimes I didn’t. But you’re right, the word when could be used as well.”

I waited a beat.

“So, do you see how the one is talking about real events in the past and the other is talking about stuff that never happened, that was never possible because you never, ever had the time to stop?”

There was a brief moment of silence where I’m pretty sure I held my breath.

Then Yuwei smiled.

“When Yuwei smiles, I know I’ve done it!” I said.

We all laughed, though mine was a nervous laugh of relief.

“Yes, I see now,” Yuwei said. “I understand the regret, the never really happened. And it’s not that; we just don’t smile as much as Americans do.”

That moment of realizing that you have helped someone understand a new concept is a unique sensation. I often glimpse it when I’m tutoring, but it mostly eludes me in this ESOL class. I think it’s because I don’t feel the pressure of teaching when all I’m doing is tutoring. Arguably, they’re the same thing. But for some reason, I view them very differently. 

I like tutoring because I’m basically helping someone navigate the experience of being a college student. I’m not necessarily teaching them anything specific so much as I’m coaching their decision-making process. I do teach an average of five students a week how to apply the four most common comma rules to their own writing, but that’s second nature to me. I can teach anyone those four rules in about five minutes.

However, the students I tutor are very different from those in my ESOL class. Van, Yuwei, Luz Alba, and Santos are all college graduates, working professionals who just need to improve their spoken language skills.  I am often so intimidated by their collective smartness that I freeze up. 

Over the past year, I’ve had a lot of conflicting feelings about my MFA degree. While I was job hunting, the degree began to seem embarrassing, like an old merit badge for macrame: cute and maybe artistic, but humiliatingly worthless. Which was really confusing because for two of my undergrad years and all three of my years in the program, I knew without a doubt that the MFA in creative writing was exactly the right thing for me, and that the NEOMFA was the right place for me. Then, as the rejections from publishers started piling up and the job offers failed to materialize, I doubted. I doubted my abilities as a writer and editor, my potential abilities as an employee in a corporation, my decision to spend three years studying something so entirely useless as writing, and my choice to forgo teaching English Composition and tutor writing at the law school instead. 

Through all those doubts and inner conflicts, I kept volunteering in ESL classes at the International Institute. And I contacted Project Learn to see about volunteering with them, too. 

Then the university called me and offered me not a position as an adjunct teaching English Comp, but a position as a tutor in the writing lab. Then Project Learn offered me my own ESOL class, albeit without pay. 

If I hadn’t earned a master’s degree, and done it by going with tutoring instead of teaching, I wouldn’t have the two jobs I love now. And I wouldn’t get to make Yuwei smile, which is the best grammar lesson of all.