TS#12 – Sultan

I finally got to meet with Sultan today. It had been about a week or so since we had last met because Sultan had gone on a road trip to visit Houston, Texas. He said that he really enjoyed Texas, and that the only down side was the heat, which was drier than Florida’s humid summers. Unfortunately, you can’t really outrun the heat as long as you’re in the South. He visited San Antonio as well. We previously didn’t meet because he had just gotten back from his road trip and was exhausted from driving for fourteen hours on the highway.

This time around I decided to try teaching him a small snippet of the lesson that I will be teaching next Thursday for my classroom filming. Although the lesson is still a little rough around the edges, I did have a lot of success with explaining the uses of the modal verbs “can” and “could” through the use of music videos accompanied by lyrics. I chose Dolly Parton’s song “Jolene” and Daughter’s song “Medicine”. I did this because one song, “Jolene”, talks about a present crisis in her marriage where her husband is in love with another woman and she begs the other woman, Jolene, to not take her husband from her just because she “can”. “Jolene” mainly uses the modal auxiliary “can”, and I thought this was important because there is not only the present and past to worry about with modals like the word can (where could is the past tense), but degrees of politeness, possibility, and tone modality in general. I did the same thing with the song “Medicine” but this time focusing on the modal verb “could”. I wanted Sultan to understand the nuanced differences between phrases like “Can I borrow your pen?” vs. “Could I borrow your pen?” and how the degree of formality and authority changes with the use of each modal.