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Story of Mr. and Mrs. Brown
1.       mhsn supertitiz
518 posts
 28 Sep 2009 Mon 12:19 pm

Mr. and Mrs. Brown went to the seaside
Turkish Daily News

Mr. and Mrs. Brown went to the seaside






This hyperactive British couple set out to teach English to Turkish students almost 50 years ago. They were involved in a series of outdoor activities; they went on picnics, to the zoo, climbed mountains, and indeed they frequently went to the seaside. They even went to Mexico and brought back sombreros. At the end of all these activities, Turkish students could still not speak English… Except for this sentence

Istanbul – Turkish Daily News


This might sound like an ordinary English sentence. But it is not. It has a deeper meaning or meaninglessness for many generations of Turkish students. They were the father and mother of an imaginary “Brown” family in an English teaching textbook used all around the country for decades.

It was “A Direct Method English Course” by E.V. Gatenby, first published in 1949. It was the only textbook for public schools in the mid-50s, 60s and 70s. Every single middle-aged Turkish high school graduate has, one way or another, dramatic memories of the Brown family.

After the first ten chapters in the book, ‘Lesson Eleven´ introduced the family to the students, titled “English Boys and Girls.” The chapter read, “I am an English boy. My name is George Brown. Mr. and Mrs. Brown are my father and mother.” The first question asked was “What is this English boy´s name?”

The impact of Mr. and Mrs. Brown on the minds of generations of students is best reflected in several entries to popular website ekþisözlük, www.sourtimes.org.

“The inseparable pair of our childhood. The hyperactive couple would always go somewhere and always do something in every chapter.”

“I met them in Junior High. Because of them, I called all ladies I know ‘Mrs. Brown´ and all men I know ‘Mr. Brown´”

“They spent so much time at the seaside that it was rumored mussels started growing on Mr. Brown´s shoes.”

Another entry on the website remembers them as, “They had three children. The big brother was George; the middle child was Jack and the smaller one Mary. In one chapter, we had learned that Mrs. Brown was wearing silk stockings.”



Prize-winning ‘other side´:

Their lifespan had to come to an end and it did. An English teaching institute, Global English, wrote their obituary. It was a press ad prepared by FERM Creative Group. It won a special jury award by the prestigious Crystal Apple in 2004. The ad was an obituary notice with a picture of an old couple. It said: “You tried very hard to learn to speak English with them but it didn´t happen. May they rest in peace.” The message was only too clear: “Remember, this was such a bad method to teach English; here, we are offering a better way.”

There was nothing extraordinary about the ad, and certainly it was far from qualifying for a prize.

The jurors must have been among those agonized by Mr. and Mrs. Brown. They had to award the idea.



Extent of damage to creativity:

The influence of Mr. and Mrs. Brown is so deep in generations of Turkish people that the theme has found its way into literature. Prominent Turkish novelist Elif Þafak has an articulate description of the phenomenon in her book, “The Saint of Incipient Insanities” (Araf), from the viewpoint of a character from Istanbul, Omer, a Ph.D. student in political science in Boston.

“Back in Istanbul during his high school days, the very first book he had read in the first English-language course he took was prosaically titled Learning English-I. That was the course book for the first semester of the very first year. In the second semester they had proceeded to another book, Learning English-II, and so it went. It didn´t give the impression of making much progress and in their fourth or fifth semester, the kids were already making fun scribbling on the covers of the prescribed books Still Learning English XIV, Desperately Learning English-XXXV.”

Þafak writes that the English language depicted in these books was “like something you could never really, fully learn but merely dabble in; a slippery substance you could not take hold of but only lay a hand on… And yet, despite the demoralizing elongation of their titles, the Learning English series could have been much more enjoyable had their main protagonists been other than Mr. and Mrs. Brown. If high school kids back in Turkey spoke some sort of crooked English with maximum attention to grammar rules and minimum competency in vocabulary, part of the blame could be put on Mr. and Mrs. Brown, and rightly so. In the Learning English -I-II-III... series, they roamed the pages doing the most simple things in the most scrupulous ways, never realizing, in the meantime, the extent of the damage to whatever creativity and ingenuity might reside in their young readers.”



Past perfect sombrero:

“The couple had popped up in the very first pages of Learning English-I, smiling from ear to ear in the kitchen of their house. During that initial encounter, Mrs. Brown was standing beside the counter with a mission to teach “plate,” “cup,” and “a bowl of red apples,” while Mr. Brown was sitting at the table, sipping coffee with no particular mission. The following week, Mrs. Brown was portrayed in the living room, still with the same smile and in the same dress, to teach “armchair,” “curtain,” or, to everyone´s shock, “television.” Mr. Brown was nowhere in the picture. The couple´s teaching techniques had, like their clothes and expressions, showed little change in the weeks to follow. At each particular scene at their house, Mr. and Mrs. Brown defined and taught everything around them in terms of three fundamental criteria: color and size and age. Thus, Mrs. Brown cleaned a green carpet while Mr. Brown saw a small dog in the garden or Mrs. Brown made a white birthday cake as Mr. Brown sat in his old chair, and at those moments they decided time was ripe enough to complicate matters, they ran the vacuum over small green new carpets, or came across big old black dogs. Be that as it may, it soon turned out that these indoor scenes were a temporary tranquility, some sort of an intermediate stage, in the couple´s life. Once that phase came to an end somewhere in the middle of the book, Mr. and Mrs. Brown launched a series of outdoor activities, never to be stopped again. They went to the zoo to name the caged animals; climbed the mountains to teach herbs and plants and flowers; spent a day at the beach to wear "sunglasses," eat “ice cream,” and watch people "surf"; drove to local farms to look for “celery," "lettuce," "cabbage," and to shopping malls to buy “gloves," "belts," and "earrings," though for some reason they´d never wear them. One other activity they kept repeating every now and then was going on long, languid, “it-was-a-nice-sunny-day” picnics. There they taught "frog," "kite," "grasshopper," as they rested by a "brook" flowing through the "hills."

“Though neither Mr. Brown nor Mrs. Brown seemed to be interested in what was happening in other parts of the world, on one occasion they went to Mexico to teach “airport,” “customs,” “luggage,” and “sombrero.” To many a students´ dismay, they quickly came back, and were detected at their house once again, giving this flamboyant party to show friends and relatives their holiday pictures (each with a sombrero), while they taught the past perfect tense. Though they seemed to be in restless motion all the time, there were certain places Mr. and Mrs. Brown would never set their foot in. They never went to graveyards, for instance; and nowhere in their habitat could you come across sanatoriums, rehabilitation clinics, mental asylums, let alone brothels, where most boys in the classroom had made a visit to by this time but none had yet dared to go inside. Not that they expected to see Mr. Brown smiling from ear to ear in a penthouse, teaching words everyone craved learning, or Mrs. Brown recalling that she could do other things with her body than point at ducks or decorate big white cakes. But at least they could take a walk, be on the streets; this Omer remembered expecting of them. As the world they depicted was so unreal and vague, the language they taught became unreal and vague, too, making it all the more difficult to speak English even when you knew what you were supposed to say theoretically-that is, grammatically.”



Bad facsimile of a happy life:

Elif Þafak comments on the “the bad facsimile of a happy life taught in Learning English series” and how desperate middle-class Turkish parents were in their attempts to hear their children talk in English, “Out of the blue, in front of relatives and friends, they would force their children to speak English, to say something, anything, as long as it was, it sounded, English enough.”

“By the time summer came to an end, kids would already hate their English teachers, hating Mr. and Mrs. Brown all the more. The next semester would commence upon this shaky basis of solid detestation, offering such little motivation to go on Learning English -III.

“More than all the things they purported to teach, it was one simple point they declined to acknowledge that made these books so ossified: that all their instructions were correct on paper and yet perfectly falsifiable in life. So deep was the deleteriousness of these books that Omer could still be struggling with its side effects, if it weren´t for his deep affection for cinema and music. It was cinema- low-budget, independent, and unpretentious American/British/ Australian movies as well as a multitude of punk/rock/post punk lyrics that had taught him far beyond all advanced English books he was made to study.”

No other words can describe better than Elif Þafak´s, the impasse created by Mr. and Mrs. Brown:

“Life, real life of blood and flesh, did abide by grammatical rules and yet, incessantly, systematically, and luckily managed to deviate from those. Life did construct sentences as grammar required but then also punched holes here and there from which the gist of the language seeped out to find its own way. It was precisely this distortion, and the matchless pleasure residing there, that Learning English books forgot to teach.”

2.       _AE_
677 posts
 28 Sep 2009 Mon 12:28 pm

It sounds like the politically incorrect, middle class "Janet and John" books that were introduced in primary schools in the UK in the 1940s to teach 5/6 year olds to read and write!  They continued to be used until the 1970s.

 

They are now considered to be funny - in fact many parodies have been made about them

 

http://www.icons.org.uk/nom/nominations/janet-john-books

 



Edited (9/28/2009) by _AE_

3.       lady in red
6947 posts
 28 Sep 2009 Mon 01:35 pm

 

Quoting _AE_

It sounds like the politically incorrect, middle class "Janet and John" books that were introduced in primary schools in the UK in the 1940s to teach 5/6 year olds to read and write!  They continued to be used until the 1970s.

 

They are now considered to be funny - in fact many parodies have been made about them

 

http://www.icons.org.uk/nom/nominations/janet-john-books

 

 

Weren´t they replaced with Wayne and Waynetta??  Roll eyes

 

lol

4.       mhsn supertitiz
518 posts
 28 Sep 2009 Mon 01:44 pm

 

Quoting lady in red

 

 

Weren´t they replaced with Wayne and Waynetta??  Roll eyes

 

lol

 

or maybe Dick and Sally Big smile

 




http://istanbuls-stranger.blogspot.com/2009/06/snickerworthy.html

5.       libralady
5152 posts
 28 Sep 2009 Mon 02:56 pm

 

Quoting _AE_

It sounds like the politically incorrect, middle class "Janet and John" books that were introduced in primary schools in the UK in the 1940s to teach 5/6 year olds to read and write!  They continued to be used until the 1970s.

 

They are now considered to be funny - in fact many parodies have been made about them

 

http://www.icons.org.uk/nom/nominations/janet-john-books

 

 

 I was taught to read with Janet and John books Confused  

 

I thought the article that Tami posted was so funny!  Mr and Mrs Brown - such a common name <img src='/static/images/smileys//lol.gif' alt='lol'> (fast)  Where was Gordon in the story?? Unsure

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