Classic!

Two weeks ago, Giggs informed me that she was going to Bangkok the following week to take an English scholarship exam. "In English?!," was my first response because it seemed utterly impossible that she had signed up for an English exam and informed me of its existence one week before its scheduled date. She kept saying that it was "no big deal" and wouldn't be difficult and that it was just practice (all reassuring things to here if only for purely selfish reasons, namely I didn't want to be fired from my teaching gig because I failed to adequately prepare my student for an exam I didn't know about). And then she came back from Bangkok, having taken the exam, and her reaction to it can best be summed up from the text message I received upon her return: "Now I am home! The exam was very difficult T__T (which is the Thai equivalent of the American :( emoticon)."
So for the past week we have shifted the subject of our lessons from general conversation/pronounciation activities to vocabulary drills from her TOEFL Vocabulary Practice Test book (whose validity is questionable at best). The exercises range from the "find the best definition of this word" to the "substitute a synonym for underlined word" variety. The sentences' subjects are mostly random and their difficulty for a non-English speaker is undoubtedly exacerbated by their arcane subject matter (17th century city planning, various types of "aromatic, medicinal Asiatic herbs"). Some of them are also worded in very non-eloquent English. Take, for example, "The practice of lynching was started by a man who was a most law-abiding citizen." Some of the sentences are also just wrong. A sentence describing a "sprawling metropolis" had "C. straggling" as its correct answer.
One of the sentences we recently went over was about Louis L'Amour, a 20th century writer of Western novels. The sentence read, "Although Louis L'Amour wrote a multitude of fictional narratives concerned with the lives of the American Frontier, his works are not considered classics." The correct synonym for "classics" was "masterpieces." This sentence then sparked a discussion about what a "classic" is and what a "masterpiece" is. (Side note: way for the TOEFL practice people to choose someone who no one would ever free associate the words "classic" or "masterpiece.") I started listing a few examples of the most widely known classics in the literary world (Shakespeare) and the musical world (Beethoven, Mozart) and then went onto Andy Warhol and Picasso (neither of whom Giggs had ever heard). I stuck with the Shakespeare/Beethoven explanation and stressed how they were people to whom there has been no equal and whose work is considered the best of its kind. And then Giggs said, "Like Harry Potter." I quickly retorted something about how Harry Potter is popular (widely, mind bogglingly popular) but that doesn't mean it's a classic. "A classic," I said in more or less these words, "is something that people will read or listen to or look at for hundreds of years after its initial popularity."
And then I realized that in Thailand, Harry Potter probably IS a literary classic. It's been translated into 67 languages, including Ancient Greek (talk about a fantastic way to get young kids to learn the Classics, as in Latin and Greek) and Basque. I'm all for the bagillion dollar franchise of HP and its addictive story, but in my opinion popularity does not mean "classic" status. In fact, it was somewhat horrifying to me that she equated Harry Potter with "classic" but has no idea who J.D. Salinger or Robert Frost are. I guess the subject matter of Harry Potter is so disparate from any reality of any country that it is truly universal, in the sense that it can be translated into any language and still have the same resonance. Perhaps the same cannot be said of Salinger although I wonder which of (or whether) the works we consider "classics" in the US are translated and read in other non-Western countries. Aside from Harry Potter and the Twilight series, are sci-fi series like the Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials (Golden Compass, Amber Spyglass, Subtle Knife) known outside of the US/Europe? I asked Giggs about Pullman and she said she recognized the name "Golden Compass" from the movie (a truly terrible rendition of the book). In my opinion, encouraging the reading of these books (HP, Pullman's series, even Lemony Snicket) in English is something that should be done more in schools and tutoring programs in Thailand given the pop culture status of many of their movie incarnations. If there's one thing I've learned about Thailand since arriving in August, it is that anything associated with the label Western (particularly American) automatically gains credibility and popularity. So why not apply this to learning English?
Giggs asked what classics she should read and the first thing that came to mind was Roald Dahl. Now there is a classic who could easily be translated and understood by people of a whole slew of cultures and backgrounds. He is magical and fantastical and yet his stories have some moral issues, just as HP does. I wrote down some Dahl titles (Matilda, The Witches, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and told her that it'd be a great idea to find these books in English. We started going over a synopsis of Matilda at the end of last week and during today's class she brought in the rest of the synopsis with all the words underlined that she didn't know. We worked on reading out loud as well as creating synonyms for the unknown words and I have to say that I'm very impressed with how much better her English has gotten since we began our classes in October. So for anyone in the publishing world, here is a marketing idea: translate more verifiable literary classics, sorry J.K. Rowling, of the Dahl/A Wrinkle in Time caliber, into English and have them readily available. Just a thought.