CSEC ENGLISH

Hello there! So you are back at school! Hope all is going well with you. Please do make up your mind that you will study seriously from now until those May/June exams. For starters, you can re-read the Literature texts you plan to use in the exam. You can start a vocabulary notebook, and put into it all the new words you meet, plus their meanings, along with any problem spellings you may have. TODAY you can start that journal, and every day you can write just 300 words on a topic of your interest. Get busy writing, and you won’t get ‘writer’s block’ when you are sitting in the exam room! Read on now, and enjoy your CSEC page.

ENGLISH B—MOM LUBY AND THE SOCIAL WORKER In your collection of short stories, some of the adults are wonderful parents and role models, but it is also true that some of the adults have a very negative impact on young people. In this week’s story, Mom Luby is one of those wonderful parents, while Miss Rushmore is most unhelpful even though her job is to assist children with problems.

Let’s take a close look at Kristin Hunter’s wonderful story, Mom Luby and the Social Worker. The key to the story is right there in the title. Two children are left orphans when their mother dies, and Mom Luby takes them into her home. Things get interesting when Mom Luby goes to the Department of Child Welfare to get financial help. What unravels is a comparison between how an elderly, humane individual (Mom Luby) responds to the needs of the orphans, and how government bureaucracy (represented by the Social Worker) responds. The result of the comparison is a satirical exposé of the failure of the Welfare Department to offer any assistance at all.

The narrator is Elijah—the older of the two children. Because he’s a child, he is totally uncritical of Mom Luby’s faults. He lets us know that Mom runs a speakeasy where she sells illicit liquor that the police come every Saturday to ‘collect their money’ and to drink some of the home-brewed alcohol, and that Mom Luby tells a string of lies to the Welfare Department. He observes when Mom Luby lies about Puddin being in bed and gives her a whack for peeping at the Welfare Officer, and he mentions how scared he was by the visit to the Welfare Department. His child’s perspective also allows him to tell us frankly and without boasting that Mom is more of a social worker than Miss Rushmore: ‘She’s a midwife and a herb doctor and an ordained minister of the Gospel, besides running a place to eat and drink after hours.’ Elijah reports, without comment, the foolish statements made by Miss Rushmore, but the reader is well able to detect her failings.

The main characters are Mom Luby and Miss Rushmore, the social worker. Mom Luby can be faulted for her illegal activities, for brewing alcohol, for preaching in church and for practising medicine without a licence for either activity. We could add that she gives false information to the authorities in order to obtain financial support. But Mom Luby has a heart of gold: despite her age, she has taken in the two children, who obviously adore her, and who are well fed and cared for. She is engaged in pastoral work, delivers babies and looks after the sick. She is often not paid for the food she serves up, yet she has taken on the financial burden of caring for the two children. She is warm and friendly (inviting Miss Rushmore to take off her shoes to ease her feet), and has a bubbly sense of humour.

Miss Rushmore, in contrast, is stiff and starchy, critical of Mom Luby’s management of the home and the children’s diet, and of the presence of men in the house. Mom Luby invites her to come along as she does her rounds, and Miss Rushmore is amazed at how much the elderly woman gets done. She admits that Mom Luby accomplishes more in two hours than she does in two years, but in response to Mom Luby’s teasing suggestion that the department should put her on the payroll, Miss Rushmore says that Mom Luby is not qualified. Of course, the irony in that brings the house down, and Miss Rushmore is escorted, amidst their laughter, from the premises, having given no help whatsoever to the two orphans and their foster-mother. Themes The story, as we see in the title and the comparison of the two women involved in the care of the two orphans, is a satirical attack on the red tape that hampers the work of officials in the Welfare Department, and a celebration of individuals like Mom Luby, who just get the job done out of love.

TROUBLESHOOTING VERBS

Let’s look at some problems that often crop up with verbs. We will stick with REGULAR verbs for the moment. Here are the four principal forms of the verb in English: ● We add –s (or –es) to the simple form for the third person singular in the present tense: The boy walks, your baby chuckles, my teacher smiles

We add –ing to the simple form to make the present participle, which is used to indicate a continuous action: The girls are playing cricket. Dad is fixing the car. The twins were hiding.

We add –ed to the simple form to make the past participle, used both for the past tenses and for the passive (which we will discuss later on): The guide has walked three miles. Has he opened the window? I am touched by your kindness.

THE SIMPLE FORM OF THE VERB

An important use of the simple form of the verb is in combination with DO, DOES, DID as the auxiliary (helping) verb.

Look at these sentences:

Did you notice that we added the –s to the verb looks? That’s because the student is “third person singular”. But did you notice, too, that as soon as we put does into the sentence, the verb look went back to the simple form?

So we have a useful rule here: If you use DO, DOES, DID as the auxiliary verb, then use the SIMPLE form for the main verb.

Let’s see how it works in the past tenses: ● Tom worked in the market. Althea passed her driving test.

● Tom did not work in the market. Althea did not pass her driving test.

● Did Tom work in the market? Did Althea pass her driving test

Can you see that we have been following the same rule? For the past tense we added –ed, but as soon as we used DID, the verb went back to the simple form.

Turn to 6B