Douglas, What is "Beatles"?

One of the problems of teaching English in Sarawak is that almost all of the readily available material is very Europe and US centred.  This even applies to the climate.  Brits are famous for talking about the weather and English textbooks are full of it too.  Whole chapters are devoted to the seasons and the way they change, but then we have a lot of weather to talk about.  Not so in Sarawak, within spitting distance of the Equator.  There are just two seasons here - "rainy" and "rainier", the annual variation in daylight hours is about ten minutes and the annual temperature range is about fifteen degrees, from 25-40c, day and night.  God knows what the locals do for smalltalk.

Earlier this week I was preparing a lesson for a sparky group of nineteen year olds and the textbook had some photos of the Beatles and the fall of the Berlin Wall as teaching aids.  I assumed they'd have heard of the Beatles and I decided to use the material to see what reaction I'd get.  They didn't recognise a photo of the Fab Four, so I wrote "the Beatles" on the whiteboard, which got me the response "Douglas, what is Beatles"? What indeed?  My first reaction was to talk about how famous they were and what an impact they'd had on popular culture, then I thought, "this is an English lesson, not a lesson in Western popular culture", so I just said "they were a pop group in the 1960s, they were very, very famous in Europe and America."  Actually, what more is there to say as far as a group of asian teenagers are concerned?  Interestingly, I had more success with the idea of the Berlin Wall, once we established it was like the DMZ between the two Koreas.

The truth is my students aren't learning English because they have any special respect for or interest in Europe or the States.  They're learning it because English is the lingua franca of business and academia and they need it to get on.  The reason that English is in this position has nothing to do with British culture and values and everything to do with American economic hegemony.  Sometimes, stood in front of these young people I feel like an irrelevant old man wittering on about Britain and the British.  But, mostly I look at them and smile and get on with the job in hand, knowing that the only antidote to irrelevance is to keep changing and that they are helping me at least as much with this as I am helping them to learn English.