Instruction

What is the most insightful step a language instructor can take? Teaching the past continuous... He/she should try to enforce it earlier rather than later. So much there is in past continuous, so much memory, so much of the imagery of a suffocating voice: habits of the past, childhood, summer days, spring evenings, actions that were being repeated with a sense of eternity. Today we were very "past-continuous" in the class. I recalled many things: I experienced the ball in my hands, playing the "fisherman", and my hands frozen while playing the "statues". There, at the empty street of the late evening; the market was closed. Only the coiffeur. And the doll at his shopwindow, wearing a damaged wedding dress and a diadem of white glass pearls. And the girls got as well deep in their eyes, while remembering their own past continuous, in another language.