ABSTRACT
The room is noisy, full of 15–year-olds who look 18 in their uniform black blazers and ties worn as individual fashion statements. The teacher enters and moves to the middle of the room seemingly unnoticed. He takes a pack of cards from his pocket and slips the top one from the pack. The noise subsides gradually like a tube train screaming from the dark tunnel and coming to a breathy halt. Silence. All eyes focus on the card, on it two pictures: a pot of glue and a road. The game is to guess the commonly known idiom illustrated here. A shout from the back, ‘Sticking to the straight and narrow’. ‘You're right! Who saw Ally McBeal last night? Would you call that sticking to the straight and narrow?’ There's irony in the teacher's voice. A hardly perceptible smile. There's laughter as the conversation continues for another minute. He claps his hands gently, ‘OK! Back to learning now. Yesterday we were looking at living conditions of different teenagers in Madrid if you remember. I set some homework.’ He smiles, they smile. ‘First job to look at the homework. Then today's goal is to think about where you have lived in your life so far. You'll meet some new grammar here – the imperfect to express used to’.
