Here she describes The Ritual. Those classes must have been so fun and funny! It's like some fantastic combination of Nabokov and Tom Stoppard.
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Another feature of the textbook was the "ritual". This was a patterned response (or dialogue) that students were to learn by heart and automatically call up whenever the appropriate situation arose in class or the first line was said by the teacher. Quoting from the book: "To be effective, a ritual sentence must be an automatic response to the preceding sentence; e.g., "Excuse me!" might be your automatic response to "Ouch! You stepped on my toe!"
The idea, I think, was to keep the flow going in class, and sometimes to avoid embarrassment when a student was caught short without an answer, etc. They also were illustrations of upcoming grammatical details—so examples would be internalized before the rule was encountered--but I suspect conversational flow and ease was the main point. I could see the rituals as little subscript comics running along the bottom of other stories, the way Krazy Kat did at first. (And I think Tony Millionaire does this too.) Or just as little independent black-out sketches between longer stories.
This one was learned in the first day or so of class:
Ritual 1
[when you make a mistake in class]
-- Of course not!
-- Akh, forgive me, dear teacher!
-- Why? What have you done?
-- I've made a terrible /coarse, vulgar/ error.
-- [tenderly] That's all right /nothing/.
And I really like the "How to avoid answering a question" series,
which gave you a number of options:
Ritual 9
Four ways to avoid answering a question:
-- What does the word 'doktor' end in?
(1) -- Repeat the last question, please.
-- "the last question, please".
-- Ha-ha-ha!
(2) -- I don't know.
-- And if you knew?
-- Even of I knew, then I wouldn't tell!
-- I'm very insulted!
(3) -- Hmm.
-- Louder, please.
-- HMMM
-- And what does that mean?
-- That means that I forgot the last question.
(4) – such {banal, naïve, uninteresting} questions do not interest me.
Or even better:
Ritual 23
How to avoid answering a question:
ADVANCED LEVEL
-- Mr. Jones (Miss Jones)! What's the difference between the
preposition v and the preposition na?
-- Generally speaking, one might say, that, as a rule, it's more or
less… What did you ask?
-- In a word, Mr. Jones (Miss Jones), you don't remember.
-- It's not that I don't remember, but that I forgot.
-- Enough! I'll ask somebody else.
-- [coldly] As you wish.
(There was also the option of "turning the ritual around," whereby the student could initiate the ritual and the teacher would have to complete it.)