Subject-

ification. It was drilled into my head as I was going through all of my classes demarcated with the prefix EDU that “When you actually get to be a teacher, you will learn more from your students than they will learn from you.” That little statement was never part of the curriculum, obviously, and yet, at the same time, it was the underlying message: simply being around education will educate you—I could associate this with the television post just previous to this one, but that particular note is not for elucidation here. In total, I teach forty-one classes every week, and of these forty-one classes, I teach one class, two times a week, to one student. He is a middle-aged Korean Business man who has studied in Wales and is looking to improve his English to the point where he could pass the Toefl examination—not a simple task if you have ever been associated with it. We are currently going through a series of books called Mastering Skills for the Toefl – Advanced, but, just about every class, he brings in his own little English questions from his business documents—he sends emails and business letters to America. The other day, during one of our breaks (five minutes is just enough time to get coffee), I came back and he had written on the board:

I have attached the corrected documents for you.
I am attaching the corrected documents for you.
I will be attaching the corrected documents.

And he asked me: Which one is correct? Now, the problem, as anybody who speaks the English language will tell you, is that there is nothing incorrect about any of them. They are all technically sound English sentences: one in the past tense, one in the present progressive, and one in the future progressive. He told me that it was outside the body of the email. It was more like a tag line. What is correct here? Why did it ring just slightly sharp in my English ear? My first reaction was to tell him that they were all grammatically correct sentences, but then to respond that when I used to send business emails, the most concise way to let somebody know that there is an attachment at the end of the document is to let them know about it in certain terms: Corrected Documents Attached. What happened? It’s the subject, you see. There is a lot of implication, I have discovered, in the English language. (There are also metaphysical implications here in the vein of "Why am I writing this?" but we'll leave those until another time.) There are things you don’t think about, and one of those things is the subject. Now, obviously, “the subject” is well-traveled territory in the world of philosophy—Kant: “A person is a subject whose actions can be imputed to him. ... subject to no other laws than those he gives to himself, either alone or at least along with others,” Heidegger: “As the ego cogito, subjectivity is the consciousness that represents something, relates this representation back to itself, and so gathers with itself,” Hegel: “Person’ is essentially different from ‘subject’, since ‘subject’ is only the possibility of personality; every living thing of any sort is a subject. A person, then, is a subject aware of this subjectivity, since in personality it is of myself alone that I am aware” (crazy Germans)—and it can be expressed as simply as the incredible shift in meaning when you write: I sent the documents. v. Documents attached. When “I” am the subject, the reader is forced to consider who the “I” is for a second: forced. There is no getting around it, because “I” am the subject of that sentence. On the other hand, when the documents are the subject of the sentence, it is more comfortable, because I don’t have to think about who’s sending it, all I have to think about is the documents—which “you” have presumably already told me about in the text of the email. Like so many things, it’s so important that we don’t think about it because it is a part of us. I was absolutely shocked at the implication of what it means to change the subject.