Class Time

Right now I am trying to codify everything that I have to say about teaching English in one big document for work, that is kind of like a self-help book and kind of like an instruction manual. 

Probably home team will figure out what I’m doing and claim that it is their intellectual property and then all will be for naught, but for now, I’m just getting it out. Half to help the new teachers, and half to get it all out. My wisdom about teaching might not be classy, but it is hard earned, and if I get hit by a big black sedan tomorrow, I’d hate to see it lost.

What’s been great about the way I’ve learned to teach, is that it’s fully intuitive. Having never been trained, I’ve been forced to follow the path that experience supports, and let experience teach me when I’ve gone astray.

And what fascinates me about it is that the way I’ve learned to teach is the way that life teaches me.

When I started teaching English, I already knew English. By the time I was old enough to realize I was alive and a person, I already had the language. So when I had to teach it to people, I hadn’t even had the experience of learning it, so all I really knew how to do was tell students when they were making mistakes.

Student: I very like dance.

Me: You should say “I like to dance very much.”

Student: OK. “I like to dance very much.”

Me: Do you like to sing?

Student: I very like sing.

Me: You should say “I like to sing very much.”

Student: OK

This was not very productive, but it was pretty frustrating.

This is also how life felt until about my early thirties.

Me: (Dates a mean boy.)

Life: You shouldn’t do that.

Me: OK. (Dates a different mean boy.)

Life: You shouldn’t do that, either.

Me: OK

As I became more frustrated with the ineffectiveness of my teaching, I began to really crave a structure that introduced English from the beginning to the end- a straight line starting with nothing and ending with perfect fluency. I started to really study the language, it’s structures and patterns. 

This helped a little, but it remained pretty frustrating, because ultimately there is no first step and no last step to mastering a language. Instead, you go in a spiral, the first few times around you’re going “I very like sing” and if someone points out to you that “very” belongs before an adverb like much and not after the subject, and if you practice a bunch your fifth or fiftieth time around you’ll say “I like sing very much” At this point you are many spirals away from “I like to sing very much,” let alone “I totally love singing.” And on each spiral, you’re picking up all kinds of junk, new vocabulary and better pronunciation and all that. You’re just wandering around and around, coming closer and closer to what people will hear as fluent English.

My attempts to improve myself in a straight and cumulative line are similarly useless. Instead, I get a little better at some things about the thousandth time I do them wrong, and pick up new things to be bad at along the circle path. Next time around I skip the mean boy but pick a really nice addict.

The structure I teach teachers to teach with (I see when I step back) is the one I’ve learned to learn from. So if you would like to teach things the way life teaches them, here is the deal.

Step One: Introduce

Expose the students to the thing that you want them to learn. Just let them experience it. Don’t correct mistakes, don’t answer questions. Just let them sit with it. Try to get them to focus on the thing you’re trying to teach, and not all the other distractions in the activity.

Step Two: Instruct

Explicitly teach the lesson. Give new information that the student didn’t have before. Make sure you start by explaining the structure behind what they’re learning, then explain what it means, and finally show them how to use it. Expect resistance. Expect confusion. Try to get them to write it down.

Step Three: Targeted Practice

Let the student practice with the new information. Do not expect success. Expect disaster. This is the practice activity that helps you know how well you did at teaching, and lets you know what your student missed. This is stuff you will have to re-instruct. But you don’t re-instruct now. They’ll have to catch it next semester when it comes up again.

Step Four: Open Ended Practice

This is where the student has to use what they learned on their own. This isn’t a fill in the blank-- they have to produce something using what they learned. Do not expect success. Expect disaster. This is much harder than anything they’ve had to do before. They might not really get it this time around.

Step Five: Application

This is when the student has to use what they’ve learned in the real world. It’s time for a field trip. They have to go out and do what they’ve learned to do. You should still expect disaster, but this is a higher stakes disaster. This will be witnessed. This has emotional consequences. Prepare yourself and your students for emotional consequences. Do not attempt to shield your student from emotional consequences, even though you really, really really want to. Even though you feel like their parent and their bodyguard and an unwilling conscripted torturer all at once. Don’t do it.

The thing about the way we teach lessons at my school is, when this process ends, it begins again. Our students enter the school, and they go through each lesson as many times as they have to before they can level up. And so do you.

As teachers, we have to learn to accept the many steps that have disaster in them, with the knowledge that the whole lesson will be back again in a number of weeks. This is how God, in his wisdom, constructed our universe as well. It’s got rolling admissions. You drop in, and you go around and around until you graduate at as high a level as you can achieve. And I’ve led enough Application activities to know that God does not enjoy your suffering. I love my students even more fiercely when I lead them out to humiliate themselves in the early circles of learning than I do when they finally nail it in the late ones. I’m a brutal kind of teacher, and so, I think is God.

And I’m not a brutal teacher because I learned that this is right or think it is. I am because I know it is they way they learn. Because I know it from experience, I am also a really compassionate teacher. And for the same reason, I’m a really faithful learner, stumbling around my dumb circles, trusting I'm getting better.