L'Escalier et L'Ascenseur

Jay from Head Office came to observe my teaching today. Things did not go at all well, for a few reasons.

The first was that Jay surprised me by telling me, beforehand, that he wasn't going to stay for the whole lesson. Okay, I could understand that--it is New Year's, after all--but it threw me for a loop, largely because he would only stay for the Review portion of the lesson. And I didn't really have one. The class he observed is on the first unit of a new level. I had not planned on much review. So what I did, ad hoc, was very bad. I had not properly thought of how to present or practice the review language I cobbled together on a moment's notice.

Ithink this is pretty much the end of things for me at Shane. The thing is, I don't really much care for the way we do children's lessons. They're very drill-oriented and don't teach very much, or very quickly. At best, they get kids able to answer questions in a very mechanical way that doesn't bear much resemblance to how people actually use English in real life.

The other issue I have is that I don't get much leeway to adapt material to the needs of my actual students. The worst case of this came when I was still in the Taoyuan branch, and I had to spend three lessons--six hours--doing things that taught my two charges not much more than the difference between an escalator and an elevator. That was the only part of the lesson my kids didn't know. But I wasn' t really free to move on.

Never, in all the times I've studies languages, has the class had to be as much of a production as children's bushiban classes are. We learned the words for escalator and elevator, for instance, when I took French in high school--l'ascenseur (elevator) and l'escalier (escalator). But it never took anything like the amount of time I am expected to spend on the simplest vocabulary with bushiban kids. My French teachers would have been horrified at the idea of spending ten to fifteen minutes, in three separate classes, chanting sentences like, "I took the wrong escalator." Or of treating all language as though it could be broken down into simple question-and-answer pairs. Practice was in the form of real conversations, not repetitious drills.

You can dress up a drill as a "game" a number of ways--hit the flash card with a big plastic hammer, have kids race to build a tower of blocks after repetition, and so on. But it's still, ultimately, a drill. And the time it takes is not, in my opinion, very conducive to getting language across.

I want to be a real language teacher--the kind of language teacher I had in high school and, a couple of times, in college. It frankly sickens me, for instance, that after two months of two-hour classes three times a week, my very-beginner class of kids in Taoyuan did not know personal pronouns. At the end of this period, kids were still giving me sentences like, "No, it's handsome" (referring to a man in a picture) or "he's small" (referring to a picture of an inanimate object).

Every time I've taken a language, the personal pronouns were the first thing taught on the first day. Or damned close to it. Maybe they got presented in class once. But generally, you l earned them by taking them home and learning them for a test. You kept knowing them because you had no choice but to keep knowing them.

To me, learning language means learning meaning. It means learning real grammar--you know, spending some time figuring out how the past perfect differs from the present perfect. And that involved some explanation that couldn't be accomplished with a sticky ball and a big plastic hammer.