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Saturday 22 February 2014

Best News Ever for Teachers: Everything Works!

The most brilliant statement I’ve ever heard about teaching and learning was “Everything works!”  Early in my career I taught basic-level ESL to new recruits at a military base. As my buddy Bob used to say, if you can teach a language, you can teach anything.  Your baseline assumption in teaching a language is that your students don’t understand what you are saying--a good assumption to consider no matter what you are teaching.  You’d be amazed how slow some teachers are in catching on to this idea, and resolve that talking faster and louder is the best possible response to students’ looks of incomprehension.  Figuring out what your students already know, what they are capable of doing and understanding, and adding something new to that mix is what I mean by the word “teaching.”  The questions is:  “How?”  And the answer is, guess what:  “Everything works!”

I was having lunch at the officers mess with Gustine Schuster when Dave Eliot joined us and began bubbling enthusiastically (Dave was a chronic enthusiast) about a new method he was trying out and that “It actually works!”  Gustine responded coolly (which was odd because Gustine was typically the epitome of personal warmth), “Everything works!”  Dave hardly missed a beat as he tried to continue his success story.  “Dave!” Gustine had to finally call him up short,  “everything works!”  In the history of teaching and learning languages, as Gustine explained, every numbskull, irrational, idiotic method of teaching can claim some degree of success.  In fact, some methods have succeeded quite well even though logic dictates that they shouldn’t have. People, especially children, are programmed to learn, especially languages, and they will manage to learn something, no matter how flawed the methods used in teaching them.  People who think they have taught children to talk are like those people who think they have taught a cat to use the litter box.  (Duhh, that’s what cats do!)  The truly amazing fact is that so many people have studied a language in school for 7, 8 or 9 years and still can’t speak it.  If the people in charge of those language courses were cat owners, there would be feces everywhere!

“Everything works!” is an important idea for teachers because it is the antidote to the tyranny and dogmatism of obsessions with methodology.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that teaching should be method-less.  On the contrary, I think every teacher should have control of the theory and practice of a dozen different methodologies, and have another half dozen in mind that haven’t been fully developed.  The sad truth is that if you asked the average university teacher what his methodology is, he wouldn’t understand the question.  (Is “standing at the front of the room and talking” a method?  Oh, wait a minute, last week I used a power-point presentation.  Is that a method?)  And tenured university professors are supposed to be at the pinnacle of the pedagogical pyramid--they are certainly the most privileged and best paid. 

The media, administrators, institutions and specialists love to announce that a new methodology is going to solve all of education’s problems, including ones that have yet to be encountered.  My former boss, who was a pretty good ESL teacher in his day, used to describe the meetings he attended in Ottawa (where all the “big” decisions about language teaching across Canada were made) sardonically.  As he recounted,  everyone was looking for the next “silver bullet” solution--a methodology that everyone would use and would solve every problem,  the ultimate panacea, the single medicine that everyone would use to cure every disease. 

The problems with this administrative daydreaming are multiple, but at the top of the list is the fact that this obsession with methodology seems to invariably lead to a neutralizing and nullifying of the effect of good teachers.  Any science experiment is designed to eliminate variables, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that pedagogues looking at a learning situation from a distance are always trying to find a way to eliminate the teacher variable.   The 60 Minute expose on the Khan Academy is a pretty good example of what I am talking about. 

The Khan Academy began with Salman Khan trying to help out his cousin by given her some extra online instruction.  In simple terms, a good teacher (Khan has all the markers: hard working, knowledgable of his field, unassuming, generous, straightforward and enthusiastic) making good use of the technology for a motivated student, but big money (aka Bill Gates) and big institutions with encouragement from the media are transforming his work into a methodology which they are calling “flipping the classroom.”  To Khan’s credit, in the interview I saw, he did his best to shy away from the “silver bullet,” methodological claims.  “Flipping the classroom” implies that students do the “learning” at home on a computer and come to school to do the “homework,” solving the problems and completing exercises.  In this new scenario teachers become a custodial presence, hovering in the background--the least essential cog in a technologically advanced wheel--while their students work by themselves on computers.

Am I saying the Khan Academy doesn’t work?  No, I’m saying everything works! The technology, resources and knowledge base that the Khan Academy provides can be valuable tools for skilled teachers to use.  It should not be used to undermine the effectiveness, influence and individuality of classroom teachers.

How did I become so jaundiced about methodology?  I’m not, but my first six weeks as an ESL teacher for the Department of National Defense I was obliged to intensively learn and then follow the Audio-Visual Method in my own teaching.  The core of the method was to show pictures to students and require that they repeat, chorally and individually, a particular affirmative sentence that corresponded to that picture.  Then they would have to learn a yes/no question that required the newly-learned response, and then a “wh” question.  Got it?  Here we go:




Everybody repeat now:  “There is a pen on the table.”

Very good, and again:  “There is a pen on the table.”

Excellent, and now the yes/no question:  “Is there a pen on the table?”

And the answer:  “Yes, there is a pen on the table.”

Having practiced this for 30 minutes of so, we can move on to the “wh” questions and, for fluency, contractions.

The “what” question:  “What’s on the table?”

Answer:  “There’s a pen on the table.”

The process is actually kind of fun for about 45 minutes, but imagine doing this for 5 hours a day, 5 days a week.  It was mind-numbingly boring, equivalent to Chinese water torture.  Of course, when you are working for National Defense the fact that something is boring is no reason not to do it--almost the opposite.  Pain is good!  So all we teachers had workbooks that we were required to follow and there were Senior Teachers patrolling the hallways who could drop into our classrooms at any time.  We teachers figured out pretty quickly that no-one was going to learn to speak English by doggedly following this method.  Behind close doors we did all the things that “the method” did not permit:  offering translations, writing on the board and letting the students take notes (yes, note-taking was verboten for beginners), rehearsing skits, learning vocabulary from Playboy and Playgirl magazines, getting our students to listen to popular music with English lyrics, etc, etc, but always ready to switch to a choral drill from the workbook if there was a knock at the door.

My lunch with Gustine and Dave took place just as we were being allowed to emerge from the Dark Ages of the the Audio-Visual Method--so Dave’s enthusiasm for a new method was understandable.  We all agreed that the Audio-Visual Method really sucked (before this expression was current), and the teaching of language went through an intense period of methodological experimentation.  In pre-audio-visual teaching, I used what was called Grammar-based Instruction (following the erroneous notion that there is anything more than a tenuous connection between grammar and spoken English), but post-audio-visual I was introduced (and actually got certificates in) Criterion-referenced Instruction, Teaching by Objectives, Communicative-based Instruction, Communications Strategies, Suggestopedia, Student-Based Learning Strategies, Teacher Effectiveness Training, Real Materials Instruction, Educational Technology, TPR (Total Physical Response, which I really liked because it meant role-playing and theatre) and a bunch I can’t remember and some I invented myself, not to mention the tidal wave that followed computers coming into vogue.  I tried them all, and they all worked.

If you were applying for a language-teaching job during this period, the correct answer to the question “What method do you use?” was:  “I’m eclectic.”  In more general terms the shift was toward anything that could be called “communicative.”  Once again, the tendency was to have teachers step back and let students “communicate” as if through this process of not-teaching them students would, accidentally or through magical osmosis, learn English.  And, once again, it worked!  However, my favourite example of the “Communicative Method” not working was when the British Council at Reading University, where all the top gurus of the “Communicative Method” were employed, accepted a lucrative contract to teach a cohort of Libyan business men.  As the story goes, after a few days of the “Communicative Method,” the Libyan business men revolted because, in their view, the teachers were refusing to teach them, which sent all the leading lights of the Communicative Method running for their old grammar books and audio-visual materials.


And now the punch line of this posting:  after a number of years of teaching at the military college (where I taught as much literature as language), I was seconded back to the military base as a replacement language teacher for the summer.  Since I hadn’t taught basic level ESL for years, I was at a bit of a loss, and had little choice but to return to my old audio-visual materials and methodology, even though I knew perfectly well that a communicative approach had become pretty much de rigueur over the years.  I was surprised to discover that the students I ended up teaching took to the audio-visual approach with enthusiasm.  When their regular teacher returned, he approached me, with deference and concern, for an explanation of what I had done with his students.  His students were in rebellion because they wanted to be taught with the audio-visual approach, and nothing but the audio-visual approach would do.  I did my best to explain the audio-visual approach, and threw out all the expected cliches (“a change is as good as a rest,” “variety is the spice of life”) but ultimately, all I could tell him is that “everything works!”

Tuesday 18 February 2014

Good Teachers Are Always Underdogs

What kind of underdogs?  Pit bulls, I hope.  I read Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath:  Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants recently and, as usual, I found myself endlessly bobbing in agreement, especially when Gladwell talks about education, which he does a lot.

Much of David and Goliath is on a theme that I have passively been considering as a book subject for years.  (Ahh, indolence!) Though the themes and education examples might be similar, my point of entry would have been much different from Gladwell’s.  I wanted to develop an idea I first encounter in E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful:  “the concept of enough.”  The problem with capitalism, the reason it is destined for eventual and inevitable failure, as Schumacher argues, is that it is based on a belief in infinite growth.  The idea of “enough” is anathema to capitalist greed, to the idea that more is always better, and to Ayn Rand’s and her acolyte Alan Greenspan’s (Chair of US Federal Reserve 1987-2006) notion that selfishness is a virtue. (See Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, 1964.)

In his book, Galdwell adopts a more cogent and, from what he writes, well established conceit of the “inverted U.”  An “inverted U” is what you get when you graph the results of increasing some “x” in order to get benefit “y.”  At a certain point the benefits of x begin to produce less significant y benefits, and ultimately too much x begins to create disadvantages.  An obvious x example might be food, and the y benefits health.  (This is my example, not Gladwell’s.  Yes, I dare to out-simplify Gladwell!)  The availability of food benefits health up to a certain point, then the benefits become negligible and ultimately the over abundance of food can produce negative health results like obesity and diabetes, etc.


The graph above shows the relationship between performance and arousal which could be applied to a number of different activities, including teaching.  If you are bored and uninterested, your level of performance will be low.  A certain level of excitement, passion and arousal will optimize your performance; however, if you become too aroused, over-excited and hyperactive, your level of arousal will have a negative effect on your performance.

Gladwell’s salient examples are, of course, unexpected and much more surprising (which is why he is always so interesting to read):  class size and money.   I can absolutely relate to both, and it was satisfying to see my own foggy intuitions clarified and even quantified.  As a counterpoint to endless debates about “the poverty line,” in my book Enough (yes, the one I haven’t written!), I wanted to answer the question:  “where is the comfort line?”  How much money is enough?  With his typical nonchalant boldness Gladwell gives us a number:  $75,000.  

Statistical studies researched by Gladwell indicate that there is a direct correlation between between happiness and money up to an income of $75,000 per year.  Between $75,000 and $100,000 money does not seem to significantly influence happiness, but people who become abundantly wealthy frequently report that their wealth has become a source of unhappiness, the cause of new and challenging problems in their lives and the lives of their families.  As Robin Williams once joked about the Hollywood crowd, “Cocaine is God’s way of telling us we are making too much money!”

Gladwell also points out that for decades politicians and administrators have been obsessed with reducing class sizes in American classrooms—but downsizing classes hasn’t resulted in improved performance in the educational system.  Gladwell’s interviews with teachers and statistical data amply demonstrate that smaller class sizes do not translate to better teaching and learning, and I would be quick to agree. High-school teachers Gladwell interviewed reported the ideal class size to be between 18 and 32 students.  A class of fewer than 18 students can be as big a problem as a class that is too large. 

I have always felt that I would rather teach a class of 60 than a class of 6 (having done a lot of both), but I was never able to explain that feeling to myself—especially since the class of 60 would demand more than 10 times as much energy, preparation and correction.  The basic ideas which Gladwell raises, and which fit with my experience, are 1) that you need a certain mass in the room to guarantee that there are 5 or 6 people ready to question and debate what is being taught, and create a classroom dynamic and 2) students need to feel they have a peer group in the room in order to learn.  This second idea implies that if students feel they are not up to the level of the group, they will tune out.  The student with the courage and gumption to ask the so-called “dumb question” (which in my experience always ends up being the most profound, insightful and challenging question) is a valuable asset in every classroom.  That student who dares to ask the ostensibly simply, redundant, intuitive, knee-jerk question is not only energizing the room and providing a teacher with the opportunity to summarize, clarify and repeat information (repetition is the essence of education), but is helping to maintain  the participation and confidence of students who would otherwise simply turn off.

In the past, when I have questioned my preference for larger classes, I came up with a number of my own potential reasons.  One of the reasons I considered was my possible “messiah complex”; that is, that I was sacrificing myself for the greater good, the good of my colleagues.  Throughout my career the university was obsessed with budgets, which means saving money by having larger classes.  By teaching larger classes, I thought I was allowing my colleagues to teach smaller classes while overall we maintained a good average class size.  However, no colleague ever thanked me for teaching a larger class.  On the contrary, teachers of my ilk were openly criticized for selling out to the administration, making large classes routine, and thereby putting pressure on everyone else to teach large classes.

When my first rational would not hold, I had to admit that the satisfaction I derived from teaching larger classes was narcissistic, a hold-over from days working in the theatre.  A full house appealed to my ego, all the more so when the audience was full of charming young people and I was a one-man show.  True enough, but ultimately I decided that I liked teaching large classes because it was more work.  I will need an analogy/allegory to explain, which, I suppose, is sort of my version of the inverted U.

The title of my fable is:  “The Three Waiters, and the Three Tables.”  One of the jobs I never mention in cvs is the three years I spent working as a waiter and bartender.  I consider that experience to have made a valuable contribution to my teaching.  However, the analogy is also based on my experience of being a customer.  Here it is:  you go into a restaurant and there is only one waiter and there are three tables full of customers, but you end up getting quite good service.  However, you go into the same restaurant on another day and there are three waiters working and you are the only customer, and this time the service is terrible.  What happened?  

For anyone who has worked in a restaurant the logic, though counterintuitive, is quite clear.  There are “down times” in the serving business when there aren’t many customers, so it’s the time to refill the salt shakers and clean the counter and straighten out some business with the other waiters who usually don’t get much chance to talk to each other.  In other words, serving the customer which, if the waiter were alone and busy, would be his number one priority, in this new and more generous circumstance drops down to priority number three or four.  Add to that, three waiters with only one customer know that they are not going to be getting rich tips and are likely to be more lethargic than motivated.

The same logic applies to teachers and teaching.  Teaching too little and too few students can result in a gearing down, a loss of commitment, focus, energy and motivation.  This is a malaise that is all too prevalent among tenured university professors where the system encourages, if not requires, that they make teaching a third-or-fourth-level priority in order that they succeed at their careers as researchers or administrators or in their careers outside the university.

Obviously there are lots of exceptions to the argument I am presenting here.  Class size has to depend on who and what and how you teach.  A teacher who knows the students, the subject and the pedagogical methodology is the person best qualified to determine an optimal class size.  Unfortunately, on one hand, class size and teaching hours are typically determined by administrators who, no matter how good they once were as teachers, inevitably come to be governed by a system of administrative values like uniformity, orderliness, standardization and economy. On the other hand, unions, collectives and some individual teachers will inevitably lobby for and negotiate smaller classes and fewer teaching hours.   Good teachers, those determined to do the job the best way they know how no matter what, will find themselves, sooner or later, in the position of underdogs, Davids forced to find a way around the Goliaths who are always getting in the way.

Sunday 16 February 2014

How to Make Love to a Logophile?


What does it mean when John gives Mary flowers?

For more than a dozen years, I taught an introductory literature course to 60 or so first-year undergraduates, 80% of whom were young women--a number of whom would typically report being interested in questions of love and romance.  Every year in the first class I described the following scenario and asked the class what word they would use to describe this young man’s actions.


John’s eyes always light up when Mary enters the room.  He always talks in a tender, flattering manner to her.  He takes her out to dinner and buys her flowers and small gifts. Etc. Etc.

What is the verb for when a man pursues a woman?

As I presented this hypothetical heterosexual scenario, I could feel Judith Butler and the gender police breathing down my neck, but bear with me. So what do we call what John is doing?  Over the years I noticed a shifting in the tenor of the answers.  The typical mid-90s answer was that he “was cruising,” “on the make,” “hitting on her” and, cutting to the chase, “trying to get laid.”  At the millennium the answers became strident:  “he’s a sexual predator,” and “it’s patriarchal oppression” and “hegemonic domination.”  In more recent years the pendulum swung back slightly and it was typical to hear reported that it’s not about him but them:  “they are friends with benefits” or “they’re dating” or “hooking up.”

Without "wooing" and "courtship" is romance dead?

As I called the room to order, I reminded my students of what they already knew: that the expressions they had given me did not include the correct verb for the scenario I had described.  When pressed, someone would eventually come up with the proper expression:  “to court.”  Eliciting the older and much more English verb “to woo,” even among students who claimed to have read Romeo and Juliet where the lexeme is used a half dozen times, was a much greater challenge.  I eventually asked my students when they had last used the expressions “to court” or “to woo” in conversation.  The point of my questions was to provoke philological reflection on the relationship between language and culture using an example that I knew mattered to a lot of them.  What does it mean that there are no current, earnest words for courtship?  Does this gap in the vernacular prove that romance is no longer part of our daily culture?  The number of advertisements I see for dating and match-making companies and web sites tell me that there is a void in the culture which consumer capitalism has been moving rapidly and vigorously to fill. 

"Making love" before 1920 and after

The scenario I have described used to be called “making love.”  Thanks to Edith Wharton’s novel, The Age of Innocence, we can now date the shift in meaning to what Wharton called the “French sense” of the expression (i.e., having sex) to just before 1920 in the USA.  We might also associate this American shift of mores with the automobile, which F. Scott Fitzgerald likened, in his famous essay on the 1920s, to a bedroom on wheels.

"Making love" in the 19th century

It would be perfectly reasonable for us to imagine a conversation between two men in the 19th century in which one mentions fairly casually to the other, “I noticed you making love to my sister last night.”  Modern readers are likely to misinterpret Algernon’s meaning when he tells Jack, in The Importance of Being Earnest, “The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to someone else, if she is plain.” Not a very nice sentiment, but not quite as bad as it sounds. “To make love” in this context means to display the courtship rituals I have described above; it does not mean to copulate.

"The Rules" for making love

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) dates the earliest usage of “to court” meaning “to pay amorous attention or make love” as 1580.  The OED dates the Old English verb “to woo” as 1050.  Oddly, the OED describes “to woo” as “Now somewhat homely” but contradicts itself by adding “also poetic.”  (Much as we might love the OED--and I do--we should remember that the original version was significantly compiled by a homicidal maniac confined to a lunatic asylum.  See:  The Professor and the Madman.) “To court” is also a problematic expression because of its elitism since it explicitly refers to what goes on in the royal court and more specifically what went on in the court of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine where the rules of “courtly love” were first written.  The rest of us peasants and plebeians were to get by in whatever way we could, clubbing women over the heads in Neanderthal fashion and dragging them off to our caves I suppose.  I feel like the Grinch in saying so, but a lot of the behaviours which people today point to as evidence of “true love” are the remnants of the rules of “courtly love” codified in the 11th century under the supervision of Queen Eleanor and her daughter.  Over the last 30 years,  Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider have turned their version of The Rules of “courtly love” into a not-so-cottage industry.  

Making love to a logophile 

Oh yes, the answer to the question posed in the title of this post:  a “logophile” is a lover of words, so the answer is almost redundant-- with words!



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