Joys of Teaching... Part II

27 Oct. 2011

One of the other joys of teaching is hearing your students correctly use something that you've taught them without prompting them.

In language classes, there is sometimes a tendency to turn students into mini-robots. You want to teach them the target language, but you can teach them everything at once. So you start with something like, "How are you?" At this point, maybe you only teach them one response "I'm fine. Thank you." However, when these students are 5th graders, I feel like I'm not really having a conversation with a real person.

The whole point of learning a language is to communicate--to be able to tell someone how you are feeling and why you are feeling that way. For this reason, one of my first lessons with my older students was to teach them other responses to the question "How are you?"

I kept it pretty simple, but we covered a range of emotions--like happy, sad, angry, good, bad. I told them that I never wanted them to tell me that they were "fine" because I could never be sure if that was a reflex answer or legitimately how they were feeling. I was really interested in getting them to really communicate.

Today, I was doing a Halloween activity with my students. It was a version of 20 questions where students had to pick a Halloween object and the rest of the class had to guess using only yes or no questions.

One student got mad that another student spoke out of turn and guessed before he had the chance to answer. Out of the blue, he said, "I'm sad." Surprised, I said, "Why are you sad?" He replied (IN ENGLISH!), "I wanted to ask the question... I'm angry."

Of course, I felt bad that he was sad, but I was excited that this student was able to articulate his feelings because I taught him the words to do so. I didn't prompt him to tell me that he was sad. He just said that he was sad.
On a day to day basis, sometimes, it's hard to see how students are improving--especially when you have 27 (IN JUST ONE CLASS!). I see probably around a hundred students a day! How can I keep track of how they are all doing? But, this is the type of moment that tells me that my work with the students makes a difference.