Lessons for teachers: lesson 1

When I started teaching, more than three decades ago, I could not possibly have imagined what the journey would have been like and to what extent it would have moulded me into what I am at present.

Lesson plans, seminars, keeping up with developments in methodology, backing them up with the psychological theories on which they were based, preparing material of all kinds all went towards ensuring I did more than enough to convey knowledge and motivate students.

Looking back, however, I would say that the most invaluable aid in my professional and personal development was offered by my students themselves. Attending to their learning needs and trying to tailor my teaching accordingly, working out their individual circumstances and making a mental note of their differences in approaching English, observing and taking account of class dynamics have enriched and informed my teaching in so many subtle ways that I would not have even dreamed of when I started out.

Thanks to my students I have reviewed so many beliefs and preconceptions that made up the baggage of the profession. I have learned humility from difference; I have learned flexibility and rejected standardization.

Perhaps the ultimate lesson I have learned is that there are as many ways of learning as learners -- depending on interests, intelligence, motivation, stimulation, personality, outside influences and so many other factors that we are not even aware of.

Learning one or more foreign languages is not simply a process that has its own rewards, practical and intellectual. It encourages -- because it presupposes -- memorising, comparing, ordering and reordering information constantly and assessing and reassessing the significance of new input.

If this was at all possible, it would be an absolutely fascinating experience to watch the workings of the brain while language learning takes place. But even thinking about it is mind-boggling. Whoever has not tried to learn a foreign language has certainly missed out. If nothing else, foreign language learning allows you to gain insights into your first language by examining it from a different perspective and subjecting it to comparisons with other languages.

By trying to understand how students tackle learning, what facilitates comprehension and what inhibits it for each one of them, unwittingly we build bridges with them and forge long-lasting relationships. And this is the essence of life.

Back to black

Back to the theme of sadness.
Here is a poem I wrote some time ago about sadness:

Your sadness travels well

It straddles 

A downturned smile

And reaches over to me

Insidiously, despairingly,

Definitively.

Sadness

Sadness is a theme we hardly ever touch upon in our teaching. However, sadness is an aspect of human condition and should be treated as such.

Sadness may be the result of loss, failure, absence of real communication -- among others. There is nothing wrong with being sad no matter how fiercely the concept of happiness or its pursuit is promoted by today’s society.

There are various ways of coping with the causes of our sadness and the feeling itself, and they vary among different individuals and cultures.

I am not suggesting wallowing in negative feeling; I am simply saying that we have a right to experience sadness or pain before we are able to deal with it. Suppressing sadness does not allow us to recover from it.

There is a well-known poem called Baby's Epitaph, which revolves round the death of a baby who was so tiny and skinny it went down the plug-hole while his mother turned to get the soap. The baby, however, is not lost, the angels reassure the mother. It has simply “gone before”.

At this remove from reality, the poem serves as a harmless representation of loss sparing the pupil’s feelings.

BABY’S EPITAPH

A mother was bathing her baby one night,
The youngest of ten and a delicate mite,
The mother was poor and the baby was thin,
Only a skeleton covered in skin;
The mother turned round for the soap off the rack,
She was but a moment, but when she turned back,
The baby was gone; and in anguish she cried,
"Oh, where is my baby?" — The angels replied:

"Your baby has fallen down the plug-hole,
Your baby has gone down the plug;
The poor little thing was so skinny and thin
He should  have been washed in a jug;
Your baby is perfectly happy,
He won't need a bath anymore,
He’s playing about with the angels above,
Not lost, but gone before."

The poem is dramatic: the narrative strand tells the story of the baby falling down the plug-hole owing to a momentary lapse of attention on the part of the mother while the dialogue between the mother and the angels puts our mind at rest: the baby is happy to have joined the ranks of angels.

The way I approach this poem is the following: I have made several copies of the poem on plasticated cardboard so I cut them into as many strips as the lines of the poem. I jumble the lines of each copy and hand a set out to either individual students or groups of them – depending on the size of the class. Then I ask them to reconstruct the poem by putting the lines in the right order. Once they have done this, I ask them to tell me the story without any dialogue. 

Discussion is optional: when you know your students well, you know whether they feel like a follow-up conversation on this particular topic or are happy with having imbibed the poem. Often they do want to share moments of sadness they have experienced, and it can be unexpectedly therapeutic. All one has to do is follow their instinct with kids. 
Another topic of discussion could be the size and structure of the family in the past and today or in different societies of our time.(the youngest of ten)

 An image may trigger further reflection, and Edvard Munch represents, to my mind, the master of sadness in artistic terms. The painting above is called Girl by the Window and could be used in various ways to encourage discussion among the students. Alternatively it could be used by way of introducing the topic.

Language of the poem:
One could extend use of Past Tenses as well as Present Perfect Simple for recent actions.

Cloudland

Clouds are a fascinating spectacle and one of my favourite themes. There is so much one can associate with clouds.

They evoke all kinds of memories: bright as well as dark. Imagine lying peacefully on a beach far from the madding crowds watching the clouds drifting  high up. So much hidden in them: dragons from childhood fairy tales, UFOs from spooky science fiction, workers running across a field in search of shelter, mercilessly crushing with their feet the ripe tomatoes they were picking only a few moments ago and drenching the thirsty earth with their blood-red juice.

Clouds have a way of losing themselves behind mountain tops or of materializing before your eyes out of a blue sky.

Clouds bring the redeeming rain that will cleanse us of the summer dust and will secure the crop of the farmer.

Clouds wreak havoc when they pelt earth and everything that populates it with rain and hail.

Your eyes become clouded and also your judgement becomes clouded.

Read what you will into clouds, it will resonate with people the length and breadth of earth.

Here is one of my poems with a cloud theme:

A CLOUD

A lonely cloud

Puffy and pallid

An aimless trade

Across the blueness

Plied

It floated indolent

Over the hilly fields

Half envious

Of life below

Until the wind blew

Immaterial master

It breathed and gusted

Besieged the cloud

A violent collision

Therein forcing

And forthwith started

A speedy descent

The journey was long

And precipitous

But the fall soft

And redeeming

Time warp

TIME WARP

We all have different perceptions of time, particularly of the past. Time is linear; time is non-linear, scientists proclaim. But we find it hard to follow science in its search for truth when it comes down to putting our own life into some kind of perspective.  We keep thinking of time as if we have never moved very far from our primitive existence.

Despite the convenience of modern technology keeping track of our memories from the moment we are born—or even before—(ultrasounds provide images of foetuses!) our present circumstances, our memory capacity and the power of recall of our nearest and dearest have a way of warping time, twisting it into knots or stretching it out like an acrobat’s tightrope.

Time perception has been a recurrent theme of fiction and art—I would dare say, perhaps, even more compulsively than of science.

My effort to somehow sway control over my past, typically results in something like what follows. I would call it an exercise at imitating one of my favourite poets, e e cummings:

splodge of a past

i carry splodges of pastness

within me

they blot my presentscape

i can’t unblur the yestermorrow

A Bridge: a multiple-intelligence approach to presenting poems, slideshow

A Bridge: a multiple- intelligence approach to presenting poems

A Bridge: a multiple- intelligence approach to presenting poems

As a teacher, I purposely avoid using certain terms because to my mind they are contradictions in themselves. One of them is “lesson plan”. Not any lesson plan, mostly ready-made lesson plans.

When I started teaching, long time ago, I never walked into a classroom without having planned my lesson. Very soon it turned out that my plan often went awry for a very simple reason: teaching is a constantly readjustable process. Of course I am not suggesting that I don’t prepare for my classes—quite the opposite. I am simply saying that the term lesson plan is redolent of standardization, and I am suspicious of “standardized” activities and I am also convinced that the make-up of your class requires on-the-spot fine tuning which can only be accomplished by being receptive to the needs of the learners.

Therefore, my presentations are simply guidelines for thinking teachers who will judge whether they suit their needs and will adjust them as they go.

This post focuses on a poem called A Bridge by Stanley Cook.

It is a children’s poem though it might well appeal to teenagers or even adults provided that the presentation and practice are adapted accordingly.

I normally use it with children so I will make a few suggestions about how to introduce the topic and read the poem.

There is a powerpoint presentation (see next post on this blog), which can be used as a visual prop to the poem. The last slide shows the activity which the students have to do after being introduced to the topic kinesthetically, visually and, preferably, aurally. It is a blank-filling activity which tests the understanding of the situation and helps focus on coherence, consistency and reference issues.

For convenience reasons I cite the poem highlighting the words which are left blank for the students to fill:

A Bridge

A bridge is a giant on hands and knees

Kneeling down to fill a gap

And let people cross it on his back.

A bridge is a giant of stone or steel

With a back so hard he doesn’t feel

The prodding of sticks or hammering of heels.

A bridge is a giant who carries the road

And the lorries on it with heavy loads,

A giant who stays there night and day

And never gets up and goes away.

By Stanley Cook

I assume children know the word “bridge” already so you may want to capitalize on their kinesthetic intelligence by asking them to make a bridge with their bodies. When they start reading the poem they will be able to complete the first two gaps simply by mentally reconstructing their body posture when making the bridge.

You could do a bit of “prodding” while the children are arching their backs both to show the meaning of the word and to enable them to fill the next gap: “feel” when they move on to the activity.

If they get stuck with “road”, you can ask them what “it” refers to in the next line or where you can find lorries(on roads).

The last gap is a bit tricky so if there is no response, you can elicit it by asking: can a bridge go away?

If you have dyslexic children in your class, it would pay to embed a reading of the poem with a pause for each gap.

On the other hand if I was to present this to teenagers or adults, I would start by discussing the use of bridges practically and figuratively. Connecting is bound to come up and there are endless possibilities for which way the discussion could go.

Your students could read the poem several times in chorus—it encourages poor readers to join in.

Vocabulary extension depends on the level of the students. You could ask them to think of vehicles going over a bridge. If they are adults, they could think of how a bridge is built (ask them to research the question on the internet).

Another idea is to ask the students to think of or search for bridges in films or to name famous bridges around the world. It could be a group project in class.

If I can stretch it a bit, you might even be able to practise Conditional Type 2 by asking what would happen if the giant went away. Get the students to think of a conditional chain:

If the giant went away, the lorries would fall.

If the lorries fell, lots of people would get killed

If lots of people got killed, …

It is not necessary or even desirable to do all the above in one lesson; the whole idea could be spread over a couple of lessons allowing the teacher to continue with the course they use in their class. 

Guilt

As we grow older, many of us look back to take stock of our life not so much on the basis of what we did but of what we omitted to do.

Guilt

One day I’ll see the sky catch fire
One day I’ll watch the waves 
Crash before my feet in a respectful bow
One day I’ll welcome back those who have gone
One day I’ll witness the downtrodden rise
And in one breath whisper “It didn’t matter,
We were always weightier than you”
And I’ll weep then, I’ll weep till my part
Of the collective crime against them all is forgiven
For I was weak of heart and gifted my love one-sidedly
For my arms did not reach far out enough
And I put my dreams to sleep because the sirens
Had it their way with me too

Resources: advanced level

Resources in teaching language is a rather tricky issue. Even those  of us who like to think we create our own resources heavily rely on what has been said before. We build on foundations that have been safely laid for us. Therefore, what I am going to say in the next few paragraphs is said without losing sight of the mass of material already available to us thanks to which we can make our own contribution.

The point is that even the best thought-out presentation or resource works with some learners, not necessarily all of them, and a teacher knows their students’ needs, preferences and ability and can adapt activities accordingly.

I thoroughly enjoy creating my own activities and exercises or adapting already-existing ones . I normally use authentic material: poems, literary extracts and articles or news items and customise the activities for my learners.

I make a point of updating my material so as to stimulate the learner’s interest with items which are relevant to their reality. This means learners have the opportunity to read some of the latest news stories and do specific tasks on them.

Having said that, however, I do make exceptions for stories or articles that for various reasons never lose their appeal and can be appreciated regardless of the time of their publication.

Each text lends itself to different kinds of exercises and of course the activities are adapted to the learner’s goals and ability.

The range of topics is wide, from lifestyle and travel to scientific and philosophical, depending on the level of the learner.

I place particular emphasis on vocabulary practice and, therefore, accompany most of my texts with custom made vocabulary exercises which test the words unknown to a specific group of learners and which have been presented while working on the text and written in their vocabulary books.

Here is a sample of my work at an advanced level:

See pdf 1

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-JgIA9pNw-KaExJUlFkc1o1REk/view?usp=sharing

See pdf 2

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-JgIA9pNw-KUXRmZjhfdDNTbm8/view?usp=sharing

The first document is the student’s worksheet while the second is the teacher’s copy with answers in bold type and a guide for the summary exercise. Surely different teachers have their own ways of making a teacher’s guide for convenience reasons and in order to focus on real teaching in class. This is just my way.

As regards the more essential question of choosing which words to remove in the first activity, there is a number of criteria. My students may have come across a grammatical or lexical item recently and I need to reinforce it by testing it. Or there may be some details which I can only explain in context or I might even want to throw a little challenge here and there!

Next issue, a really big one, is the type of activity chosen. As the popular saying goes, it is … complicated. The activities used in this particular case are very familiar especially to those who have sat a Cambridge exam and preparing for a higher-level qualification. However, by no means do I limit myself to those only. As one can see, there are comprehension questions, which, despite their removal from most exams, do provide the learner with the opportunity to talk on a subject using ideas from the text. There is also a summary question, which again does not figure in most exams but which is an old-fashioned (I say, timeless) method of digging deeper into the text and going home having really learnt something.