Teaching and learning

It’s Friday, February 1^st.  The alliteration in this date reminds me of Martin, my Korean student in grade 11.  I spent a total of three hours this week trying to help him learn literary terms.  What a drag for both of us!  We made an effort to enliven the ordeal by inventing ludicrous examples for each of the terms so that they might stick in his head.  He seems to have a good memory, but it’s being taxed to the limit by four typed pages of terms he’s hardly ever used and likely rarely will.  I finally discovered that he had a list of about 20 of the terms written without definitions on a page that was stuffed into his binder among a lot of other disorganized material.  He seemed to be completely clueless about why he’d written them, but I thought his teacher must have had them make a list of the terms that were most likely to be on the test, so we concentrated on them.  He had not kept copies of any of the poems that they had worked on in class.  The study of English literature is beyond him for many reasons.  First, the language in “Macbeth” and even Lord of the Flies, let alone poetry is more than he can cope with, and second, the whole idea of going beyond memorization to application and appreciation is right out of his ken.  He will be able to write the definitions because he will memorize them.  I can only hope that some of our crazy examples will stick in his head too and help him to find similar ones in the works he is presented with on the test.  

Tutoring his sister Stella provided me with a much more positive experience this week.  She had asked me a while ago to speak to her grade 6 class about teaching.  I agreed and had a vague idea of what I would say, but as the date approached, I began to get nervous.  I wrote the ideas down on a sheet of paper, tried to order them and interject a few lively examples.  I had a big map of North America and bought another of the world to use to illustrate points.  I pulled out the old one-room schoolhouse bell I have kept since I found it in a cottage we bought on Lake Superior when I was in high school to use as a prop.  With only 2 days left, I actually got out cards and put key ideas down on them.  I knew I’d shake a bit; I didn’t do that in my own classes when I taught, but I have done when I’ve had to speak before, as president of the union at the Lycee Claudel or on a few other occasions.  Even when Jim and I got married in my own home, the dry grasses that I had gathered shook raspingly in my hands as I stood and said the few words I had to in front of family and friends.  As it turned out, I was marvelously calmed by the familiar smell and atmosphere the moment I entered the school, but my hands shook a little bit as I wrote the theme of the talk on the board: 

Students and Teachers

Are not such different creatures.

Then I remembered that nothing works like asking for help, so I asked if 4 kids could help me put up the maps.  Hands flew up and I had nothing but cooperation and interest from then on.  I went from a lesson I learned in kindergarten, to how I became a teacher, to what it was like teaching in a French school full of kids from all over the world, to the fact that my son is teaching in Korea and finally that Stella’s mom is trying to teach me Korean.  This was punctuated by students teaching each other about themselves by coming to the board to point out on the maps where they had been born, lived and gone to school.  Forty-five minutes went by quickly.  I had to drop some of what I had planned to say in an effort to complete the circle and end the presentation by reiterating that throughout our lives we are all both students and teachers.  I was exhilarated by the end of it all.  Then I drove to Stella’s house where her mom thanked me by teaching me how to make kimbap.  We had a wonderful lunch of miso soup with tofu and green onion, kimbap with kimchee and bolgugi.   It was all good.