ELT News Think Tank

This Month's Think Tank Panel

Marc Helgesen

Peter Viney

Chuck Sandy

Panelists: Marc | Peter | Chuck
Date: November 2002
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Topic: "What kind of tools do I need to allow flexibility and spontaneity in my classes?"

Chuck Sandy

The basic joy and dilemma about teaching and learning is that it exists in a world inhabited by humans and is defined by their interactions with each other. This makes it a messy place complete with various characters who bring to it a variety of attitudes, desires, motivations, moods, needs, and personal habits -- all of which not only often conflict with each other, but also shift in ways small and great from day to day.

This is to say that it is a world, like any other, and therefore demands flexibility and spontaneity. Unlike most other worlds, though, it is a place where most often one person out of the many arrives with a plan he or she expects the others to carry out with some degree of precision and even greater degrees of good humor.

It's a simple, yet absurd notion, which is why it so often fails on so many levels. It fails spectacularly around the room in group confusion or singularly in corner pockets of withdrawal. It often fails because the plan itself is absurd, but sometimes even the most brilliant plan falls apart. What brings it down?

“it's a messy human business, teaching and learning”

Blame it on the bossa nova. You might as well. It's certainly easier than pinning it on the bad mood welling up in that corner or on the girl who had a fight with her mother in the other corner or on the boy over there who didn't have breakfast, or on that young man in the back of the room slouching as if he doesn't care, and doodling, if you can believe it.

It's also easier than blaming it on your own misreading of the situation or on your lack of or over-preparation. The one thing that is certain is that you've got to be ready to shift gears, slow down, speed up, abandon ship, give in, save the day, be human. Choose the metaphor that works for you, but do it quick because things are deteriorating rapidly now.

What I often did as a new teacher was to puff up my cheeks, let my building irritation at having failed as a leader take over, and give a lecture on some topic like the importance of being flexible, which I wasn't. This, of course, is exactly the wrong thing to do and be, but as the American poet Charles Olson writes in his poem Maximus to Himself, "I have had to learn the simplest things last."

I know it's somehow different now, but when I was in school preparing to be a teacher, there was almost no focus on the human dimension of teaching and learning. Though the best teachers knew even then, and perhaps always, that this human dimension is the very center of it all, almost no one would come out and talk about it. Few would stand up and say "it's not about you" or "take the time to figure out who has had breakfast and who hasn't" or "before you do anything, scan the faces and take the temperature of the room" or "it's a messy human business, teaching and learning" but that's the basic truth of it. It's a messy human business.

When working with people, one has to be not only tuned in deeply to the waves of mood and emotion, but also has to be prepared for the whole range of moods and emotions to show up, against plan, on any given day. Given this, it's not merely enough to say that one has to be flexible and open to spontaneity. What has to be said is that what's essential is the ability to sometimes let go of what you've been taught, of the knowledge and skills you've acquired, of your own self-importance and ego and simply be a human interacting with others openly. This is the simple thing I've learned last and am still learning.

This is more than humanism in language-teaching or student-centered learning or the needs-based classroom or whatever quasi-academic terminology academics in our profession sometimes come up with to achieve tenure and to help us avoid being laughed at by colleagues in the "hard" sciences. What we're talking about is what another poet, Robert Creeley, means when he says "make a chain that holds /to be bound to /others, two by two."

Such thoughts will still get you suspicious looks at conferences and in most graduate programs -- and then there's this one: When asked what tools one should have to allow flexibility and spontaneity in the classroom, try mentioning an open, giving, human heart. In the academic world -- and in most places where professionals feel they need to legitimize what they do by analysing, classifying, naming, then breaking it all down into objectives and outcomes, benchmarks and skills -- such thoughts are seen as embarrassing. "Don't talk about the human heart," one colleague told me, "you'll set us back a hundred years." Would that be so bad?

Let's go back a hundred years again to a one-room schoolhouse. That's where my grandmother, the teacher I spoke of last month in my column, began learning that the human heart and its need "to be bound to /others, two by two" is the essential tool. At 98 she was willing to talk about it. One of the last things she said to me was, "trust your students to tell you what they need, then be human enough to give up whatever you've planned and give it to them. Sometimes they won't use words, you know. It's all about the human heart. It took me a lifetime to learn that." We all learn the simplest things last.

Panelists: Marc | Peter | Chuck

Chuck Sandy, Chubu University

Co-author of two series from CUP, Passages and Connect

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