ELT News Think Tank

This Month's Think Tank Panel

Chuck Sandy

Curtis Kelly

Chris Hunt

Mark O'Neil

Panelists: Chuck | Curtis | Chris | Mark
Date: December 2004

Topic: "What are 5 things you wish you'd known when you started teaching?"

(This is a continuation of the theme discussed by panel regulars Marc Helgesen and Peter Viney, as well as guests Stephen Krashen and Michael McCarthy, last month at the JALT 2004 national conference. See last month's feature.)

Curtis Kelly

As a college professor with 25 years of teaching English in Japan, there are some fundamental things I have learned along the way I wish I had known before.

1. Human beings are language machines
We are built to process and internalize language, but only when it is meaningful, in other words, related to a communicative experience. We in the EFL world must ensure students have communicative experiences before all else, especially before teaching vocabulary or grammar.

2. Schools don't know what they are doing
If you read any school's academic mission statement (if they have one), you'll see something like: "to develop independent, self-sufficient members of society" etc. Bunk. Think about what we do at school. We really teach the opposite of independence, through what Eisner calls "the hidden curriculum." We teach them that they must be in their seats at a certain time that we have designated, that they cannot speak unless we tell them to, that they must learn what we have decided is important to them, and that they have almost no choice. Worse, most schools don't even have a mission statement, except one buried somewhere in the school pamphlet. They just do education because that is what they have always done, with no clear goal.

"Just because I teach something, I can't assume students will learn it."

3. Studying is not learning
It wasn't hard to figure out that teaching does not equate learning ­ meaning that just because I teach something, I can't assume students will learn it ­ but it was a little harder to figure out that studying does not equate learning either. This is one of the paradoxes of education. We know that motivation and time on task, ie. studying, is correlated to learning, but the correlation is weak. Despite our best intentions, our brains are selective in relation to what they will learn, as if they make this decision all on their own, ignoring conscious will. No matter how hard we study, we have trouble learning things that have little relation to our daily lives, and thus real value. Our students' eyes, ears, and mouths wrestle down foreign words, while their brains just kind of fold their arms and laugh out: "Come on, you don't really expect me to keep that nonsense for more than an hour or two, do you?"

4. It's not about me
In the early days, I was so nervous and worried about whether I was really "doing my job." I was hired to teach English, and any failure to get students to plod through the textbook was a failure of responsibility. The word "Teacher" seemed so lofty and sacred. In other words, it was all about me. What a fool I was. Now I know it is all about them, and I try as hard as I can, in every encounter, to forget me (which includes "course objectives," "school policy," "educational standards," etc.). I am no longer an English teacher, I am a people grower, but not like a God thing. I am more like the farmer that shovels on a little fertilizer, sprinkles a little water, and hopes something will pop up towards the light.

I am still bound to the system to some degree, but not as much as I thought I had to be before. I do not treat them all the same, I don't allow myself to get angry or dominate, and I listen a lot more.

5. We all have disabilities
On the Four Corners Tour last week through Kyushu, I met a Japanese college professor who told me about one of her students. Every single class, about halfway through, this student asked if he could go to the bathroom and then he disappeared for awhile. "Yep," I thought. "I have had students like that. They use the bathroom ploy to get out of class, and in one particular case, to apparently take illegal drugs." I frowned and shook my head. Then she said that she asked the Health Center about this student and found out he suffered from severe hemorrhoids. Sitting on a hard seat for 90 minutes was too painful, and he was embarrassed to bring a pillow, so he went to the restroom in order to stand up. "Oh," I thought, "What could we do for this poor boy?" How my outlook changed with that bit of information.

But then it hit me. We bend over backwards to help someone with an external physical disability, but when it comes to an internal, psychological one ­ such as fear of looking stupid in English, the inability to motivate oneself to keep doing something that continually brings failure, or just the inability to sit for hours in a classroom ­ we just get self-righteous and indignant. Yet, how can we say that a psychological disorder is any less painful than a physical one? We do not really choose our psychological dispositions, and they are usually related to some physical condition, like levels of serotonin. A psychological problem can be just as disabling as a physical one, so we should give their owners the same loving care.

Panelists: Chuck | Curtis | Chris | Mark

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Curtis Kelly, Heian Jogakuin University

Author of Writing from Within

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