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.)

Chuck Sandy

1. It's About People
Though this is something that has become increasing clear to me, I cannot remember any talk in any of my graduate school classes about the very people who we would be teaching. We learned about methods. We studied linguistics. We discussed the theory of students' needs and motivations and even learned something about classroom management, but we never sat down and talked about people as actual living human beings with their usual joys, sorrows, attitudes, psychologies, and issues.

"We never talked at all about the true messiness of the human condition and that we would be facing it in all its pathos and glory each and every day of our career."

We never considered the possibility that there would be students who would come to class after having heard a piece of devastating news and then suddenly burst out crying. We never talked about those students who would sit in the back and refuse to learn. We never learned anything about how best to include someone who does his or her best to remain isolated from the group. We never talked at all about the true messiness of the human condition and that we would be facing it in all its pathos and glory each and every day of our career ­ yet that is exactly what teachers do.

While it's true that I relish this work and work hard at reaching out to all students in whatever ways seem possible, I do wish that I had been better prepared for this real work. Though current MA programs now deal with issues such as learning styles and multiple intelligences and the various strategies and motivations which learners either apply or don't apply, I feel that this is still somehow missing the essential point: we work with people and it's impossible to classify or qualify them into a particular set of rubrics.

Every new teacher should be spending more time reading Carl Rogers' On Becoming a Person and Paulo Freire's The Pedagody of Freedom and Thomas Merton's No Man is an Island and Parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach and less time learning about contrastive analysis and the history of language methodology. Such things, of course, are necessary, but they are like gardening tools. The readings and study of the human condition are the soil itself.

2. You've Got to Be Flexible
What do you do when you ask a question and no one answers it? How do you segue from an activity that is a complete failure into something else? How do you respond when your well-thought-through lesson plan falls flat on its face? What do you do with a class that does not respond very well to your teaching style? Well, you change what you're doing and come right back at the work from a different direction, of course. That answer is obvious, but it's one that has been hard learned over the years and which requires some maturity to accept.

The simple truth is that many times, more often than not, you will be wrong about how best to approach a class. The first step then is to admit this to yourself and then move on from there. Of course, this is much easier said than done. I wish I could have back all of the early classes I taught in some pig-headed way, approached as if I in fact did have the answer and the correct approach, but since that is clearly impossible, the best I can do is to not ever do that again.

3. You'll Get Tired
It constantly amazes me that a full day of doing nothing but talking with people can be so exhausting. It is exhausting in a way that pure physical labor is not. Still, at the end of a full day of teaching, my body feels as if I had spent the day taking down a stone wall, and my mind feels as heavy as the heaviest stone. True, like with any labor, there is often the satisfaction that comes from having done a good day's work. To ever assume, though, even for a moment, that teaching is not heavy labor of the most rigorous sort is a mistake. I do not know what I would have done differently had I known this when I first thought about being a teacher, but I might have been a bit more prepared for the work that it is.

4. You'll Change Your Mind
As I have mentioned elsewhere, there is part of a bumper sticker on my office door which once read "Teachers Change Lives." Now, it simply reads, "Teachers Change" and I think this is more to the point. It would be hard to count the number of theories I once had and once firmly believed in that I have now completely discarded, or to quantify the ways in which abandoning these ideas I once held dear has made me a better teacher.

To just give you a few quick examples, I no longer believe that the Communicative Approach is the answer to much of anything. I no longer believe that it is essential to only speak the target language in class. I no longer feel that textbooks, even the ones I write, are of much true use. I no longer feel as if I know exactly what I am doing, but am now smart enough to realize this.

When I first walked into a classroom over twenty years ago, I was armed with a head full of theories and activities that I knew would work. Now I walk into a classroom with some ideas that could work if I can manage to convince the learners I have been charged with to give them a try. And what I find most often is that it is these very learners then show me how best to approach and carry out the ideas I have come in with in the first place. We, then, learn together. This much more reasonable and flexible style is in direct opposition to the earlier dogmatic self I was, and so when I look up at that bumper sticker on my wall, I just say yes. I have changed and continue to do so.

5. You'll Have to Be Political
Anyone who works with others in any sort of school, be it in a language school or university, will have to face up to this. Like it or not, a teacher within such a group is forced to be political -- for even the act of refusing to participate is in itself a political stance. There will be factions and sub-factions to contend with. There will be colleagues to deal with who do not feel the same way about things that you do. There will be meetings to attend and committees to serve on. There will be stands one has to take both in favor of and against the position held by one's employer. There will be days when all of this becomes so much that you'll want to quit.

I never knew any of this when I first began teaching, and in fact it is probably a good thing because this is the one area I find most difficult to deal with and manage. Still, it is unavoidable and, as Curtis Kelly has pointed out in his wonderful essay Meetings For Dummies, is even something one can become good at. I'm trying, as best I can, though it still remains difficult for me. No man is an island ­ especially in a school.

Panelists: Chuck | Curtis | Chris | Mark

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Chuck Sandy, Chubu University

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

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