I got this email from Drew who is over in Germany this week doing some professional training and whose experience there prompts reflection on what we all are doing:
Ben,
After 5 years of no German in my life I decided to come to Germany to do a German class for German teachers in case I ever get lucky enough to teach German. I know I’ve lost a lot of my German but I feel not only bored but lost in this German class. It’s catered to the top 4%, like you say, and I crave comprehensible input. Today I just stared out the window because I couldn’t follow the one-sided presentation about how Germany became a country. Besides that, I don’t really care.
[ed. comment: just remember, my brother, that we are pioneers. I needed a good laugh and I got one with the image of you sitting in there staring out the window. Shades of Alain-Fournier.]
I have to give a presentation tomorrow and its on a topic that I don’t give a crap about. I can follow the teacher a good amount of the time but sometimes I just forget to listen. Just get through it.
[ed. note: there is nothing better for a teacher exploring comprehensible input to do than to experience this helpless feeling of being “taught at” instead of being part of a living, breathing interactive process of language acquisition. When the teacher playing the role of student thus feels the feeling of being disenfranchised and undervalued felt by most kids in language classes across the world, it changes her own professional view of herself completely.]
The teacher asked on the first day what people wanted to learn. Most people said subjunctive or prepositions. I said useful German. I’ve recently come out of the closet to the other teachers here as a teacher who doesn’t teach grammar or use worksheets. You should have seen the looks I got. Everyone looks at me funny when I describe a CI class – especially when I say they don’t have anything on their desks except their hands.
[ed. note: maybe you could gently suggest that it is perhaps a better thing to have one’s hands on one’s desk in class than to have one’s head in any other possible location.]
The best thing about my class is that it’s comprised of 11 German teachers (and me one Spanish teacher) from 8 different European countries and 2 American countries and our common language is German so we talk to each other in German. I am learning the most from them because we talk to each other about things we care about in common German. Not to mention the best conversations happen at the Hofbrauhaus where there is no affective filter.
[ed. note: this is like a great quote from someone I heard recently: “Il y a plus de philosophie dans une bouteille de vin que dans tous les livres.”]
It sucks that I’m having these feelings in a class but at least when I get back to the States to my classroom I can do my best to combat students who feel like I do right now. It’s interesting to follow the blog from abroad. It keeps me thinking.
I asked Drew for more information about this [medieval sounding] class. He responded:
It’s actually a two-week, 30-hour class and today, on day three, the German teacher was lecturing us on prepositions. I asked a question about when the verb sprechen takes a dative object and when it takes an accusative object. She stopped class and in front of everyone said, “You know, Drew, you need to study your prepositions in your hotel room because I notice you keep making the same mistakes…” (Yeah, no shit; that’s why I’m here.) She went on to describe her experience in learning the cases of Latin. My Welsh colleague said tonight over a beer, “She quite cussed at you.” Yeah, she embarrassed me. Maybe it’s a cultural difference between the German and Americans but I haven’t spoken in class since and I don’t really want to.
My comment is that it’s a cultural difference. They still get to do that. In the U.S. teachers can’t get away with that model of teaching any more, except maybe in universities. Now, in this new model that we may not yet see but whose sweet scent we can certainly smell, we have to teach two things simultaneously: 1) the subject matter via comprehensible input and 2) that we care about the students as much if not more than the subject matter. That is the new model (an old model actually for those few teachers who have survived the dark years of the last century in that very way). In every interaction we have with our students we are either teaching them that they matter to us, in which case they will learn, or that they don’t, as has been Drew’s experience this week. Drew goes on:
I hope this is karma biting me in the ass if I ever had a student that I embarrassed who really was trying his best to learn the language. My Hochdeutsch might not be great but on the street and anywhere I go the Germans and I have 0% difficulty communicating with each other and I can even crack jokes with them. 9 more classes and 2 presentations to go… I’m counting down the days until I can relax and enjoy my last 10 days of Munich without school.
Vive le CI!
Take care,
Drew