The tough teenage years don’t have to be so tough. They can be easier.
What happens is that when kids move into middle school and even before, they are met with most teachers asking them to start memorizing stuff. Does this even make them “teachers” in the real sense of the word?
I think not. Rather, teachers that teach via memorization are a sort of guard, making sure that homework quotas, etc. are met. They are mere deliverers-of-instructional-services. The kids learn quickly in middle school that success in life is mostly only about memorization and testing. Some schools, the ones that say they are “high achieving”, are the worst.
When this happens, kids miss the richness of life, its marrow. They learn things as a dog chews on a bone, but, unlike the dog, there is no marrow for them to suck out of what they are learning about our earthly home. This brings disillusionment. If the parents are burdened as well, we see why in our country suicide rates among teens are way up.
Education should not be about competition but cooperation. The essence of comprehension based instruction is based in mutual sharing and respect. I find it hideous that the rules in many classrooms talk about showing respect and cooperation with others when there is no actual platform in the classrooms for the kids to learn what those terms mean.
We can help with this problem. Our classroom rules can be real. Our instruction can be real. By real I mean heart-based. Our instruction has substance because it requires children to show up as human beings. We can make our classes more interesting, without any memorization whatsoever. How about that?
In some cases our language classes even become a kid’s lifeline through their teenage years. So the next time you think that this work with comprehensible input is too challenging, learn how to do it well anyway. Find the marrow of language and deliver it to your students. Be part of the solution.
Many of us are creating situations in our boring, test-based based classrooms in which young men and women find no reason to believe in life and so will have to do so in their 20s or later. Some don’t make it that far; they find no reason to memorize a list of words like “heirloom” for a test. Their brains craved context and they didn’t get much so that is a metaphor for their teenage lives. Dang it, Bobby!
Most of them turn things around in their 20s but if we in education, we the system, could have taken even a small page out of Robin Williams’ performance in Dead Poet’s Society, it would have been easier for them to believe in life. It would make them see that you can’t memorize your way through a job later in life.
Life is a thrilling divine romance and nothing less. We must find the romance in our teaching and really unlock the language for our students. We must give them hope. We must give them the marrow. We must teach so that they want to keep on learning the language well into their golden years. We must find ways to make their language be for them an infinitely unfolding flower. We must open pathways that lead them into the deepest layers of the onion that language acquisition is.
Adults who ask kids to memorize, adults who test and consider only that to be the measurement of what has been learned, owe a big apology to a lot of kids. I owe that apology from my first quarter century of teaching but I am fixing it now.
I bow down to the children I ignored in favor of the few. I have changed. We are changing. God bless us all. The reason I ask for that blessing is because I know He blesses us, like for real, every day. He is blessing us right now by showing us a way to make our teaching real.
https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=AwrUiT2Yzolb_koArW82nIlQ?p=dang+it+bobby+gif&hsimp=yhs-SF01&hspart=Lkry&fr=yhs-Lkry-SF01&fr2=p%3As%2Cv%3Ai%2Cm%3Apivot#id=1&vid=3563fb2ad1f7e2fb2bb1b1b075959c73&action=view