I was watching “Inside the NBA” with Shaqille O’Neal and the “Round Mound of Rebound” Charles Barkley. On their Christmas show they gave away about 40 bicycles – placed on the set – to disadvantaged kids in the Baltimore area.
The kids, all neatly arranged in their Zoom boxes, when they saw the bikes, had no reaction. Free, brand new bikes and other things at Christmas given by their sports heroes – what’s not to love?
In those few minutes I saw something that chilled me down to my soul. The kids did not react to the bikes and other gifts. As I studied their countenances, looking deeply into each kids’ face, not one jumped for joy at the bikes. Not one seemed happy. They just stared. It was surreal.
I’ll leave this to the reader to think about. Perhaps I’m reading too much into this. Was it just a case of nerves for them? Maybe. But kids get new bikes and just stare like Zombies. Hmmm. Is this what our children of poverty have become? Search the word poverty on this PLC for more.
Were they just afraid of life? Have you had such students? What was so really sad was that the athletes didn’t notice the kids’ reactions, or maybe they did but didn’t show it. Let’s just say that as an educator it raised a point of concern with me.
I’m just pointing something out. Here we are trying to teach kids school things about languages online. But how can they react to our instruction if they won’t react to a bunch of free Christmas presents offered to them online by their sports heroes? Charles called attention to one kid in the upper right hand corner and she turned off her screen.
Might that action – turning off her screen in class – have something to do with self-image? Does how we teach them affect the self-image and overall confidence of children? Might our system of education have anything to do with the favoring of the few that occurs in most of our nation’s classroom?Is that possible?
How much less success might we who profess to be language teachers experience when our gifts to our students are quizzes and tests. Why do we give all those tests? To make sure there are a few winners and many losers?
And how well will unengaged and bored and disenfranchised kids do with those verb conjugations? (Some teachers still think it’s BAAAAD when their charges can’t conjugate a verb…). But the kids, even the few, have never heard the language spoken in class and therefore have nothing to tie their memorization to except for the five or six kids – probably not those in poverty – who have attained “pal status” with the teacher and taken over the classroom. How is a kid supposed to get interested in a language they never hear?
Something is happening here. Exactly what is not clear. But we need to stop and look around and everybody needs to see at what is going on in our profession of language teaching. Does our success in our language instruction have anything to do with BLM?
I think it does. I’m devoting 2021 on this PLC to proving it.