I got this cool email from Mark Knowles at UC Boulder:
Hi Ben,
I heard another absurd language teaching story yesterday that you may want to post on your blog. I happened to hear it at a discussion about “Absorb, Do, and Connect” and “Absorb activities”(http://www.horton.com/portfolioabsorb.htm), but the context is somewhat irrelevant for our purposes.
The person who told the story was a linguist who wanted to learn Hindi. At one point during the course, she asked the instructor to bring in a Hindi song. The instructor conceded willingly, and brought in what the linguist said was a beautiful sacred song, one that many other students seemed to enjoy as well and that provided some comprehensible input. However, once the song had finished, one student sitting near the linguist had a different reaction, which she expressed emphatically by pounding her fist on her desk and exclaiming, “I did not pay money to learn about Hindi music, but to learn about Hindi grammar!”
The linguist said that from that point forward, the class did nothing but learn grammar, and the classroom dynamic was anything but inspiring.
Astonishing as this story may sound, it might be worthwhile to hypothesize just what exactly would cause a language teacher to cave in to one forceful student. I can see at least two interpretations of the teacher’s behavior. First, if the teacher was a pro-grammar advocate, that student’s strong reaction may have given him/her enough justification to reset the teacher’s personal agenda. Or, perhaps the teacher felt vulnerable to the potential that the student criticism would reach her supervisor, and perhaps that supervisor’s overriding message had always been that grammar would be the central focus of the syllabus. It is also possible that the teacher “housed her oppressor” and felt that strong-willed American children with cash always trumped the transnational underclass, should that underclass be composed of maids, convenience store workers, teachers, or heart surgeons. Most likely, it is some combination of these factors plus one or two others.
The story was set at an American university, and I also believe that is not inconsequential, for reasons that might actually be put into the category of “the social situatedness of language learning,” a pet topic of mine. I will stop there as this may be enough to elicit some interest.
Best,
Mark