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2 thoughts on “Through Us He Plays His Music”
I pray that I will be an instrument in God’s hands that others around me will hear a beautiful melody as I begin this new way of teaching English to mostly adults in a foreign country. Thank you for this post.
Mel thank you for finding this post. It is from a year and a half ago and so I updated it. I had completely forgotten writing it so thanks for digging it out of the archives!
Let me say why I like your prayer. It is because I think that in general teachers want to bring beautiful music/language (languages are very beautiful forms of music, in my opinion) to their students. But in the process many of us, in the making of the music/teaching of the language often forget that teaching is really devoid of any beauty/artfulness when it is caught up in mind.
Beautiful teaching cannot come from mind. Mind cannot even produce beauty, as I see it. It is a computer and can only compute. The fanciest thing it can produce are rules like how in the past tense when the helping verb is avoir the past participle agrees in gender and number with any preceding direct object pronouns, including relative pronoun objects.
For the first 24 years of my career as a traditional AP teacher, I taught to the few and generally mostly the rich, and definitely to the mind, and to impress. My teaching felt artful at the time but was not. I tricked my self. Je me suis trompé.
So your prayer reminds us that when we trust, when we keep things out of our mind, when we base our instruction on images and not on word lists, things will go well as per ANATS. I have always felt that we must be out of our minds to be language teachers.