15.11.09. Teaching English.
I love it when they ask questions. Five days a week I sit down with my little Italian friends to teach English, and I spend these lessons talking, scribbling, and explaining. I fear silence all the while. I know that when I stop—and I must stop—silence will fall. This silence frightens because if it lingers and takes hold, it may never lift, and I might be forced to spend the balance of the lesson in ludicrous gesture. So when the quiet comes I breathe and stare at grains in the table until in a burst of courage I look in my students’ eyes.
Seldom do I find rapture, but I am willing to settle for question marks. When students have questions, it means they are engaged. They might not understand everything, of course, but a certain level of focus and comprehension is necessary to ask a question. If they can formulate these questions in their mind, all is not lost, and if they can express them aloud, then we can have the kind of dialogues that tickled Socrates and breed successful lessons.
Last night I got my questions. The topic was the Works Progress Administration, an element of FDR’s alphabet soup which operated from 1935 to 1943. I chose this topic because of its connection to the current economic crisis; because many WPA projects are still in use today, such as Eugene’s quaint downtown post office; and because it was one of the first things that came to mind when I went on Google an hour before my lesson. When I give seven one-hour lessons a week and attend my own university courses, I don’t have the luxury of constructing highly elaborate lesson plans.
Yet the internet makes elaboration so easy. People in the field of education champion the internet as a Priceless Tool for Learning, and I always figured they were correct but deluded—even if the web is our modern day Library of Alexandria, digital dust cannot but lay across it all as the masses pass their time on YouTube. But the beauty of the internet’s resourcefulness is that even productivity black holes like YouTube pull their weight as a part of the web’s didactic mission.
Thus after pulling an article from Encyclopedia Britannica Online (no student of mine will have a wikication!) I caught a wave to YouTube and found a wonderful bit of government propaganda about the WPA. This 1937 video touting the early successes of the WPA shows hordes of strong men in overalls and hats hacking at rocks and working cranes. The narration is provided in soothing 1930s baritone and offers such informational nuggets as the sum of roads built in the program’s first year and a half (enough to wrap around the world five times) and the program’s focus on securing local workers and supplies for construction projects (sustainability even then!).
My inaugural student for this WPA lesson was Luca, age fourteen. He has studied English in school for several years and has also spent a couple of summers with family in England. Mostly due to the latter, I deemed him fit for my multi-pronged teaching attack. We began with the encyclopedia article (accompanied by a rigorous vocabulary list), in which Luca read of the billions in government layouts and hundreds of thousands of roads, bridges, and airports constructed under WPA ægis (the article actually used the word ægis). Then we turned to the video.
I know Luca didn’t understand everything—in addition to the standard back-of-the-throat narration that accompanies all old films, the audio quality had lost a smidge during the video’s seventy-two-year journey to YouTube—but he asked some great questions. He noticed as I did the men’s hats, and was not amused but concerned: but where were their helmets? He asked, too, how old these workers were, where they had come from, and where they would go when they finished their current project.
Gee, Luca, my lesson plan never made it that far! I only just found the film an hour ago. Of course I answered his questions as best I could using the critical thinking skills that came with my English degree; I told him that safety regulations in the ’30s were not what they are today, that these men were probably middle-aged folks who had lost their regular jobs as bankers and hardware salesmen, and that they would keep hacking rocks until there were no more rocks to hack. Beyond these educated guesses, I also told Luca that for the next week’s lesson I would research better answers about these men whose lives he had inhabited so completely after four black and white minutes.
But he had one more question still: Where were all the women? This was something I hadn’t noticed, but which peaked the interest of young Luca in Pavia whose liberal upbringing had taught him that women, too, can wield pickaxes and plow roads with draft horses. Ah, have we come a long way (but do women really want to be doing these things?).
I could never have expected Luca’s line of questioning, but it is just as well he caught me off-guard. Fresh sets of eyes like Luca’s are what move teaching away from strict lesson plans and into the nonlinear, or perhaps even non-Newtonian, where a simple prod can paralyze the most fluid discourse. The teacher mustn’t worry, however, because it lasts only a moment, this solidity, this impasse, before the atoms relax and things begin to flow once more. It is, moreover, precisely this moment of pause that allows reflection and discussion to flourish, that permits, in a word, learning.
But such philo-scientific heights are not becoming of travel essays. I will try to let some air out of my balloon. One basic aspect of teaching English that I have yet to come to terms with is that my sole purpose and my sole qualification is speaking English. Thousands of parental and state dollars have gone toward my pursuit of higher education during the past four years, and now I must simply speak my mother tongue. All I have learned to this point naturally informs my teaching, but my knowledge of Donne and Keats and cosmology if anything makes me overqualified.
I know about things like etymology and alliteration (and light cones and Schwarzchild radii) and want desperately to teach them to twelve-year-old Italians. Andrea is one such. He was born in Italy and has spent the last year in Pavia, but in the interim lived six years in New York City. It is my job to ensure that he maintains his fluency. I had my first lesson with him last Friday, and we did a section of his workbook about the great camel races of Saudi Arabia (who knew?). The article used the word ‘spectacle’ to describe the event, and in response to Andrea’s question about this term I explained how ‘spectacle’ relates to the Italian spettacolo and also specchio (mirror, or better, ‘looking glass’) which all date to the Latin specere—to look. Perhaps a bit much?
Perhaps, but these kids are visibly interested—here we go back to the question marks in their eyes—and I feed off that interest when I see it. Luca, for instance, will often ask things or offer answers that are wrong or fully non sequiturs—as so often surface during discussions in foreign languages, where there is no straight ‘train of thought,’ but only disjunct cars. But he so clearly wants to participate and show what knowledge he has, a desire that is satisfying and flattering for me, that I want to do all I can to fuel his enthusiasm. The challenge is to nurture this energy while also guiding it in the right direction. I must correct him when he makes mistakes, but not at the cost of his self-confidence and eagerness.
Expanding his knowledge base forms an essential part of this nurturing process. I want him to understand not just functional English—vocabulary and grammar—but the foundations of the language and its expressive possibilities at the highest level. I don’t want to teach him and my other students things so far outside their level of comprehension that I lose them, but if my language skills apply and can help the students understand something better, I intend to use them. This way they may come to know the language more intimately and begin to inhabit it as Luca did the lives of the WPA workers.
My being in Italy also has bearing on what constitutes acceptable material for my students. Teaching Latin roots to twelve-year-olds in the United States might be misguided or even counterproductive, given that for us this language pertains to the realm of advanced college education. But in Italy, many high school students study Latin and Greek rather than (or in addition to) Spanish or French. The impetus for learning these languages is not that there are Ancient Romans or Greeks wandering the cobbled streets of Italy, but that these classical languages carry cultural significance even today. Latin especially. Mass is sometimes still conducted in Latin, and Latin engravings are often used to mark and describe historical landmarks. All of which makes my otherwise arcane knowledge relevant, or perhaps even obsolete—maybe Andrea learned specere in middle school in-between declining planum and natatorium.
Even if my literary terms and scattered etymological knowledge are fair game, there remains the question of how to present this information. I have never studied teaching as a discipline. All of my experience in the classroom has been as a student. Still, I think these years of schooling have been instructive, both in terms of what to do and what not to do as a teacher. That is, the secret of a good teacher, like that of a good salesman, can be intangible and elusive, but it is nearly always obvious why teachers suck. They speak in monotone, they make no effort at humor or to present material creatively, they look at you with faraway eyes as if you are not human beings but drying beige paint. I must above all avoid these pitfalls if I want to have success.
That I have success is becoming more important to me with every passing week. For personal reasons I want to succeed, because I want to succeed in everything, but in this short time I’ve also become invested in and have begun to inhabit my students’ lives. It matters to me now that Luca, Andrea, Tommaso, Stefano, Giacomo, Arianna, and Matteo learn English because I want them to rise to the top of the class and be prepared for the English language opportunities that await them in the future. These are young folks with vast potential, and it has suddenly become my responsibility to help them realize this potential. This is probably an absurd amount of pressure to put on myself after a few weeks with a few kids, but I came to Italy to do big things. I think this is my chance.◊