16: Getting to the bottom of the question: "What are your goals?"

A day or two ago I chatted with a friend and 先輩 of mine who is working towards revolution in his own corner of the EFL world. He asked me before and he asked me again, What are your goals?

I know my goals, I thought. I write pages of notes about what I want to do a couple of times per week just to keep my thoughts from evaporating into forgetfulness. My goals are to provide a fun, relaxed, English-learning environment for kids and adults. I have a handful of ideas that I want to implement that I reckon will have better outcomes than the typical 英会話 fare. My biggest goal, I thought, is to imagine what a proper 21st century 英会話 school would look like, and to work my way there over the next couple of years.

But the more I thought about his question, the more I realized that these goals, while useful, weren't fundamental goals. They were resting on gravel. I know why I wanted to build an 英会話 school, and I knew what I wanted to do to make it better--or at least fresher--than a lot of other schools I've seen, but I never answered the question of what exactly I wanted my students to be able to do.

This is especially important with elementary school kids. With JHS students and above--including adults and businesspeople--they have access to grammar explanations in their own language, and enough discipline on average to apply the knowledge and improve their abilities over time. Younger kids seem to be wired to absorb linguistic information faster, but they do it less consciously and so it ends up being a harder thing to pull out of them.

(Well, that is, if you conduct English classes all in English. That's the trend at the moment so I shall have to abide, I suppose, but I would be interested how students of English who are taught the technical aspects of it in their native tongue do after a year or more of instruction compared to the all-English, game-based learning practiced everywhere in Japan at the moment.)

What do I want my elementary kids to be able to do? Why am I teaching them English?

This is a frustrating question if you work in a public elementary or junior high school in Japan. Rules are either changing, but some rules are changing too quickly and others not at all. For the last couple of years Japanese 5th and 6th graders have been learning English, but despite that the curriculum at junior high schools nationwide doesn't seemed to have changed to accommodate them. What's resulted is essentially a system designed to jerk the students around: they go through two years of "fun" English class where they learn the basics, maybe even a bit of reading and writing, but then they're effectively reset in junior high school, going over the same introductory material but in a much less active, immersive environment.

(By the way, none of this is researched; I'm just taking vague bits of knowledge that I have and extrapolating. Nobody quote this in the potential future where this blog has more than a small handful of readers.)

I keep thinking about piano and dance schools. Kids come once or twice a week to these private schools, take their lessons, and after a while they come away with some skill. Little kids can play songs, maybe even perform at a recital; dance students learn how to dance. At this age only prodigies are good enough to raise anyone's eyebrows, but nearly every child walks away with a skill that they can perform in front of family or friends and be applauded for. Does this happen with students at 英会話 schools? I don't think so, usually.

There are complicated reasons that we can throw around to prove that piano and dance are fundamentally different from learning and using a foreign language, but I don't think leaning on that wall will help us create a better type of school. The problem is, piano schools train kids to enjoy smashing keys on a piano, and dance schools train kids to enjoy throwing themselves in the air, but English schools don't necessarily (or even usually?) train kids to enjoy using English. If we can change this, we will have solved a major problem in the field.

What English schools do, though, is teach little kids how to introduce themselves to an English speaker. They learn how to talk about their likes, and sometimes the things they don't like. They can point at and name a whole bunch of nouns. But I don't see the point, really, since none of these things really allow the students to express themselves in realistic, constructive ways. That's arguable, but that's how I feel.

One promising memory that I have floating around comes from my first job in Japan teaching kids. I had a preschool student named Nozomi who, her mom told me, shouted "It's cold!" one day at the hair salon when the hair dresser started to wash her hair in the sink. It was spontaneous--the little girl felt cold and she said so, and she had the energy to say so in English without anxiety or any of the stuff that sometimes stops kids from speaking. She thought it would be fun to express herself in English, and she did. She blurted out her feelings right there in the salon.

That's the kind of atmosphere I want to create. That's my goal. To get kids to blurt.

Well, how to do this? Actually, starting a private 英会話 puts me at a bit of an advantage: I know for the time being that JHS and HS curriculum are going to promote reading and writing over speaking, which will largely be left to elementary schools (which will soon start offering classes to 3rd graders and up). Elementary schools cover all the basics of speaking: introductions, likes and dislikes, and a whole bunch of basic vocabulary, phrases, and sentences. Those are the bases already covered: it is the job of private EFL teachers to reinforce those lessons and to expand the students' knowledge base. In this case: teach them how to blurt.

Beyond the basics, they can learn to blurt catchphrases from cartoons, from Internet memes, from English translations of their favorite anime characters' catchphrases; they can learn to blurt STOP in an authoritative, English accent (or, for that matter, Stop right there!); they can learn how to ask for a high five properly (Gimme five!!). Teach them how to play chess and how to say “check and MATE” when they know they've won. Teach them that the words they use can be used anywhere, because the words are a part of them--teach them not through explanation, but by the presenting of and playing through a myriad of situations where they can blurt and have a ball doing so.

Okay--back to work. If anyone knows of any places already doing stuff like this, I'd love to hear about it. Link me through in the comments, if you please.

7

I just had a thought. If software companies had stopped developing new OSs after LOTUS123 and instead just focused on patching up that OS year after year...

...the resultant system would look an awful lot like grade-school English education in Japan.

I'm always thinking about the brokenness of the system, but I had a meeting on Tuesday that brought a certain aspect of the system into sharp focus for me. Basically it went like this: teacher A and administrator B had a disagreement. B wanted A to advance through the next chapter in a certain way under a certain timeframe, and A had a problem with that.

So far, I'm on A's side: teachers are hired with an implicit amount of trust in their abilities and they shouldn't be micromanaged in such a way.

A had a problem with that because he wanted to do every page in the textbook.

Now I'm confused, because I was in the exact opposite position last year. I was trying to skip over swaths of pages that I didn't think were important for the students, and my boss was in strict disagreement with me.

B, upon hearing A's reasoning, exploded in a rage and shouted at him in front of all of us, "Think of the students needs, not your own!"

Now I'm jotting happy faces all over my agenda 1) so that I don't have to make eye contact with anyone, and 2) because B's unjustified shouting down of another teacher was, at least in content, correct. A wants to do every chapter of the textbook because there are x number of pages in the textbook and, not coincidentally, x classes in the school year. As x=x, any skipping of pages will have the end result of a textbookless lesson at the end of the year for which the teacher in question would have to make up completely from scratch. And he didn't wanna.

Making lessons is hard as a full time teacher. I failed all the time last year to balance lesson-making time with my busy teaching schedule (which, incidentally, was ridonkulously busier than any of the teachers at my current school). Planning a good lesson takes at least an hour (if your head's clear), and often more if you want to do more than just talk at the students for 50 minutes. It's easy to fall onto the carefully balanced crutch of the textbook, but if you spend too many years there you might fuse to it like, I think, A did at the meeting earlier this week. He's almost incapable of thinking about his job as a teacher in the traditional sense: someone who knows a good deal about a certain subject and being an adult, who makes it his full-time occupation to transmit the best of his knowledge to the up-and-coming generation. He's fallen into a habit--either of his own volition or because the system is set up in such a way as to force all but the strongest-willed into it--a habit where his job is to show up at x:00, do page xx to page yy in textbook zz, and to spend the majority of his time keeping records and grading things to ensure his students are, hopefully, increasing their grades to a level sufficient to enter society.

This is the kind of teacher the principal wants him to be, though from time to time teachers will be subject to a pep-talk, or to a mandatory extra workload, to remind them that they're not just paper pushers, pushing class after class through an education mill until their bodies are exhausted and their brains consider creative work to be a time-stealing nuisance.

There are only a few strong-willed teachers left. The system doesn't want strong-willed people; they buck the system. The system wants the scared and fearful, who will work their evenings and weekends away on non-class-related paperwork and grading that will keep things running much as they have been. Personally, I could afford to be much, much better. I'm trying all the time, but it's life--it's a struggle between motion and sleep and sleep will have its due. I'm lucky to be inspired by a few good friends, Yorkii and Paul, who are always on the move, creatively, in the EFL field. Hopefully you have someone in your professional or personal life to look up and aspire to as well. It's an extra bit of energy that, I think, will have made a great difference in my life once things are said and done.