7.10.2005: eight-year-old dilemmas (part one)

Hello. A slight change of pace this week: for the benefit of those who’ve been asking, here's where I finally stop gawping at landmarks, street vendors and wallpaper and start telling you a little about what I actually do here. If you’re the kind of person who can’t think of anything less interesting than the minute details of someone else’s job, I can empathise; feel free to skip this entry.

*ahem*

Ignoring all considerations of narrative good taste, let's start with a flashback. Picture Anthony sitting in an office tower in York Street Sydney, in a relaxed, civilised round-table atmosphere, studying for his CELTA certificate. It's the beginning of 2005, and twelve months of fairly intense introspection have led Anthony to decide that this year he will finally give his life a long overdue shake-up. He will stop procrastinating; he will start making some of the Big Changes he's been putting to one side; he will set events rolling as soon as possible, and try to give them a momentum of their own so that the brakes can't be applied later when the usual doubts begin to surface. All of which will hopefully drag life into its next ‘phase’, whatever that turns out to be.

Hence the teaching course, among other things.

A brief explanation for those of you who haven’t come across the acronym: CELTA is the piece of paper you need to convince prospective employers that you’re fit to teach English. Its full name is the Cambridge Certificate of English Language Teaching to Adults.

I'd like you to take particular note of that last bit - the word after "to". It roughly translates as “people to whom one can probably try to teach some things without sustaining permanent damage to one's sanity”.

But returning to Flashbackland, there I sat in York Street, learning how to teach adults to speak English. Training with adults. Teaching adults. Giving my adult students lots of useful adult exercises, choc-full of useful adult vocab relating to useful adult subjects, to which they responded in a sane, adult manner whenever I formed a sentence beginning with a phrase like like “What I’d like you to do now is …”.

Now cut to six months later, as Anthony rides the Metro out to South Butovo (“the outer administrative limit of Moscow”, according to one website I visited recently), assumes the blackboard position, and sizes up his first class ...

... of eight-year-olds!

Anthony [to self]:       “What the hell am I supposed to do with all these little people?”

Answer [from self]:     “No freaking idea.”

I did have one thing working for me, though. As luck would have it, this class had been together for a year and had already worked their way through a whole textbook together. So Anthony goes straight to Page One of Book Two, and reads the cues:

Anthony [to class]:      “Touch your nose.”

Blank stares.

Anthony:                    “Point to the door.”

Nothing. Students evidently pre-occupied with eight-year-old thoughts (most likely the eight-year-old equivalent of “What's this scary man with the beard doing here, and what the hell is he pointing at?”).

Anthony:                    “Stand on your chair.”

Seconds pass. A silence so absolute, my brain starts supplying the soundtrack: a whispering breeze blowing through a ghost town. Imaginary tumbleweeds begin rolling across the classroom.

And then finally, signs of movement: a student lifts her hand, seemingly in the direction of her nose. Is this a delayed response to the earlier “touch your nose” request? Could be. Or maybe she’s just thinking about doing some house-cleaning. I have to know. I turn to look at her. She stops, puts her hand down, resumes pouting. The silence washes over the room once more, like the metaphorical Red Sea onto a swarm of figurative Egyptian guys.

And so went most of my first lesson.

The second one was marginally better, but still dire. I really, really needed to seek some guidance from my ADOS (Assistant Director of Studies) about this, and quickly. I was getting absolutely nowhere with these little monsters.

To cut a long meeting short, the ADOS’ main piece of advice was this: "to 'activate' young learners, it's often necessary to introduce a more kinaesthetic component into your lesson plans". Translation: get them moving. “Hmmm”, I thought. “Good idea.”

It worked, too.

Four weeks and eight lessons later, the classroom atmosphere has changed beyond recognition. Having lost their fear of the Scary Bearded Man, and seemingly invigorated by the knowledge that learning doesn’t have to entail being tied to a straight-backed chair and drilled by scary bearded women, these kiddies appear to be having a rather wonderful time in my classes. Even better: while that’s going on, they’re also beginning to retain small quantities of information about the English language. They’re running around the room to find numbers I’ve ‘hidden’ in far corners; they’re running up to the board to draw the time onto clock faces or to write “fifteen balloons” next to my pictures (although they still pronounce it “fiveteen”, and I still can’t draw balloons that don’t resemble sperm). They’re running straight at me as I walk around dropping slips of paper with vocab written on them, making me feel like a Gulliver-sized referee in a football scrum full of midgets. They’re running, they’re running, they’re running …

… they’re running me completely ragged!

Still, at least I’ve more or less solved the first dilemma I faced with my eight-year-olds. I can safely say that they’re well and truly “activated” now ;-)

Would you like to hear about the next, even thornier dilemma? Okay, then. But I need to get back to my lesson planning right now. Tomorrow - oh sweet joy of joys! - I have to try and explain to one of my teen classes the more or less arbitrary 'rules' that apply when choosing between gerunds and infinitive forms for the second verb in a sentence (right after I spend an hour making making paper clocks with the littl'uns). But I’ll give you the lowdown on eight-year-old dilemma #2 as soon as I can.