ON TEACHING: Final Question

Some years ago, when Consuelo Goodfellow was a Middle School Foreign Language teacher, she decided to just prompt a single open-ended question in the final test:

“What did you learn throughout the year?”

As a teacher, she didn’t want to focus on what students hadn’t learned but instead on what they had. Naively, she expected her students to give their answers in the subject taught. She thought students would write at least something about the verb “to be”, “to do” or “to have”; or any new words or grammar rules.

What a surprise she got when she was reading her students’ tests. She realized that besides the subject matter answers, the foreign language classes had gone beyond expectations in her students’ learning. Some students had learned to make friends and respect each other's points of views and styles of learning. Others discovered they were good at the subject despite years of failures, what previous teachers had said about their language abilities, and that foreign language was not as scariest as they thought at the beginning of the year. There were other students who also learned how to draw and make cartoons, how to study and develop their own strategies and learning. And most of them had fell in love with the subject.

She also observed that during the two-hour time allotted for the test, all students were absorbed in writing on their test and some of them were smiling as they recalled their experiences throughout the year.

Some years ago, when Consuelo Goodfellow was a Middle School Foreign Language teacher, she decided to just prompt a single open-ended question in the final test:

“What did you learn throughout the year?”

As a teacher, she didn’t want to focus on what students hadn’t learned but instead on what they had. Naively, she expected her students to give their answers in the subject that was being taught. She thought students would write at least something about the verb “to be”, “to do” or “to have”; or any new words or grammar rules.

What a surprise she got when she was reading her students’ tests. She realized that besides the subject matter answers, the foreign language classes had gone beyond the expectations in her students’ learning. Some students had learned to make friends and respect each others’ points of view and styles of learning. Others discovered they were good at the subject despite years of failures, what previous teachers had said about their language abilities, and that foreign language was not as scariest as they thought at the beginning of the year. There were other students who also learned how to draw and make cartoons, how to study and develop their own learning strategies. But the most important thing is that most of them had fell in love with the subject.

Isn’t that our main duty as teachers? To develop the passion, interest and love for a certain subject or discipline?

She also observed that during the two-hour time allotted for the test, all students were absorbed in writing on their tests and some of them were smiling as they recalled their experiences throughout the year.

One answer made the teacher jump to the top of the roof when one of her students had written, “I learned to be organized”.

What? She thought. How was this possible? Guilt came over her as she remembered the jungle-doodle-state contents on the blackboard: That wild territory full of chalk traces and varying sizes of handwriting where she wrote as she walked around the classroom. Oops! She felt sorry for her pupils and the little care she had placed in keeping the board neat and organized.

How did this student learn to be organized?

Not because we teach something, students are going to learn it. Not because we don’t teach something, students are not going to learn it. Students have minds of their own since a very young age. If we think for example of parents who are addicted to drugs or alcohol or who get in nasty fights and violence; it would be wrong to assume that their children will end up doing the very same thing. They might also have the capacity to learn by opposition, good opposition, and not behave in the ways they were modeled to learn.

Let’s trust in the ability our students have to think critically and make sense of the world they live in and learn on their own accord. Who knows? Maybe the new generation can be much better than ours and our ancestors’.