All They Know They Learned from McDonalds

  Lots of the parents of the kids speak English.  But apparently not enough that they would want to speak English at home, regardless of OPOL and that theory.  I hear stories of kids responding to their parents in English which is both heartwarming and inspiring.  From "Wo ist Oscar?" to "I am here" to more complicated situations requiring adjectives and vocabulary, the kids do it in English.

  But what about the other side?  Every month I receive a new set of flash cards to teach the children, to build their lexis and to build upon their previous vocabulary.  At the beginning of the year are basic emotions and colors.  Then things which can be described by these words, like a red car or the ultimate statement, "I am thirsty," continually employed by the kids to get a break from the strenuous action of learning and speaking English once a week.  When summer really hits, and the kids have been playing outside before English I understand.  But at 9:00am?  Oh no.  If it were only accepted to teach them how to say that they must go to the bathroom.  Again, it would be abused.  I used this motivation once in an afternoon class and the kids picked up on it so quickly that I had to stop it's use although eighteen months later the kids still think it is valid and that I approve.  Just a pain to me, really.

  So I do understand that the kids learn a lot of words at home.  I think some secretly watch Dora and Hannah Montana in English so that they can impress me.  Maybe they just want to learn more English, too.

  There seems to be an underlying current of english vocabulary that exists in these kid's lexis that no teacher or parent has actually impressed into their usable lexicon, and in fact that the kids do not know is there.  Care to guess where they come from?  From television, where even 'TV' is sometimes used rather than the germanized version 'FS'?  Oh no.  From the shows themselves, with their 'hip' vocabulary and 'New German?'  Nope, not even in that internationally-oriented market.  Think deeper.  More basic.  What does a person do every day?  Three times a day, probably.  Under the campaign of healthier Happy Meals.

  "So, was heiẞt Käse auf Englisch?"  "Cheese!"  "Wo weiẞt du das her?"  "McDonalds!  Ein Cheeseburger!"  Oh right.  Far be it from me to expect you to pay attention to what your mother orders for you from the most disgusting restaurant on the European Continent.  Which, by the way, is imported from America, and of which I am not proud.  If only I could bear to describe the awful practices of this corporation and it's actions against our Earth.  I don't really mind if people eat french fries and like mayo on them, or if they think that McDonalds is a good place to enjoy a Cappuccino on a date as the Germans do, but really.

  Then the picnic flashcards came.  Cheese among them, also apple, coffee and sugar.  How does one represent sugar on a flashcard?  With a sugar bowl and a spoon sticking out of it.  Do the kids recognize that as sugar?  It it so common here to have sugar available everywhere you see food.  Maybe this is a result of Paul Fussell's book on the american class system, but I think that any opened or exposed food items near the dining experience cheapens the whole experience.  

  "How do you all know the name of apple in English already?"  "From McDonalds!  Apple Pie!!!"  Sure.  And the nerve of one student to ask, "Michael, why are you thin?  Aren't you from America?  Americans are fat."  I don't know, Apple Pie Face.  But when I brought up the fact that Germans are also fat, I was shut down.  Fact, children, fact.  13% fact.  A little more than a third of the same statistic in America.  The BBC reports this as a problem frequently.  These kids need to get out of MD's and onto the health trends of the world, maybe.

  In the last post I mentioned setting up a situation in which they go around and participate in the actions of life in a town including shopping, seeing a film, and going to the zoo.  At least I just let them buy their own groceries(of which they invariably chose ice cream(known by those of them that had been on holiday to an English-speaking country) or sugar or honey or cheese rather than the apples, egg plant, carrots, or cucumber) but maybe I should have inserted a McDonalds.  At which they could only buy cheeseburgers, fries, and shakes.  No salads, no veggie burgers.  

Teaching

  Teaching is very rewarding.  For oneself.  It has absolutely nothing to do with how students develop or what they take away from any particular lesson.  Children or adults, there is no difference.  I have found it to be a challenge that I and only I can face, letting the learners be damned.  I want to create a lesson that is to be remembered, like a movie in film class 7 years ago, when the teacher told me that it was important, but I didn't believe it until I saw it, and took away my own thoughts and interpretations.  Some article online somewhere was titled "Teaching or acting, or imparting what you know" or something.  And so I have my own ideas about teaching.  How to present different material, which contexts are suitable for which learnings("I Fucked my Way into this..." is just not good lesson material for a group of middle-aged women), and what I think about what I am teaching is more important than what they are going to learn.  And I cannot control what they learn, specifically.

  I do not have the same approach for each lesson, for each class, or for any topic.  I try to change most things, and work differently every time I have to work.  It keeps me thinking.  I am looking for new texts to teach every day.  But I cannot imagine myself into my classroom very easily, maybe a trait I picked up from a linguistics professor and a literature professor at university, who would come in to class every day with an idea but seemed to constantly adapt what they were talking about and what they wanted to highlight depending on the discussion and where it would lead.  Once I recommended a new theme to read about in class to one of them, and he ended up abandoning our textbook to teach from photocopies of what I wanted.  And I try to do the same.

  But.  The most trivial manifestation of this is in the way that I lead classes for adults.  I like to begin every class with inane conversation to see where it will go.  Any topic will do.  Hopefully it will lead somehow to what I wanted to work on for the day.  Or maybe I can make one of my illogical jumps to thetopic.  It doesn't matter to me as long as I can see where we are and where we might be headed.  One group laughs at me for taking such leaps very frequently.

  I realized that I could be a good teacher only after about two years of teaching.  I started a new evening class and I wasn't sure of the way to mesh the class together, that is, how we would all get on the same page.  I needed to find a starting point from which to launch our experience in the classroom.  We had a 90-minute conversation of who we were, and our experiences leading up to being in the same room together, and the group was too random to just start in to grammar or any excercises.  And maybe I didn't feel like doing a lesson on the first night.

  We had a break and smoked a cigarette, and inspiration came.  Like going to the bathroom in the middle of a conversation to collect your thoughts and gaining a few seconds of personal time to plan out the next series of arguments, I quite possibly had the greatest epiphany of my career.  I came back in and elicited from the class what I wanted to hear, some mistakes that I would not tolerate, and defined for them some things that we would be learning about.  All in 45 minutes.  And from then on, whether it be kids or adults, I adhered to these standards and my success as a teacher grew.  Now kids know that when I groan they have said something in German when they already know the English, and the adults know that I have corrected this mistake before and that they should know the right way to ask something.  I don't know where to draw the line between too specific and too general a correction to make.

  The breakthrough was like this:  I wanted to branch out and teach more linguistic things rather than just grammar and speech.  And the question was how to raise this without sounding like a professor or some drone.  Supercalifragilisticexbealidocious was the answer.  So I went back in and just wrote it on the board without explanation.  I don't want to just be an English teacher, I want these people to learn other things from me, as I learned to think from a professor at university.  And I just sat down with what I hoped was an expectant look on my face.  I wanted them to fill in the rest of the lesson.  And slowly, they did.  I performed various facial expressions, nodding at the board, and then at them, as if I thought that they would know what I wanted.  Filling in the blanks, so to say.

  Although the first question was "Why did you write that?" it did start the discussion about the word.  Some had heard it in a movie, and some had real questions about it; the questions that mattered to our class.  Once they got the hang of what I wanted they were quick to fill in the lesson material that I wanted: the appropriate questions.  Parts of speech, spelling, usage, etc.  And I got what I wanted, without working.

  Applying the principle to children worked the same way.  My company provides it's teachers with material and a vague syllabus, but no concrete way of presenting anything.  There are workshops held to practice and get ideas, but assembling all of the information and tasks into one solid and understandable Open Lesson is never given.  A complete downfall on the part of the 'Head Teachers' and directors of this school.

  During May and June the kids learn the lexis of transportation and holiday through a combination of flashcards and songs, although in no particular context.  It is up to the teachers to determine how to present this material.  Luckily most of the kids go on holiday during this time, so the subject is not hard to breach, similiar to the way that starting a new class and getting on the same page as the learners in an adult class is key to the first day of class.  Songs include subjects such as a yellow submarine, wheels on buses, and rowing a boat.  There are also songs on a CD which are incredibly too long, ranging from three minutes to five, with a varied and complex vocabulary and theme.  Useless unless incorporated into some kind of presentation in which the kids would hold a card high when the singer sings their corresponding word.  Futile.  How are seven kids supposed to wait at least thirty seconds for one single word and then appropriately show their one single card in a random context to a song that they do no know word for word in a language that is not their first?

  Thus I have devised a slightly clever and thoroughly cheapskate way of avoiding this.  As a group we 'row' around the room and sing together, and at various stations we will see certain cards for the kids to identify, respond to questions about, sing a song pertaining to, or play a game related to the subject matter at hand.  In this way the kids with various talents(vocabulary, repitition, action, response) are all exposed for their own brand of learning without leaving any behind through the whole lesson.  Something completely ignored by the syllabus and expectations of my boss(es).

  The expectations are even and clear.  And I can get the answers I want from the kids that can do each particular activity.  For the older kids in primary school the format is the same but in the setting of a town with various buildings; a cinema, a town hall, a school, a zoo, etc.

  Thus I justify myself through teaching.  I get responses that I want.  It wasn't a metaphor or parabola.  All through setting up a situation in which what I think should be reproduced is.