Always Look Eye!

So I'm trying to get a pulse on teachers when it comes to multimedia. Here are two questions: 1. What do teachers (and I'll let you define whether you are a teacher or not) watch on TV? 2. What movies do you let students watch?

My answers:

1. I'm addicted to Lost (I'm watching season 5 right now).
I love watching the Biggest Loser. I get teaching insights from it all the time (my wife is a personal trainer and so I also learn from her).
I love watching So You Think You Can Dance.
I love Glee because it reminds me of being in high school show choir.

2. I used to watch Karate Kid with students to teach them about indirect and direct styles of writing (contrastive rhetoric/Kaplan). I love to watch clips of the Ironman triathlon and relate it to students' lives (it requires tremendous effort, few people do it, the end is joyous but the process can be miserable).

And here is something I think ANY ESL teacher could find a way to teach...It's Joshua Bell, violin virtuouso, performing in the Washington D.C. Metro, while more than a thousand people simply walk by and ignore him. This guy is one of the premier musicians in the world, and people are just walking by. The teaching applications are endless. And you can listen to his entire performance. It is gorgeous. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

teachers are poor and their wives cry

So I've noticed I want to start all my blogposts with the word "so." I think it just helps me feel there is a real audience out there; like I'm starting a new conversation with my closest friends. But I really don't know if I'll strike a chord with anyone yet.

Someone listening? Someone? Anyone?

And I'm still not sure who my audience IS. I think I'm writing to teachers. I think I'm writing about teachers. Blogs can seem so self-absorbed (Do you hear the voice of ditzyblonde in your head when you read most blogs? Cause, yeah, I do). And so here I am trying to defend why a teacher blog would or should even be read. I'm totally going Sally Fields all over you, my nonexistent audience. But let me defend myself.

I wonder what it is about teachers that make them feel the need to defend themselves all the time. Is it the size of our paychecks? The perception that we couldn't hack it in the real world? The belief that others don't really give us the "respect" we deserve? We definitely have complexes, me included. My wife has cried no less than a dozen times because we can't get into a house. And while I know it is not entirely my fault, if I had been doctorlawyerdentist (yes, people, that's what I'm calling that guy, you know, the one with the shiny sportscar and shiny teeth and non-tearing wife) then I think I'd be spared those tears. I try to put my arm around my wife and support her by just being quiet (do you know how HARD that is for someone like me?) but the tears keep coming and literally fall onto my arm. They're big and warm. I've decided I hate them and their stupid unexpected warmth.

And here is my big teacher question for the day...do you use one space after a period or two? I had always been taught to put two spaces after each period/sentence. It makes a comforting sound when I'm typing. Here's a sentence [period][space][space] And here's another [period][space][space] But I notice EVERYONE is using just a single space now. Did I fail to get the memo? Could someone send it to me now? Thank you.

See you tomorrow everyone/no one. Oh, and I forgot to defend myself and teachers properly. I was voted most likely to succeed, got straight A's, and scored a 760 on my GRE Verbal. So I COULD have been an excellent doctorlawyerdentist. So there.

Rule #2: Practice? We're talking about practice.

Rule #2: The Basketball Metaphor

The problem with most ESL instruction, and language instruction as a whole (I'm looking at you 8th grade Spanish class!) is that learning English is akin to learning how to play basketball. Imagine that you walked into a room and were told that you would learn everything you needed to know in order to play basketball. The teacher is an athlete with lots of basketball experience, and he seems to know what he is talking about since he has been playing basketball for years.

The teacher then places a large tome of instructions in front of each student and announces that he has passed out the best book available to learn basketball. How about, "The Ultimate Basketball Book: Skills Needed to Be the Ultimate Player" by well-known coach and legend Frank L. Wright (wait, didn't he design houses?) Hush. Never mind that. Fantastic title, you think. That's what I need!

And so you spend the entire semester, 15 weeks, 4 hours daily, pouring over all of the intricacies you find in the book. You learn about the jump shot. You learn about dribbling. You learn about how to drive to the basket with both the left and right hand. The book is fantastic. It has diagrams and pictures and gives you a clear sense of what you are supposed to do to defeat an opponent. You know all of the rules and all of the moves.

Furthermore, you take weekly tests that prove your competence. You ace all of these tests and get straight A's in every single quiz as well. You do all of your homework and read each chapter carefully, underlining all of the parts that you find most valuable.

So, now, so the story goes, you are ready to play basketball. Right? Right? ...Frank Lloyd Wrong.

Rule #1: I Don't Teach English

I'm attempting to create a clear vision of the past 15 years of my teaching career by stating the principles that I am willing to live by. These represent the principles that I feel strongest and most passionately about as a teacher and as a person. Here it goes...

Rule #1: Why I Try to Teach as Little English as Possible as an English Teacher
I think one of the biggest mistakes of most novice ESL teachers, and perhaps ESL programs, is the incessant, consciously misguided, panicked and manic. need to teach English. I know, I know, you would THINK that teaching English is a vital part of your job as an English as a second language teacher (please stay calm, people), it is just that teaching ESL well, I mean really fine language instruction, often involves anything but teaching English. Let's see how many of you relate to this story:

Case in point: my students are great learners. Most are entering the college ranks (and ESL often is synonymous with college international students), and they are the best and brightest. They come at various levels of study, and I have taught classes in pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar (love the Azar books) and have been successful in teaching all of these disciplines. But if I am to really focus away from me and take a serious look at what engages students into really performing, really submersing themselves into language and learning, I have to admit that often my best classes are when I don't act as an ESL teacher.

For example, when I teach them my personal passion (for example, famous American short stories), I often have students create storyboards--picture stories, I call them--that allow them to truly wrap their minds around the structure and philosophy and organization of a really good story. Are they learning English? Absolutely! But the focus on authentic learning material and away from parts of speech, verb tense, and usage in general is not only liberating to them, (lo and behold, their eyes seem to tell me, we're actually communicating about important ideas!) but it truly allows for them to see themselves as negotiators of language.

In short, by and large, we need to stop teaching English. And we need to start teaching IN English. My goodness gracious, English itself is such a dull topic, wouldn't you agree? Isn't it therefore reasonable that language would be acquired much faster if it were used more as a vehicle than as the topic?

Perhaps, some of you, however, are still a little uncertain. If we don't teach English, you might wonder, then what do we teach? Well, my friends, that is a very good question indeed.

Ask it again. And again. I know you'll come up with something.

The Gratitude Letter

Thanksgiving time. So yeah, predictably, I did this assignment for my ESL class in which they have to say how grateful they are for someone. Yeah. Gratitude. Thanksgiving. Pretty sappy, I know. But hear me out...

It started when I read a Guidepost's article that suggested that real writing often comes from the heart, and that writing to someone that you haven't really thanked can be, well, transformational. I liked the idea, but had little idea whether it would play to international students. Would they like speaking to people in this way? What if the person they chose didn't speak English?

The suggestion included reading the letter aloud to the person you haven't properly thanked. Predictably, my students chose to write to fathers, mothers, grandmothers, teachers, and friends. I asked them to write and speak in English, but if they chose, they would be able to also speak in their language so that we could send their "letters" in the correct language. Lo and behold, they cried as they read them aloud, and I teared up more than once. I found that their writing was better, that they were more interested in the project, and that the students were enthusiastic (in general, we had a couple who couldn't get into the spirit of speaking so emotionally--and so I had them present the letters privately with me after class in a conference room). I'd recommend this activity to any educator looking to improve writing/speaking skills.

Oh, and perhaps most importantly for me, I got to back up this assignment and do it myself (teachers need to walk the walk, too, you know!) So I wrote to a teacher in my past to give them an example. Here it is, a letter for Mrs. Leslie. And although I haven't read it to her in person yet, I think just putting this letter out in the blogosphere has some amount of power. It changes me to put it out there in the universe. It makes me know how special she is to me. Now isn't that interesting? Transformational, indeed.

Dear Professor Leslie,

I never told you how thankful I am that you taught me in 11th grade United States History. I wanted to let you know how important your class was to me and how it helped me to become a better person. I remember how proud I was when I got a 60% or more on one of your tests (note: 60% was an A on a Mrs. Leslie test!) I studied hard to do my best and I remember how you would tell us that the tests you gave were college level. I learned how to study hard and how to be proud of my efforts. 62% never looked so good. I also remember how you taught us to write a five-page paper every week. At first I thought it was crazy hard, but when I saw how you read and critiqued my papers, I tried my best to really think about the topics and found I enjoyed letting my mind imagine history. I even kept my essay that you graded on American transcendentalism. Above any class that I took in high school, your class prepared me most for the difficult assignments I would encounter in college. I also remember that your clsas was different from other classes. Other teachers seemed to care more about their popularity and making classes easy for us. They were praised for letting students leave early or giving students time to just talk. But you seemed most interested in preparing us for our future contexts, and I remember thinking several times while in the college classroom how grateful I was that I had your class. I would never have been prepared for my freshman year at the university, and I would never have been able to get the grades I received in college. In fact, I think I owe a great part of my professional career to you. I am now a teacher who tries to prepare international students for college. I help them to do exactly what you did for me. I am so thankful for what you did. You will always be very special to me. Thank you so much again. I am not the same person I would otherwise have been, and now I have the joy of motivating others to excel as well.

Chieko Honda

So I'm teaching again.

I have pretty mixed emotions about it all, to be honest. First of all, I LEFT education because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to support my family. A lot of those fears still remain. It is so hard to put in my all, do my best, and quite frankly, be paid so little in exchange. It is hard to come to grips with the fact that my friends in college, many of whom looked up to me as the scholar and the brain, are making double or triple what I make. There are positives about working at ASU, and I do see some possibilities that I don't need to mention now, but all of my past college success stuff (magna what?) kinda haunts me.
And then there is Chieko Honda.I thought about her this week as I was speaking to students. It was nice to remember her story. As I was speaking, I fell into that natural teacher cadence that I had forgotten I had (like riding a bike?) And more importantly, as I shared her story I remembered why I had developed that teacher cadence in the first place. (Side note: If I ever speak teacherese to you and you find it unnervingly irritating, feel free to slap me. Thank you.)The English lesson of the week focused on several individuals that had overcome trials. I love teaching this lesson to ESL students for so many reasons. For one, ESL students face tons of adversity. They leave their countries and come at the prime of life, and they often sacrifice all kinds of comforts that most people who never leave a country take for granted. Take this comfort for example: the comfort of saying what you think. Trust me, if you learn a foreign language, then saying precisely what you think is not a luxury you get to have. Yours, au contraire, is the arduous task of being asked difficult academic questions and inevitably sounding five years old."What do you think about the American Dream in relation to international students?" I might ask.Or how about, "Why should adversity also create a possibility for success?"I like to push students with didactic, open-ended questions. And their answers? Give them an hour, and they'll compose complex thoughts that prove they have strong opinions and great cognitive skills. But ask them to produce on the spot and their answers get predictably juvenile."Adversity sometimes good.""Adversity bad. I think, bad."They tell me things are good. They tell me things are bad. And if you pay attention to the eyes, you'll see that it pisses them off to no end that this is all that they have. Can you relate? Imagine having all these complex and beautiful thoughts and being told to limit those thoughts to 2,000 words. Yeah, it'd suck."I think very good adversity, it make stronger the person because..." The student trails off at because, not because she has nothing to say, but limited resources with which to say it. Time and vocabulary run out like the proverbial hour glass. And then you end up looking dumb. At times like these I praise my students for their efforts, then glide along in my perfect English in an attempt to bail them out.
And so I began to share a story about a Japanese girl with several strikes against her. I met her while I was just a young teacher in Provo, Utah, and I liked her immediately. She was vivacious, thoughtful, and deeply introspective. Precisely the kind of student that couldn't give you an answer quickly only because the wheels were turning ever so carefully. She had long black hair with streaks of white, the only indication to me that she might be older. While I loved her energy and desire to learn, over the course of that first semester it became obvious to me that English learning was particularly challenging for her. She took the college English entrance exam, TOEFL (the one I'm in charge of preparing her for), and failed. I got worried. In my MA classes we had just discussed how some students simply never progress beyond a certain level of linguistic awareness. They just get stuck. We call it (it almost sounds like some sort of insult) "fossilization."
Predictably, 4 months later, she failed the test again. Another semester. Then a third time. By the fourth failure, I believed intervention would be necessary. English schools are often as expensive as universities, and I could see the sands of her hour glass slipping away. But instead of intervening, I decided to watch. She just seemed so determined. She paid her tuition, she studied, and she kept taking that stupid, stupid test.Eight friggin times. That's right people. She took the test eight "holy-crap-who-does-that?" times. And she passed on the eighth. Tons of time. Tons of money. Tons of depression. But what a payoff. I remember being exultant when I was told. It was as if I had passed. I felt vindicated. "I told you so, people!" I felt like shouting, "I knew I could do it."And it was then I questioned that fossilization ever HAD to happen. My one-person reasoning: If Chieko Honda can pass that stupid test, I'm going to just shut my mouth and consider the nature of possibility. That is what Chieko Honda represents to me, after all.Possibility. It is a fantastic word. It is what I see in every student. It is what I believe. And where does that possibility lead?In Chieko's case, quite a distance. She graduated from college, became a research assistant, and is now pursuing a graduate degree. It should be really tough. She has to take this ridiculously hard test you might have heard of: the GRE. It makes the TOEFL look like the festival of flowers and bunnies (ever been? its nice...)So you think I should bet against her this time? I can't. I won't.Because "can't" and "won't" just don't mean anything to her.

A new ESL blog for ESL teachers and students

Hi! Here's a free gift just for you (sorry it's not a car). My name is Shane Dixon and I am an ESL professional at Arizona State University. My goal in creating this blog is to help teachers and students gain vital information about the English language. I will be responding to questions that teachers and students pose, and I hope to provide insights that will be useful for all. And I'll also say stuff. Some of it might be good.