>Date: Tue, 2 Feb 1999 14:18:24 -0800
>From: Johanna Rubba <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: Scope and Sequence
>
>There are several cool new issues to respond to in recent messages.
>
>1 - terminology: who is 'expert' enough to contribute.
>
>Linguists aren't the only people with grammar-term expertise. Grammar
>teachers certainly have loads of experience, and this is meant to be a
>full two-way interaction.
>
>I really liked the suggestion that we get input from other subscribers on
>what terms have been most useful/clear/learnable to them/their students,
>and in what order of presentation. That is VERY relevant information for
>our SSS mission, as well as this list's mission of sharing what works in
>the classroom.
Hello all,
I am a teacher of English as a Foreign Language. As such, I generally listen in
on this forum; my references tend to be from a different area of the ballpark.
I did notice that recently someone mentioned that there was a large difference
in the presentation and methods in grammar teaching between what I do, and the
teaching of English (grammar and structure) to native speakers so as to improve
their facility with their own language. And this is absolutely correct. I also
feel that the overwhelming majority of the people on this list are generally
talking about the latter situation; but I will still contribute my 02 cents
American in regard to practical ideas that work. Ultimately, theory must always
be turned into practice.
There are some educational ideas which I use in the classroom that tend to
reenforce my conception that the mere cramming of facts and knowledge into
children's heads, the way we generally, as teachers, make them memorise ideas
as if they were the Holy Grail, and then turn around and rate them numerically
based upon their ability to regurgitate them back at us by rote, may not
exactly be the best idea for educating, in the finest sense of this word, our
children.
To quote someone whose name escapes me at the moment:
"For the most part, the university system that exists today is an excuse for
the failure of the primary schools to teach and to instill a desire for
learning, and a breakdown in the mechanisms of trust. Those who rely on degrees
as confirmation of ability are assuming that the skills necessary to follow
rules, sit, listen, and parrot back what they heard at test time are
transferable to real world tasks".
In High School Geometry for instance, I was taught that a straight line is the
shortest distance between two points. And yet any two-year-old child already
knows this: when frightened, it will run directly to its mother in the
straightest of straight lines possible. This is an unconscious learned piece of
reality. And in one sense, regardless of the discipline we teach, this is what
we are attempting to teach: how outward reality functions in the space we
appear to occupy.
The difference between the high school student and the two-year old being that
at that tender age, it is known only in a certain unconscious area of
themselves, and the intellectual centre knowledge of the PRINCIPLE is
unconscious, dormant, so to speak So in elementary school Mathematics, and
perhaps even further down the road, the aim of the mathematics teacher should
be to draw out and make conscious what the kids already know unconsciously,
rather than to push concepts into their memories.
So, often we can fulfill our goals through transmission of the data which we
wish to place in the conscious mental area of the child through movement and
art, again, regardless of the discipline, and this does not reduce the accuracy
of the resulting intellectual concept; it enhances the concept so it can be
experienced through the Whole Being. Art thus becomes a fundamental medium of
education, even for academic subjects.
On the one hand we have the "artistic" form of education in contrast with the
all-too-common childhood classroom experience of alienation, disengagement, and
boredom, which some letters to this forum have touched on. For example, in
Social Studies, the classical method of teaching is to read a boring
description of some historical event and then memorise it; it's quite another
thing to hear an exciting description of this event and then act it out on
stage or in front of the class. This then enters the emotional part of the
child and can remain for the whole lifetime.
The general theory here is *involvement*: everything that is colourful, active,
warm, beautiful and diverse makes us get involved, because it is alive and has
something we can term "soul", using this word in its sense as in "soul" music,
which creates emotional involvement. When material is presented dryly and
mechanically, it is dead and alien to the kids and remains outside of them
forever.
I was teaching Reflexive pronouns to my kids the other day. To understand what
a reflexive pronoun is, it is obvious that you really have to understand the
concepts of subject, verb and object, and of course what it might mean for a
verb to be "reflexive". For this I used a live, physical, demonstration. At the
front of the class I placed two pupils: I had Marķa gently hitting Elisa, over
and over again, in slow motion. Here we had, to the comic relief and
involvement of all, an obvious subject actor/doer, an action, and finally an
object/receiver of the action.
Then I stood with Marķa alone at the front of the room and told her to relax
herself totally. I lifted her arm, which had been at her side, to horizontal.
It stayed there. "Marķa," I said, "you are not exactly relaxed". Laughs from
everyone. Finally I got Marķa to relax and then using my hand as the motor
force, I had Marķa begin to hit herself lightly in the head over and over. That
is, Marķa and the rest of the class grasped intuitively that Marķa continued
being the subject of the verb "hit", but somehow she had also turned into the
object of the verb as well. "This," I said, "demonstrates what a reflexive verb
is" and proceded to put a name on the object: instead of "Elisa" it was now
"herself".
So I like to use theatre which will work with the mental, the emotional and the
motor parts of the child and I have found that this genuinely, whenever
possible, is the best method for helping the child assimilate, because at the
end of the day this is what we as educators wish to do: instill the necessary
tools to function constructively and use the potential any child may have.
The arts and dry scientific method are really not opposed to one another. There
is a point, when practised correctly, that art actually is science itself in
the very best sense of the word, and that when they are split up into two
different disciplines, you really end up with neither one nor the other.
eric
Time is the moving image of eternity
[log in to unmask]
<http://www.interbook.net/personal/efeingold/index.htm>
|
