What Doesn't Kill You

To say I had a bit of a shock when I started teaching here would be an understatement. I have almost 400 students in 8th through 10th grade, and despite having had English instruction since 6th grade, only about a dozen of them can actually string together an original sentence in English. They know greetings, they know "stand up" and "sit down" and half of them know how to form a sentence with "to  be". Honestly, I think most American house-pets have a bigger vocabulary.

Most of my students don't really care about learning English, or learning at all. Apart from a select few, these teenagers know that when they grow up, they're going to get married, have kids, and farm the land -- just like their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents did. School is something you're supposed to suffer through for a number of years, doing just well enough so that you can move on to the next grade, and eventually you won't be required to come anymore. Most of the classes consist of well-intentioned but under-trained and underpaid teachers dictating notes that the students then copy, repeat, and memorize. That's what passes for "learning" here. Critical thinking and motivation to improve oneself are non-existent. The idea that school can be interesting and enjoyable is (literally) a foreign concept to them.

Clearly, this is quite different than my attitude to learning. Back when I was in school, I was the kid that counted down the days to start school, the kid who went to school with colds, fevers, and laryngitis. I elevated the annual autumn stroll through the aisles of Target -- surrounded by gel pens and glitter pencils and notebooks of every color -- to about the same level as Christmas.

As a teacher, too, my experience so far has been at a summer camp in Germany and a Montessori school in Houston, both of which employed the basic philosophy that anything can be made interesting and fun to learn when presented in a creative way by a determined teacher. I've slowly come to believe that if my students aren't enjoying what I'm teaching them (or at least finding it intellectually stimulating), I'm teaching it wrong. If my students here aren't learning anything and aren't finding the lessons engaging, it's not because they are lazy and unmotivated, it's because they don't consider learning enjoyable -- and, along with English, that's one of the things I'm here to teach them.

This is easy to say, but hard to do. How do you motivate a room of 50-plus kids who stare at you like zombies when you ask a question? How do you get kids who are used to being hit and yelled at by their teachers to stop being afraid to speak? How do you get the girls, who are under the impression they should be seen and not heard, to participate in class? When asked a direct question, students generally stare at the floor silently or mumble something incoherent, so how much valuable class time do you spend trying to coax a simple answer out of a reluctant student? How do you get them to want to learn?

For me, one of the biggest answers has been music. I don't have a single student who doesn't like music -- so anytime I can find a song that ties in to the vocabulary or grammar point that we're studying, I use it. "What a Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong for colors and adjectives, "On Top of Spaghetti" for prepositions of place, "Rock Around the Clock" for telling time, etc. Sometimes they fill in missing words. Sometimes I teach them the words and we sing it. Sometimes they stand up and have to do certain movements when the hear certain words.
But every single time I pull out a song, they visibly perk up. They stop looking like zombies and start looking like students. It's refreshing.

However, sometimes I worry that these kids are so far behind that we can't afford to waste class time doing things like choreographed dances to American pop songs, even if it does vaguely tie in to what we're learning. When trimester exams come up, it's going to be much more important that they know how to write a sentence in the passive than if they know where the meatball that was on top of my spaghetti went.

About a month ago, we were learning about comparatives and superlatives -- "João is shorter than José, but Manuel is the shortest" -- that kind of thing. I taught my classes the chorus to the song "Stronger" by Kelly Clarkson:

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, stand a little taller
Doesn't mean I'm lonely when I'm alone
What doesn't kill you makes a fighter, footsteps even lighter
Doesn't mean I'm over 'cause you're gone

I told them this song was about personal empowerment and resilience, and explained what each line of the lyrics meant. They loved it, and wanted to listen to it over and over again.

Two weeks later, we had our first test. As I was correcting, I couldn't help but notice that almost everybody remembered what "stronger" and "taller" meant -- and nobody remembered how to form sentences in the passive.

Maybe I'm not wasting my time with these activities.

I've taken a sizable risk, in that I've thrown the provincial curriculum out the window. I may incur the wrath of the provincial Ministry of Education, but there's no point in trying to explain relative clauses to students who can barely put together a sentence in simple present tense.

What I'm gambling on is this: If I can get my students to a very basic level of English -- something that's at least better than "trained household pet" level, some of them might, just might, be able to pass their exams -- and more importantly, improve their lot in life.

I have no idea how it will pan out -- but for now, after facing a zombie class, when I come home exhausted and frustrated, I am greeted and calmed by the words that are now hanging above my workspace:

"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."