An extra five minutes a day

For several years now I've been making an effort to arrive in my classroom five or ten minutes early and put on some music or a video. I started doing this because I am not an extrovert and didn't feel comfortable making chit-chat with a group of students before class. And even if I were naturally bubbly and vivacious, I would still have been facing students who had just woken up and stumbled into my early morning language class. How was I going to get this room full of sleepy, silent students to perk up and start talking during my class? They didn't even speak to each other in English!

I decided that I could at least do away with the oppressive silence, and benefit from the change myself. Somebody in that room had to be in a good mood, and if I didn't enjoy being there, there was no hope that they would. My solution was to choose some music in the foreign language and play it before class started. I would get a little energy boost, and students would walk into an environment already flavored by our subject.

I soon discovered some other benefits. Controlling the aural environment gave me a new way to focus students' attention. No longer did I have to announce the start of class to get their attention or interrupt their conversations (in English). Class starts when the music ends. But what about students who chat over the music? Of course that's allowed; class hasn't started, after all. But if the music is accompanied by a video, students' attention is already focused on the front of the room. They're curious -- will the music be good? a surprise? is the video funny? does it tell a story? Students often ask questions, too. They want to know who this musician is, whether he or she is popular, whether there is other music like this. Or they want to understand the song: what is the singer saying? do the lyrics match what is happening in the video? Students come up with all kinds of questions about what they see and here, and they even start to make requests ("Can we listen to so-and-so again? Who was that guy with the song about . . .?").

We all know that music can be used to teach comprehension or particular vocabulary or grammar structures, but I insist that these five minutes are not about that. They are free. There are no comprehension questions, no fill-in-the blanks, no exercises to be done. The students are there early, because they choose to be (they could spend those minutes out in the hall, if they wanted), and the music is there, because I offer it freely. Why not be more demanding? Another instructor I know of hands out quizzes before the official start of class: come early and have more time to earn points. But I'm trying to encourage students to be curious, not to earn points. I want them to remember what it's like to be attentive because you want to know something, not because you're being graded. The French writer and children's author Daniel Pennac describes in his book Comme un roman the process in which children gradually lose their curiosity toward and love for books as the books become more constrained, less open to their imaginations and more loaded with expectations. Imagine reading a child "Little Red Riding Hood" and then, as you reach the end, starting with the comprehension questions: "Wasn't that nice? Now: name two things Red Riding Hood had in her basket. Describe two aspects of the wolf's appearance that make Red Riding Hood suspicious. Why do you think that she is unable to see through his disguise? What is the result? etc, etc." Not surprisingly, children cease to look forward to reading as they instead anticipate that it is not something done for pleasure, but only a tedious lesson. Reading, Pennac says, must become free again if students are to regain their enjoyment of it. The same applies to music.

In the end, what I hope to teach with those extra five minutes a day is curiosity, and curiosity must be free. There must be a place for an active mind to wander, without being directed toward a particular object. If I can cultivate that in my students, then there is some hope that they will develop their own reasons for wanting to know about other objects in our class: about words, about history, about the things they see. That seems to me like five minutes a day well spent.

Covering grammar

Over the last several years, I have engaged in a struggle against coverage. What is coverage? It is when we say that students have covered the subjunctive or the past tense or greetings, or any other topic or material. In general, textbooks and instructors alike use the word to mean that the thing has been taught and that students now are assumed to know it. From that assumption follows our frustration when, a semester or a year later, students don't know how to use the subjunctive or can't remember what they learned about greetings, or whatever it might be. Why don't they remember that we covered that?

It isn't that I object to courses that include a wide range of topics; I don't think the results would be any better in general if we focused on only, say, three grammar topics instead of a dozen. It is rather that I consider much teaching to be like painting a wall. The first coat of paint looks terrible. You may have covered the wall, but the result is nothing like what you want. The color is off. The paint is streaky. It looks like a mistake. Only after waiting, then going over it again, then waiting again, and going over a few more times do you achieve the depth and evenness you hoped for. And that, it seems to me, is natural. Language, too, requires time and repetition to blend into something coherent.

As a result, I am experimenting with what I demand in the first semesters. I still have students who feel that we do too much and that the course goes too fast. But at the same time, I have learned to expect less production early on -- which is obvious, isn't it? I don't use anything like a "natural" teaching method, but I can't entirely fight against nature either. I expect a great deal of comprehension, and some fairly high-level decipherment skills. I expect students to show that they have understood topics singly. However, I am no longer surprised when they need repetition, when they seem to have forgotten. I am trying to teach for greater depth, for a better final result, and for the lasting impression, not the first one.