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.
