On Teaching

For over twenty years I’ve been doing something with no real idea of how I’m doing it, or how it should be done.

Apparently, I do it well, however I do it. Well enough to work 13 years at a language school, well enough to convince Wal-Mart Puerto Rico that it should hire me as a full-time teacher. And well enough that old students, when I come across them, greet me with affection, and tell me they only learned English from me.

For years I felt like an impostor—if they knew that I knew absolutely nothing about what I was doing, they’d have to kick me out, right? And shouldn’t I go to school, since I was pretending to be a teacher, and figure out the right way to do it? How to confess—I have no idea what a lesson plan is, or how to conduct group activities, or how to assess a student’s progress, or lack thereof.

I had vague theories, of course. Nobody learns in a boring classroom. If I’m talking, the students aren't learning. I don’t teach, I observe learning. The teacher makes an environment in which learning can occur.

The above four statements are about all I know about what I do. But it appears that I may be faring slightly better than the men and women who know what they’re doing. Less than10% of Puerto Ricans, The New Day reported yesterday, are fluent in English, despite having twelve years of instruction in the subject.

Say what?

Twelve years is a lot of time. We’re talking, I presume, of an hour-long class five times a week, forty weeks a year for twelve years. That’s 2400 hours of instruction. Could I get a group of kids fluent in English in that time?

I think so.

And the crazy thing, as I read the article yesterday, is that the public school system in Puerto Rico isn’t doing the one thing that I would do, were I in any position to do it. It’s so simple—you want to get out of high school? Then sit down and talk to me in English for half an hour.

That kind of stuff was my metric—could a student go to Bentonville? Could he pick up the phone and talk to a supplier in the States? Wal-Mart made a big deal about “coaching by walking around”—it was abbreviated CBWA. Mine was TBWA—the T being “teaching.” And nothing was more exciting than hearing a student stammer his or her way through a business call in English.

Well, I began wondering about all this last week, when I saw a brief clip of a teacher explaining contractions to a group of students in a summer baseball camp. The teacher is at the board, she is explaining that she takes out the letter “o” and replaces it with an apostrophe.

As a teacher / non-teacher, that made no sense to me. I began to wonder—how would I get that concept across? And that, of course, made me remember the time I taught a seven-year old nephew about negative numbers.

We were in the restaurant Macaroni and Grill, which has good food and terrible service. Fortunately, however, they have paper on the table and crayons. So I began drawing the one thing I can draw, and then, to amuse myself, instructing Luis Enrique about negative numbers. Which happened quite naturally—he had asked me what six minus two was.

OK—it was a test; he had thrown down the gauntlet. Luis Enrique to this day is unconvinced of my general intelligence, and he may well be right. But if a kid asks a question—actually, if any student asks a question—you grab it and run.

Nor was it my intention to get into the negative numbers thing, since I am a complete math idiot. But in seconds we were challenging each other—I replied that 6-2 was 4, now what’s 6-3? He got that and asked me 6-4? And so we got to the question—what was 6-7?

Luis Enrique was stumped. Was it zero? Was 6-7 even possible? I said it was, he was unconvinced.

Without thinking, I drew the famous line with the two little arrows in opposing direction and marked and marked from 0 to 6. And left, of course, plenty of space to the left of 0. And then we repeated the whole thing—what was Luis Enrique doing when he subtracted 6-2? He put his little finger on the number 6, and counted two numbers down to 4. We got to 6-6 with no problem. Then the question became: what to do about 6-7? Instinctively, I grabbed the crayon and marked in the vertical slash for -1.

I didn’t, of course, tell him the number. We had a discussion—what should it be called? When I finally did tell him the name of the number, he got quite easily the hang of it. Which meant that we could tweak it—if he could subtract into the negative numbers, could he add out of them? And then could he do multiplication or division?

In the time it took Macaroni and Grill to cook a pizza, I had Luis Enrique dividing -4 by-2; that’s something that I could barely do, I was learning the stuff as fast as I was teaching it.

Granted, I could do it with one kid—could I do it with 30? That’s a tall order. But rereading Malcolm Gladwell’s essay “Most Likely to Succeed” this morning was revealing: there is absolutely no way of knowing who a good teacher will be until they have taught for three or four years. And the only thing that has been shown to make a difference, academically, to a kid? The quality of the teacher. A good teacher can teach a year and a half of material in one year. 

So Gladwell argues that we should forget about requiring master’s degrees or incorporating technology or lowering class size. Anybody with a pulse and a college degree should be able to teach. Then, we track the teachers and isolate the ones who are great, and these we pay A LOT of money. We can the ones that don’t make the grade.

All of this, of course, will be met with howls from teachers, teacher unions, educational authorities, parents (possibly).

But tell me—does anybody have a better idea?