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The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in. Would love to hear from you.
I came over
to Japan for my first English language teaching job on the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program. It was 14 years ago.
I was living way out in the countryside and always looked forward to our
big prefectural trainings. At that
time, the program directors gathered up the assistant language teachers
twice a year and plunked us all down in a hot-spring hotel for three days. During those trainings, I first learned
how to use the International Phonetic Alphabet as a tool for pronunciation
work. I learned about how to help students adjust to ambiguity in the language classroom (something I
recently revisited thanks to the spring issue of The English Connection). And oddly (or perhaps not oddly at
all), I met John Fanselow for the
first time. He gave a lecture on
partial information which has stayed more than partially with me for over a
dozen years.
I also
remember one more presentation from the first training I attended. It was only
thirty minutes or so long. It was
given by a very unassuming high school teacher from Japan. He wore a short-sleeved cream colored
button-down shirt with a brown necktie.
He stood at the front of the room and started telling us about his
bullet-train ride into the conference.
He hadn't brought much cash with him, so he bought a cheap Japanese
lunch-box before getting on the train.
He put his luggage and Japanese lunch-box on the rack above his seat,
nodded to the business man sitting next to him, and then promptly took a
nap. When he woke up, he felt a
little hungry, so he pulled down his lunch box. He was pleased to find that, even though it was a cheap
lunch-box, it was filled with all sorts of strips of beef, some fatty tuna, and
quail eggs. He was particularly
happy about the quail eggs as they were his favorite. About half way through eating his lunch-box, the businessman
next to him also woke up from a nap, stood up, and took down his own
lunch-box. But as soon as the
businessman opened the lunch-box up, he seemed to get very angry. The presenter said, "I wasn't sure
why he was angry. I guessed that
maybe he was disappointed in his lunch-box. It wasn't as nice as mine. It was the kind with sausages, not steak. Fried fish, not sushi. I felt very bad for him." Then the presenter started
laughing. A real solid laugh that,
I think, made everyone else in the room want to laugh as well. "In fact, I was feeling bad for
him when he turned to me and said very quietly, 'You are eating my
lunch-box.' That's when I really
started to feel sorry for him. And
a little bit sorry for myself, too.
I tried to give him his lunch-box back, but he said he didn't want
it. Then I tried to give him
money. But I remembered I didn't
have any cash. And he said he
didn't want any money. So I finished
eating the stranger's lunch-box.
It was very embarrassing.
But it was a very delicious lunch-box."
Then the presenter asked us, everyone in the room, to tell each other a story about some kind of
mistake they had made in their life.
There were no rules. We
were just supposed to think of some mistake we'd made and share it with the
people around us. Most of us had only been in Japan for a few months at that
time, so we all had a lot of mistake stories to tell. I remember I shared my story of using dish washing liquid as
shampoo for a few weeks before a Japanese friend spotted what was going on and
gently suggested I head to the drug store. Everyone told stories.
And that unassuming Japanese high school teacher in his brown necktie
walked around and listened to our stories and laughed with us. Then, when we were almost out of time,
he said, "this is how I start my first class of the day. I have one or two students tell a
mistake story. It makes people
laugh. It also makes making
mistakes seem very normal. If you
have time, try and have your students tell some mistake stories."
* * *
Today, one
of the first teachers I met on-line, started bogging. Her name is Sophia Khan. I could write a lot of words about the
whole lot of things Sophia has done for me over the past year. But instead I will just mention
one. Sophia helped me understand
the different meanings of production when I suddenly got very confused about
basic ELT terminology. She did it in a way that left me
feeling relieved and not even the slightest bit foolish. Her first blog post is a musing on
mistakes, a celebration of failure.
In it she writes:
we know just from our instinct as teachers
that it’s ok for students to make mistakes, that making mistakes
is good because it means they are pushing their boundaries, and because realizing
something has gone wrong can help fix things. So it’s ironic really that
teachers don’t extend nearly so much compassion and understanding towards
themselves, when they make mistakes in the classroom.
When I
first read this, I found myself thinking, "Because it's different for
teachers!" For a moment,
maybe a heart-beat longer than a moment, I honestly saw my mistakes untying my
students from their ideal futures, leaving them unmoored and drifting off
course. But it was only for a moment.
I have more faith in my students than that. Just as I have slightly less faith in my influence as a
teacher. I guess it comes down to
a matter of perspective. When our students
see a mistake looming up ahead of them--its vague outline of shame as large as
their imagination can make it--it's not surprising that they might veer away
from it. Veer away from speaking
at all. And when teachers see
their own mistakes as pushing learners into a bleaker future, it's probably
difficult to see those mistakes as something less than a kind of fundamental
transgression against what it means to be a teacher. But both of these ways of framing a mistake is based on the
Nth conditional, the conditional of fear.
This year I
have made a handful of what I consider to be serious mistakes. I pushed a student to do more than they
could to prepare for a speech contest.
I compared a student to another learner in the room during a class. I repeatedly told a student who was
trying his best, but starting from a point far behind the other members of his
class, that he was doing a great job.
But "doing a great job" had nothing to do with what he was
truly worrying about. In all of
these cases, I felt shame. In all
of these cases, the first thing I did when I recognized my mistake as a mistake
was go to the student and apologize.
I said what I thought I had done wrong and said how I would try and do
better. One student laughed and
said she didn't think it was a big deal.
One student continued to avoid me for a few more weeks. And one student said he didn't care, as
long as I would give him some sample university entrance exams,
immediately.
* * *
There are
all kinds of mistakes. There are
as many flavors of failure as there are shades of success. Taking time to laugh about our mistakes
can be a great way to create a space in which mistakes don't loom so
large. Likewise, celebrating our failures as a chance for growth also seems like an important way to help shift the Nth
conditional of fear to a more concrete present of hope. But just as we still debate about how
to correct our students' errors, there's no one ideal way to manage our own
slips as educators. If you can
laugh, laugh. If you can treat
yourself with compassion and reflect and learn, by all means, reflect and
learn. But if once in a while a
failure leaves you feeling buried in sadness, if all you can get out of the
experience, as least for a little while, is tears, then by all means, cry away. And if you need an extra box of tissues,
just give me a ring. I usually
have one handy.
(note: I
have searched and searched for the name of the presenter who shared his ideas
about mistake stories, but have had no luck so far in finding him. If anyone who reads this post has some
idea where this idea came from, or who the mystery teacher in the brown necktie
might be, please let me know.)
