Contracting Learning

There came a time about halfway through the week when the students stopped talking over each other. It was gradual and seemed to be connected to this week’s lesson plan. We have been learning contractions, or shortcuts. However, as seems remarkably culturally apropos, shortcuts lead to even more work. From the beginning, some students have been wanting to say “I don’t” or “I didn’t”. They do not, though, know that it means “I do not” and “I did not.” So we had to backtrack and cover the basics of tense and principle parts of verbs. And once it was clear and we had done several in class exercises, I wrote the contractions on the board. Suddenly, these students who had been able to say the word “don’t” since the beginning of the year had lost that ability. To read is so far from to pronounce, much less to write. This is why it is particularly important to emphasize the length of time it takes to traverse a shortcut. For no matter how many paving stones are laid before hand, the horse will find either a path it prefers or step into the first small crack in the path and throw a shoe.

What then happened on Thursday? I have no idea. I was standing before the class asking about principle parts of verbs when all at once the answers flowing to me were not half-hearted murmurings of error, but clearly spoken “Eat. Ate. Eaten” “Drink. Drank. Drunk.” And then we were making sentences “I drink water” “I do not drink Fanta.” The diction was superb and I began doing my bounce for joy to the delight of all. The bounce for joy is where I start on one side of the room and bounce backward while singing their praises and fist-pumping like hasn’t happened since Marky-Mark little dreamed of becoming “The Fighter.” And once I showed the pattern for contracting “cut out the ‘O’ of “not” and close the gap, there we were contracting all the live long day. “I don’t drink milk.” “He doesn’t eat chicken with pineapple.” “Doesn’t” takes some getting used to as the pronunciation is very difficult and “couldn’t” is basically impossible. But even my rowdiest class was on top of the English learning game on Thursday. They sat with ears perched forward and eyes darting faster that the woodpecker and pencils jabbing at notebooks with greater eagerness than even the woodchuck who can chuck wood. How much fun it is to teach students who are desperate to learn and desperately attentive! I reviewed vocabulary: they all knew that beans are les haricots. They remembered that chicken was le poulet. And of course they had no problem with vegetables and les légumes. I decided to reward them in the dictation the next day.

For my fifth levels, I just kept it simple with a slight review of adjectives and told the story of Cinderella and all the food she “couldn’t” and “didn’t” eat, but for my fourth levels (remember these are the most advanced) I decided that a little cross-linguistic playfulness was in order and gave them the following dictation:

“The healthy” WOOOOH. Too much. They understood none of those syllables. What had happened? Where were my students of yesteryear? Like the most nostalgic of the Old English Ubi Sunt poets, I stood beneath my rood and dreamed. (there’s a recondite allusion). Or I would have (would’ve) except that students were suddenly jumping out of their chairs and pointing fingers declaring one of my quietest boys to be listening to music on his cell-phone. Well, even if he was, it was far from disturbing anyone, and as he seems to me most awfully innocent, I frankly did not care. After all, he performs well, asks questions and does his work. But these students are at an age where they want to put others in trouble. I solve this, cruelly, by scolding the students who are disturbing the class with their accusations. Well, it is time to start dictation again, after shoring up the pit in my stomach that formed from the erosion of worry on account of thinking that I was going to lose control of the class.

“The healt” I didn’t get any farther. No one was even trying to write down the sounds they heard. Finally I just wrote “The healthy” on the board so we could move on. So much for iron-clad will with regards to dictation. I then slowed from reading slowly in phrases to reading word by word.

“The healthy student had drunk her juice. She had eaten her beans. She didn’t eat chocolate, and she couldn’t drink milk. She began to break the tables. She had eaten fish and was sick because fish is poison.”

Do you see the awesome linguistic punning? I worked so hard. So very hard on it.

Well, fish is poison, in a way because the French for fish is le poisson! At least I was entertained. They should have enjoyed it even more because the word for poison is the same in both languages.

I'm getting pretty comfortable in the teaching but find there is so little time to hear each students speak and have a small grammar lesson and review vocab. All in an hour. But it is fun.