The year I graduated from high school, the American political philosopher Allan Bloom told students, “These are the charmed years when you … have the opportunity to survey your alternatives, not merely those current in your time or provided by careers, but those available to you as human beings.”[1] My school years were indeed charmed because of great teachers and greater friendships. Reading Bloom’s best-selling book The Closing of the American Mind as a high school senior drew me to the University of Chicago where Bloom was a professor, and in that exceptional community I came to understand the joy of learning. My purpose is to share that joy with my students.
Learning is not just something people do in their school years: to be successful, we all have to keep learning throughout life. But during these “charmed years” in high school and college, we can indulge in studies we won’t have time for as grown-ups, developing a taste for life-long learning. We can “try on” other identities. We can read Shakespeare and feel what it’s like to be Julius Caesar or read Jane Austen and imagine we’re young ladies in the English aristocracy. Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior can show us what it’s like to be a second-generation Chinese-American woman, and Martin Luther King can help us begin to understand living under extreme racial prejudice. When we are free to explore unconstrained by bare necessity, we can discover valuable things we weren’t even looking for—both about the world and about ourselves. More than 2,000 years ago, Socrates engaged in the same kind of activity with his students: “The treasures that the wise men of old have left us in their writings I open and explore with my friends. If we come upon any good thing, we extract it, and we set much store on being useful to one another.”[2] My gifted English students have the same kind of experience, not only with wise men of old but also with women and men of contemporary times.
Although not every EFL student has the skill level to meet Shakespeare or Jane Austen, all of them can improve their English ability and have fun doing it. Some of them may not see why they should, and some may not believe they can, but I am certain that by making every lesson an exploration, by giving every student the chance to “try on” being an English speaker, all of them will come to understand why they should and how they can.
I have read that many foreign English teachers describe themselves as bridges between two cultures. It’s a nice image, if a bit cliché. But it doesn’t quite represent my concept of teaching.
Instead, I think of myself as a bridgehead. My students are building a bridge from their language on the opposite bank of the river to English on my side. I show them which way to aim their bridge; I give them a solid place to land their bridge; I even supply them with building materials; but they are the ones building it.
Why would students go to all this trouble, building a bridge?
To get at that question, let’s first consider this proposition: “appetite is the best sauce.” When you are really hungry after a long day of work, a plain bowl of rice can seem like the most delicious meal imaginable. Even a cold slice of pizza from two nights ago will taste wonderful if you are hungry enough. This is an incisive observation for which I wish I could take credit, but it’s an ancient idea. The earliest record is Xenophon’s portrait of Socrates, the Memorabilia,[3] and three centuries later Cicero rebuts Epicurus by extending the notion to a number of historical figures in the Tusculan Disputations.[4]
Of course the ancients aren’t just giving us dietary advice. The literal explication of this aspect of human nature is also meant to be a metaphor for education: a student will enthusiastically and easily learn something he or she hungers for—something really necessary. It’s an ancient endorsement of task-based learning, if you will.
I first encountered this appetite image reading Xenophon with four extraordinary classmates and Allan Bloom, who was then my graduate school advisor. He practiced this approach to education, and he explained it to us at the beginning of a course on Rousseau’s Emile like this: college students will spend hundreds of dollars to buy the latest, fanciest compact disc player, and then immediately and obsessively read the operating instructions. They hungrily consume the instructions, digest them—because they know the reward of listening to Mozart—or more likely, the Rolling Stones—depends on understanding how to use the machine.
Back to our bridge-building EFL students: they are undertaking this engineering project because they need to get to the other side of the river—they need to avoid falling in and being swept away by the currents of global competition. This is no day trip across a babbling brook to another culture; this is about survival.
So in addition to being a bridgehead, as a teacher I must understand what they hunger for. These two principles are my lodestar. On the individual student’s level, there are many different kinds and degrees of motivation, some shared and some idiosyncratic, but there are a few imperatives that always follow from the bridgehead and appetite concepts.
Firstly, students are not commodities. Each of them is a unique person endowed with dignity. Each of them has an interior life deserving of respect. This might seem too obvious to rate ink here, but recognizing it is the first step to understanding and developing their hunger for English.
With this in mind, I have seen that every day, in every class, it is possible to reach a student who might think “This class isn’t for me” or “I’m not good enough for this” or “I just can’t understand this” or “English doesn’t matter.” I make an effort to have a connection with at least one such student in every lesson.
These two imperatives lead to another very important rule: the teacher should be careful not to let the target language separate students into “in-the-know” and “in-the-dark” cliques. Learning should be playful whenever possible, and the whole class has to be in on the joke. I will allow myself to look silly if it helps set that tone, because building a community of peers in curiosity, where it is safe to try and fail and try again and improve, is key. Exploring is not a solitary pursuit.
Xenophon judged Socrates to be a happy man, and his students to be becoming better people, because they were learning together, exploring as friends.[5] I bring this ideal to every class I teach.
[1] “September 11, 1987 – Allan Bloom Ubben Lecture at DePauw University.” YouTube, uploaded by DePauw University Video Archive, 7 April 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO6rW7LEMzo.
[2] Xenophon, Memorabilia, I. vi. 14.
[3] I. iii. 5.
[4] V. 34.
[5] Memorabilia, I. vi. 14.