Saturday, March 07, 2009

Why We Teach

We were at the end of a lesson on the order of adjectives. The students shouted out some nouns, randomly: microphone, tie, scooter, banana. I threw a dice in the air. It landed on a six. Suddenly everyone was speaking English, their voices raised in excitement whenever they came up with a new word: a stunning, huge, affordable, checked, Chinese, iron microphone.

Next lesson I got them to describe an object in the classroom. Tall, active, middle-aged, white-skinned, wrote one pair. "What's that?" I asked.
"You."

2 comments:

Garry Nixon said...

It's when it becomes really human that it becomes worthwhile, don't you think?

Michael said...

Yeah. Unfortunately, that's an all too rare occurrence.