Four truths about teaching and learning

‘Can you name four things the teaching profession has taught you?’ asked a young teacher in a freewheeling session I had with a small group of school teachers on an orientation programme last week. ‘Why only four?’ I asked perplexed. She flashed a coy grin in response. Just like that, it seemed to suggest; you could talk about two, three or even five. But I decided to stick to four, and spoke about four of the insights I had derived in my three-and-a-half decades of chalkface experience. Considering the lightness of mood, however, I wanted to speak half in earnest half in jest. As it turned out, the earnestness far outweighed the jest.

Teaching doesn’t necessarily lead to learning

The first insight is: Teaching doesn’t necessarily lead to learning. What I mean is that what our students learn during our classroom teaching is not in proportion to what we teach. In other words, intake, as they say, is not equivalent to input. Teachers are often quick to protest that they are not to blame; a host of factors, they point out, are conspiring against learning. Yes – and no! There are, of course, constraints in any environment, but apportioning the blame is not going to help. Instead, we, teachers, must look for ways of maximizing the intake, which in turn will lead to the maximization of learning.

How can we maximize the intake? Perhaps by increasing the attention span of the learner. This we can achieve by motivating the learner to listen, by making our classroom communication appealing, by introducing variety in the learning experiences we offer, by introducing interactions of different kinds (e.g. learner-text interaction, teacher-learner interaction, learner-learner interaction), and by providing for experiential learning – by relating textbook knowledge to real-life experience. If we can attempt to go further and inspire the learner to go beyond the scope of the lesson, the intake may even exceed the input.

Telling is not teaching

The second insight is: Telling is not teaching. (I have borrowed this catchphrase from Bright and McGregor whose 1970 book, Teaching English as a Second Language, which I read in 1982, begins with this statement.) In other words, teaching doesn’t mean merely providing information or, worse still, explicating the textbook. It calls for methods and techniques. But if the teacher merely – mechanically – adopts expert-developed methods and techniques, they are not likely to work. This may even lead to the teacher complaining that the methods and techniques have failed in his classroom – I have heard this complaint often enough on teacher education programmes. The problem is that most teachers merely adopt expert-developed methods and techniques and find them failing at the chalkface. If, instead, the teacher adapts them, according to his sense of plausibility – according to his perception or judgement of what can work with his learners and what cannot – he will find the methods and techniques working effectively. (“Teachers’ sense of plausibility” is a beautiful idea the well-known ELT scholar, Dr N S Prabhu, whom I regard as a guru, discusses in an insightful article, ‘There Is No Best Method – Why?,’ in TESOL Quarterely, Vol. 24, Number 2, Summer 1990)

To exercise one’s sense of plausibility, one should be capable of some reflection. It may be relevant to briefly mention here what Donald Schon, a philosopher in the American Deweyian pragmatist tradition, has said about reflection in professional practice. In his book, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, he talks about two kinds of reflection: reflection in action and reflection on action. Reflection in action refers to the reflection the teacher makes during the course of his teaching, while reflection on action is post-teaching reflection. Teachers do practise the former, which Schon describes as “knowing-in-action.” But they need to go beyond it and reflect on it in order to derive experiential knowledge from the process. More on this subject in a different post.

Teaching has little value for learning unless it provides for learner self-investment

The third insight is: Teaching has little value for learning unless it provides for learner self-investment. When we teach, we normally do so at the level of our learners. And when we test them, we do so at their levels. Do you know what happens as a result? There is no pressure on the learners to rise above their levels. If, on the other hand, the learning experiences we offer in the classroom are neither at the level of the learners, nor far beyond their level (which might frustrate them), but a little above their level, and the teaching challenges and motivates them to bridge this gap, the learners will struggle to bridge the gap. The learning that takes place as a result of this struggle is real learning. And if the struggle calls for the learner making investments of different kinds – intellectual, emotional and ethical – the learning will be even more valuable.

Teaching is performing, and the teacher is a performer

The fourth truth is: Teaching is performing, and the teacher is a performer. When someone gives a performance, what does she actually do? She makes the audience enjoy what she is presenting. In other words, she entertains the audience. The teacher is also an entertainer – both in the superficial sense of engaging his learners, and in a deeper sense. In a deeper sense, a gifted teacher is capable of three kinds of entertainment: he can entertain a new idea, he can entertain other people, and he can entertain himself.

Entertaining a new idea is not so easy; it is often as painful as delivering a baby. ‘The soft-minded man always fears change,’ said Martin Luther King Jr. ‘He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.’ Teachers, in particular, resent new ideas – I’ve noticed this often enough. That is one of the reasons why the education system remains so hopelessly conservative. Teachers by and large don’t look for new ideas, and even when a new idea is imposed from above, they routinize it in their resentment, with the result that the idea gets absorbed in the “tradition” – the name we often use to refer to our bad practices. What happens as a result? Nothing happens! The past continues. The world is changing rapidly and dynamically, but the education system is unable to keep pace with it: it clings to the past, shutting its eyes to the present. If a large number of teachers entertain new ideas and visions, if they are prepared to innovate and experiment in the light of those new ideas and visions, then the system will become dynamic: it will be ever-changing, ever-expanding and vibrant.

A teacher must also know how to entertain himself as a professional. This will help him enjoy the profession. For such a teacher, teaching itself is a chief source of entertainment – so much so that when he comes out of the classroom, he comes out not weary and tired but absolutely relaxed because teaching is a satisfying, refreshing and entertaining experience for him.

I concluded my answer with a catchphrase and stole a glance at the young woman. She was stifling yet another yawn.

Thoughts occasioned by ‘What’s your good name, please?’

The major part of this post was originally written for Quora, the question-and-answer website, to answer a follower’s question whether ‘What’s your good name?’ was acceptable. When I was about to paste here a link to the answer on quora.com (https://www.quora.com/Is-it-correct-to-use-What-is-your-good-name), it struck me that I could add some more perspectives. Hence this blog post.

What didn’t strike me at the time of writing an answer to the Quora question is the fact that “What is your good name, please?’ is the title of a memorable poem written by R Parthasarathy in 1975 – a poem in which Parthasarathy caricatured the syntactical oddities in what can be called bazaar English in India. This reminds me of two other Indian poets who used, in some of their poems, a pidginized variety of English, widely prevalent among not-so-well-educated people in India, in order to produce a humorous effect: Nizzim Ezekiel (e.g. ‘A Very Indian Poem in Indian English,’ ‘Goodbye Party to Miss Pushpa T. S.’ and ‘Soap’), and Joseph Furtado (e.g. ‘Fortune-Teller’ and ‘Lakshmi’), who had mocked, in some of his poems, the English of middle-class Indians long before Parthasarathy and Ezekiel did. But, in my opinion, “good name” in ‘What’s your good name, please?’ doesn’t deserve a pejorative treatment that, perhaps, the pidgin forms parodied in the “bazaar English” poems do. The world has come a long way since Parthasarathy ridiculed the expression in his poem four decades ago.

Though I have often come across ‘What’s your good name?’ in India, especially in the northern part of India, including West Bengal, I have never used it myself. However, “good name,” which is actually a translation of the Hindi “shub naam” makes perfect sense in the Indian cultural context. If an Indian wants to sound deferential while talking to another Indian, I don’t see any reason why he shouldn’t ask, ‘What’s your good name?’

Indians have little difficulty in adopting western tendencies in their own English, whether they make sense in the Indian cultural context or not. A good example is ‘I’m good’ in response to ‘How are you?’ A typical Indian understands “good” in the sense of the opposite of bad or, to be more precise, morally good in the context of human beings: ‘He’s a good boy.’ But the Americanism, ‘I’m good,’ in the sense of ‘I’m fine’ (which was the typical response till about the 1990s), is now firmly established in Indian English. As a matter of fact, you may not sound trendy if you say ‘I’m fine’! ‘I’m good’ is a la mode.

The disapproval of “good name” in the country of its origin itself has much to do with how English is taught as a second language in India. Grammar and vocabulary teaching in the English classroom in India is almost always guided by British or American norms. English teachers must graduate from the stage of passing an absolute veto on expressions which make perfect sense in the Indian cultural context (though they may not in English-as-a-lingua-franca contexts) to one involving teaching both forms or different forms to help their students communicate in an intelligent way in different English-speaking contexts. This calls for some cultural sensitivity on the part of English teachers.

Some of us, Indians, may frown upon “good name,” but we do sound deferential in various other ways. Why only Indians? Being deferential is an essential part of successful communication in any language, whether one uses a particular tone of voice or words to sound courteous or respectful or submissive. Let me share with you a real-life incident which will help you understand this better.

Sometime ago, a friend of mine, a young woman whose staple intellectual diet is Hollywood movies and American television chat shows, committed a faux pas. She was walking out of an auditorium in Vijayawada, my home town, after watching a cultural programme when she saw in front of her Krishna Rao (name changed), a retired professor of English, whom she had met a couple of times earlier. ‘How are you, Mr Krishna Rao?’ she greeted him in a chirpy voice. The rising intonation fell flat on Krishna Rao's face: what greeted her back was an admonishing look from the professor. ‘I only greeted him. Why did he give me a dirty look?’ the young woman asked me when she met me later.

Krishna Rao answered the question when I met him a few days later: ‘I am used to being addressed in a respectful way – as 'mastraru' or 'sir' or 'Krishna Rao garu'. (Both mastraru and garu are deferential forms of address in Telugu, a South Indian language. Incidentally, I have always addressed Krishna Rao as “mastraru”). But the lady mistered me: she called me 'Mr Krishna Rao'! I couldn't stand that familiarity.’ I would have shocked him if I had told him that the young woman, who is ten years my junior, and I are on first-name terms.

But Krishna Rao is far from being an exception. As likely as not, any other Indian of Krishna Rao's stature would have taken offence at being addressed as "Mr--". We may have taken easily to western social mores, but the old Indian practice of addressing an elderly or a respected person formally (sometimes even in the third person) is too deep-rooted to give in to western modes.

A young friend of mine carries this a bit too far: he addresses me as "your goodself"! Here is a sample: ‘If your goodself comes here at 10 o'clock…’ I won't be surprised even if he says, ‘Your goodself says in your goodself's blog post today …’ This deferential form of the second person is in effect the third person and springs from the belief not only in Indian culture but several others that the singular form ("you"), when used with reference to a respected person, is over-familiar and therefore vulgar. I am so used to this overcourteous form that I wonder whether I will take kindly to the use of the unadorned "you" with reference to me by the same person.

Getting back to ‘What’s your good name?’ Jhumpa Lahiri, an Indian writer in English, has captured this practice so beautifully in her novel, The Namesake. In an interview to John Glassie, portions of which were published in The New York Times Magazine, September 2003 (�Questions For Jhumpa Lahiri� -), she uses the term “good name” several times and even explains that one’s “good name,” as against one’s pet name, is one’s proper name.