A good teacher knows that working with children is really a blessing. As exhausting as teaching can be, it’s a profession which allows for creative freedom, and children can give you the opportunity to think in a different way. Through children, we can learn to free up our innate synaesthetic leanings so that blue is not only calm but also associated with Tuesday, The Present Perfect, and Mum’s blouse. These associations become lost as we get older and are forced to order and appraise the world in a more ‘organised’ and ‘rational’ way.
Working with 11 year old Amy was a huge challenge – a Ukrainian child who had very little English, but spoke fluent Italian, Ukrainian and Russian, in addition to a smattering of several other languages – she would code switch at any opportunity, as if her brain was unable to contain and differentiate between all the linguistic information it possessed. After one particularly frustrating morning, Amy sat announced “I don’t like…” followed by a long list of her grievances with countries, family members and the world in general. I began to think that her abrupt refusal to work and extreme mood swings were more than mere tiredness or an inability to understand the material we were covering. It was at this point that I was told that Amy had undergone many operations to her brain as a child, which had initially rendered her unable to talk or even to move, after a tumour was removed.
This helped me to understand why she had such difficulty interacting with the other children, why she would try to lock the classroom door during the lesson to prevent other people coming into the room, why she refused to go downstairs during the break and wanted only to play noughts and crosses on the board every day. After about four days together, things started to work better as I began to understand Amy. As I hit upon strategies to keep Amy focused on her work, her moods became less erratic and she responded extremely well to exercises involving number patterns or pictorial stimuli. Providing a generative situation with a cartoon coupled with a tactile object (a radio shaped like Homer Simpson’s head) proved very effective for the introduction of new grammatical structures, and I began to find her receptive and, in fact, quite a pleasure to teach. She was certainly unlike any other child I’d taught. Amy didn’t want just to play the games; she wanted to design the games. Although she couldn’t speak Korean, in her mind she was quite fluent. The soft toy cat on her chair was as real as any animal, and the references she made to her favourite things (Obama, Berlusconi, foxes, huskies) during exercises or games, or when I praised her for grasping new vocabulary or a new grammar point, were an expression of her happiness and satisfaction. Viewing groups of things she likes as connected, ‘odd one out’ questions can involve only preference. A very interesting way of looking at the world!
This little girl certainly taught me the value of play in the classroom, and in life in general. She also reminded me of the importance of listening and responding to the way students think and feel as opposed to simply teaching by the book. The artist, the architect, Amy is constantly recreating the world and she may well create something quite amazing when she grows up. I’m thankful to have had the opportunity to teach her, and will work hard not to forget the lessons that she taught me.
Photo: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/
Anyone who knows me would tell you that I’m a food lover. I will hardly ever say no to something I can eat, and I think that might be why I love Joburg so much.
