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Short Article 06

The Heart of the Matter: The Way

Lou Spaventa

Lou Spaventa teaches and trains in California, the USA. He is a regular contributor to HLT. E-mail:spaventa@cox.net

“At age 87, I am wary of the word the. Because most of us go through life, ‘Oh, that’s the way to make that recipe. That is the revolution, that is the Savior, the this, the that.’ We fool ourselves.” Pete Seeger 

Way back when, when I started teaching English as a Second Language, I was required to learn the right way to teach my future students. It was the tail end of 1968, and just out of college, I was headed to the Republic of Korea as a university United States Peace Corps Volunteer. However, before I could go, I had to pass a selection process. My character had to be vetted, and my potential as an ESL instructor had to be evaluated. At the time, we were in fear of being “deselected” as volunteers and thrown back into the boiling pot of American society, from which many of the tastier, younger male morsels were being sent to be consumed by war in Vietnam. I was instructed in the dialogue, the substitution drill (single and multiple slot), the transformation drill, and the minimal pair drill. I somehow stumbled my way to acceptable future teacher status and avoided being deselected (What a great piece of bureaucratese that word is!). I then flew, with a group of similarly clueless Peace Corps Volunteers who had learned the right method for teaching, from our balmy Hawaiian training site to the frigid Korean winter, and went through another few weeks of training in Seoul, the capital city. In case the first application of the right method didn’t take, the second was bound to have some effect. 

My first class at Yeungnam University in Taegu was language lab, in which I sat isolated by a glass divider from about 50 Korean university students. My job was to monitor their mindless repetition of English. The language in dialogue and drill form was being played to each of them in their booths via a reel to reel recorder. I couldn’t use the method I had learned in training. I didn’t like my work very much. Luckily, I was able to transfer to the island province of Cheju, where I found a place at Cheju National University. There my first class was with a small group of senior English majors and my first task was to teach them Moby Dick. Unfortunately, not only could they not read the novel, but they weren’t even able to tell me in English that they couldn’t read it. I truly wish I had taped my teaching in those classes of senior English majors because I think it must have been the single worst exhibition of teaching by a novice teacher in the history of Korean-American educational exchange. Be that as it may, I became very fond of all of my students, more so when my Korean got good enough to hold conversations with them rather than just exchange pleasantries. Yet again, however, I was stymied in my attempt to use the method. I spent two rather adventurous years in Korea as if I were teaching English, when in reality, I was learning Korean language and music, and traveling every chance I got to see other volunteers in winter and spring, to discover beaches in summer,  
 and to climb mountains in fall. I even got more training in the method at some regional volunteer teacher conferences, but alas, I can’t say I used it very much.

When it came time to decide what to do next with my life, I perversely chose to get an MATESOL at the School for International Training (SIT). There I was fortunate enough to set my own course of study. I learned about then current methods: the Silent Way, the TG (transformational-generative) way to teach grammar, the total physical response method, the audio-visual method, the audio-lingual method as practiced by John Rasias of Princeton University, and Community Language Learning (What happened to its the?).  I learned about the critical period hypothesis, and about the psycholinguistic approach to language instruction. 

I soon became a devotee of the Silent Way, used it every chance I got. I studied with the inventor of the method, Caleb Gattegno, at Educational Solutions in New York City. The highlight of my studies was the day that I demonstrated to Gattegno my complete memorization of his Fidel (color-coded pronunciation) charts, and won his approval. I became a purist and Silent Way referee. “This is the way you do it. You don’t do it that way,”  I would think when I taught and when I observed others. I was a Silent Way believer when I went to student teach in Veracruz, Mexico. I used the Silent Way with young children in an orphanage, with adult students at a private language school, with secondary students at a colegio, with waiters at a union hall. I even rejoined the Peace Corps in Korea and spread my knowledge of Silent Way to volunteers there. I met a fellow alumnus of SIT who was similarly devoted to the Silent Way. How wonderful!

So. I spread the seed of the way, my own little journey of tao. The story gets longer and extends to Yugoslavia Fulbright teacher conferences, to England at Pilgrims Language Courses, and then goes on. Somehow, somewhere, I lost the way. Perhaps it was when I decided to return to the Foreign Service and stopped teaching for a couple of years. Or maybe it was when I went to do a PhD in education theory and policy. But the story takes a turn in a different direction.

After 3 years of teaching part-time at universities and community colleges in California in the mid-eighties, I signed on with a small Quaker college in North Carolina, Guilford College, to shape the international education and service piece for the new education major the school was proposing. I learned about the Quaker way of doing things, which has much to recommend it, including allowing an individual to follow the light of his or her own conscience. In working with my colleagues and students, I found that there was not a fixation on the right way to teach, but there was definitely an aversion to the way the public schools were teaching children. So, at Guilford College, it was a matter of subtracting ways of teaching from the possibilities in current practice, and finding out what was left. I was stretched academically at Guilford because, unlike my colleagues, I had little experience teaching in U.S. public schools, and we were preparing our students to do just that. I was less secure that there was going to be any right way to do things, let alone the right way. 

Presently, I am back in California and teaching English at a community college where my students are as varied as the state’s population: international students with good educational experiences in their home countries, U.S. students often with miserable high school learning experiences – not in command of their own language, immigrant Mexican and Central American students who have perhaps 2 or 3 years of formal education and are struggling to make lives for themselves in California. There are so many different cultural and linguistic histories among my students: Ukranians, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Swedes, Nepalese, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards…the list goes on. What they have in common are English reading and writing skills below college standard. My job is to bring them up to standard so that they can study. Does anyone dare to say there is the right way to do this with such different students? 

It turns out that the answer is yes, not a really big yes, but a yes just the same. There is a group of my colleagues who went through the same graduate experience in learning to teach reading. They are fairly secure in their methodology. They tend to share together, and those not part of that graduate experience are not part of that inner circle of sharing. I am not part of that group, and sometimes the things I do in class would likely go against their ideas of best practice. In fact, one of the ongoing issues in our department is the feeling on the part of some instructors that we need to establish best practice documents to guide others. This would seem to follow if one thought that there is the right and wrong way to go about teaching our students. 

From where I sit now, I don’t think there is such a dichotomy, and I don’t think the question is worth entertaining. As Earl Stevick pointed out years ago in “The Riddle of the Right Method,” two methods with diametrically opposed theoretical bases and practices can both work. It all depends upon how the instructor goes about the business of teaching and enabling students to feel comfortable enough to learn. In the end, the teacher, I believe, teaches himself to his class. If that self includes hope, curiosity, openness, warmth, and tolerance, there may be a chance for success of the deepest kind, the success of meeting the fullness of each person in the act of learning. In the end, I leave it to Gary Snyder to speak for me. 

 “What Have I Learned”
Gary Snyder

What have I learned but
the proper use for several tools?

The moments
between hard pleasant tasks

To sit silent, drink wine,
and think my own kind
of dry crusty thoughts.

-	the first Calochortus flowers
and in all the land,
it’s spring.
I point them out: 
the yellow petals, the golden hairs,
to Gen.

Seeing in silence:
never the same twice,
but when you get it right,
you pass it on.

Seeger, Pete	(2007) “Seeger Session,” interview by Jeffrey Pepper 				Rogers, in Acoustic Guitar, pp. 43-53.
Snyder, Gary	(2003) “What I Have Learned,” in Teaching With Fire, 				p.104 Jossey-Bass, San Francisco. 
Stevick, Earl	(1974) “The Riddle of the Right Method,” English 					Teaching Forum