Humanising Language Teaching
Year 1; Issue 7; November 1999

Opening Up - a letter from a Southern European University.

Dear Mario,

I just feel like dropping you a line to tell you about what for me was one of the most remarkable lessons I've ever given, all the more so as it was a first lesson with this class in an institution noted, in general, for its properness.

As I often do in first lessons, I spoke to this 2nd-year class about positive/negative learning experiences of mine (about when I learnt to drive, just over 2 years ago) and expected to get back comparable experiences from my students, some mundane and shallow, others more vivid and deeper. But never have I experienced the kind of things that came out with this class.

What brought it to the fore was the crying need two members of the class felt to let out what I can only describe as the poison they had within them as a result of their English classes in the 1st year. They felt so deceived on a human level by how their teacher had treated them that it had been fermenting in them over the summer holidays and they simply had to let the venom out. They were fully aware of the awkward position it could put me in, though I can only suppose they sensed that I could cope with it -but such was the need they had that it all came out. I feel I was able to handle this with the right combination of professionalism and sensitivity.

But in a sense, though all this was already quite remarkable and unique within my own teaching experience, what followed was equally noteworthy, for what followed was three students describing the painful time they had had in embarking on one degree course and finding at varying stages that they were doing what was the wrong degree for them and needed to switch to another - something much less usual and more difficult here than it is in England, I was very glad to be able to share with them how I switched to ELT after completing my MMus!

To top this, one student then departed from the learning experience angle as such and simply told us about the hard time he was having in coping with having to live with, watch and care for his grandmother, who, having brought him up because of problems with his parents' divorce, had now had a stroke and was paralysed on one side.

I can only say that this was by far the most powerful and moving lesson I have ever experienced, comparable in some ways with some of the sessions I experienced with Bernard Dufeu and the others at Canterbury. I was very glad to have had not only the Canterbury experience but also several years of group psychoanalysis with a very competent practitioner here - such that I can not only cope with a lesson that should turn so close to a therapist's session but can actually handle it with, as I put it above, the right combination of professionalism and sensitivity.

We had our second lesson yesterday - we did a text from last week's Guardian Weekly that involved questions of belief in creation and/or evolution. I don't think I would have dared get so close to existence-of-God type things so early in a course, in the normal course of events, and as the lesson progressed I even decided firmly against doing it with my other classes. But with this class it went beautifully.

This seems to be a special group. I hope I can nurture it in such a way as to keep it like this.

A hug

D.