I have been thinking a great deal lately about language
and its work as the main medium of teaching. The Japanese have a saying: “Water
and conversation are free.” This was an obstacle in my previous career in
consulting, as there is a predisposition in Japanese business culture not to
pay for “conversation,” which is often what our services boiled down to. My job
was to make the conversation interesting and valuable enough to pay for.
In teaching, it’s even harder than that. Language seems so
ephemeral- do students hear the words we say to them? Do they understand? Out
of 25 kids, how many are hearing me at any given moment? Did that fire truck
mean I should start over? We don’t have the luxury of meandering conversations:
if nothing else, we’re limited by the attention span of the least attentive
child. We have to write koans and haiku. Every word has to be packed with
meaning, we have to know how to say the most in the least amount of words and
time, and the lesson has to be more than the sum of its parts: its substance
has to stay in their minds somehow. Right now, I waste words, and time, casting
around for just the right lever to pull, to tip their minds in the direction I
want them to go. I feel like I don’t know where we’re all going—mainly because
I’ve never been there before. I am not reliably leading them, yet, where I want
them to go. If they do wind up there, it feels like a happy accident, and I
need to also find a way to know if it happened at all. It’s all still water and
conversation.
。。。水とお喋り
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