As I type this, I can hear another teacher in the room next to me talking on a microphone. I have my windows and door closed, and yet it’s still really loud. There’s no point in complaining about it because all of the female teachers at my school use a microphone at such volumes, so I’d be seen as the weirdo if I complained. Anyway, I’ve always wondered why a person would need to use a microphone in a room that measures approximately 15m long and 12m wide, if that. Does the human voice alone really not suffice for such a space? I’ve heard it’s because they need to save their voices, but they only teach about three lessons per day. Anyway, this is not so much the real point of this post, but the introduction to it.
There does always seem to be some sort of arms race in noise volume that could probably just be avoided if the teacher told the kids at the back to shut up and didn’t use the microphone solely as a means of keeping other students awake. If you have a presence in a room that is not too big, you can actually be talking quite softly and everyone will pay attention. I suspect that this issue with the microphones is to compensate for the fact that these teachers stand out the front like statues and drone on and don’t require any real active participation from the kids, but they think that if their voice is inescapable in the room, that that alone will forgive all other sins. So long as when the principal walks past, everyone has their eyes open, it’s okay. That seems to be the jist of it. By active participation, I don’t mean that the kids have to be explicitly doing something with their hands and so on. There can be active listening. I mean that they have to be doing more than basically sleeping with their eyes open. There seems to be little feedback mechanism in these classes where the teacher actually knows (or for that matter, cares), right now, if the kids are following what she’s on about.
Recently, I’ve really begun lighting a torch under my students and putting them on the spot if they haven’t told me they don’t understand something. It really freaks them out if I ask them if they understand (which is really the warning for “I’m going to ask you specifically in a second, so tell me now so I don’t embarrass you”) and that it doesn’t end there. I ask them to tell me what I just told them, or to tell me what _____ means in Chinese. I think many honestly expect that they can spend two periods per week, if not the full forty, asleep with their eyes open and no one will call them on it, probably because no one else does call them on it. Then everyone just prescribes make up classes after the fact. Yet doesn’t this miss the point that if the initial instruction were more effective, and had mechanisms built in for formative assessment along the way (which requires more than the kids just pretending that they’re actually conscious in the classroom), that make up classes (and indeed, the sheer volume of study that students do in general in this country) would be completely unnecessary?
As I wrote above, I don’t expect anything here to change, but it’s an insight that I had at the recent workshop with ironlady that many people are just phoning it in, on both sides of the classroom. There were moments where ironlady actually went right up to people and they refused to even look her in the eye, let alone answer. Why were those people even there? Because they had to attend a certain number of professional development hours? It came as a great epiphany that if, when we take the role of students, we professional educators can’t, won’t or don’t take any responsibility for our role in the process, what likelihood is there that we expect our students to do likewise? So, what likelihood is there that they’re actually getting anything from being in our classes?