Teachers What Do You Teach ?

Teachers often just follow the book or the syllabus without stopping and thinking : what’s the use ? And students to follow them blindly and blaming themselves for not achieving high enough results…

I regularly see teachers and students produce a long list of irregular verbs in classes when all the really need is about 50 of the most common of them… same goes for verbs and preps and phrasal verbs… there are thousands and thousands of them… how many does the average –or even literary- native use in his whole life ? So few… and far between…

I have always – and certainly of late more and more- been giving this matter a lot of consideration…

Do you students need to know EVERYTHING in and about a language ? A culture ?

Does anybody know ? Do any teacher know everything ?

Of course not !

Even with the best memory it would be impossible… and then what for ? To what avail ? In aid of what ?

Who needs it ?

What language do people really use ?

We’re not merely talking here about reducing the language level or content but optimising what’s necessary…

A book is merely a book… with an offer of material that does not necessarily need to be taught -and learnt- from cover to cover…

It is for the teacher to decide what’s relevant and or useful… and a teaching job is not to fill –let alone to stuff- the students’ brains…

Let’s make our teaching useful and appropriate…

Very often overdoing it only ends up serving the sole purpose of putting students off… which is at the other end of the teaching spectrum if you ask me…

I ask students to learn things… I ask my students to make notes… and I also ask them not to bother… not to learn… not to write…

Jesse CRAIGNOU