I have a colleague who is an outstanding teacher of Japanese. Her knowledge of her subject is second to none, her classroom management skills are top-notch, she expects the best of both her students and herself, and she teaches with energy, humour and verve. Her students’ results over the past several years have been, in a word, spectacular. And like so many outstanding teachers I have known, she came to the profession relatively late in life (see my comments on such teachers in this post).
She also, not coincidentally, has no truck with fads or gimmickry in education, and has a wealth of tales of gimmickry gone wrong.
A few days ago, she told me a story about one of her own practicums which I thought was worth sharing here. Her master teacher on this particular prac was considerably younger than her, and evidently in thrall to all the current education fashions.
One afternoon, Master Teacher came to my colleague in the staffroom. “Want to come and see the best lesson ever?” she said conspiratorially. My colleague was intrigued, and followed Master Teacher to a Year 9 class in which there were bottles of shaving cream on the desks.
Shaving cream? Read on.
Master Teacher instructed the students to cover their desks with the malodorous cream before smoothing it out to a thickness of a centimetre or so. The students were then asked to use their fingers to draw, in the shaving cream, some Kanji* characters. My colleague was then asked to go around the desks and judge who had drawn the best one. The cream was then smoothed over again, with further squirts as required.
This continued throughout the “lesson”, with a good deal of mess, laughter and chaos, not to mention liberal application of paper towels. Oh, and a few Kanji characters were traced in the foam with questionable expertise by the students.
One can imagine the sort of mood the students were in by the time the bell went. (One thing is for sure, their teacher for the next period could certainly imagine it.) As they filed out, one of the students duly said to Master Teacher, “Miss, that was the best lesson ever!”.
The most tragi-comic aspect of this story, of course, is that Master Teacher evidently considered this the sole criterion of a good lesson.
* Chinese characters used to represent Japanese words; Kanji is one of the three co-existing Japanese writing systems, along with Hiragana and Katakana.
Pocket Quintilian 