Found in Translation

So I was teaching probably my favorite class at elementary school. It’s a very small school so my fifth and sixth grade classes are combined. This means we do half of the fifth grade textbook and half of the sixth grade textbook. It’s a little confusing, and with some of my other students it would never work, but these kids are amazing and it hardly seems to faze them. They are always super excited about English and it is just a joy to be in their class.

I have been incredibly lucky. Both years we have used the textbook at that school I have had amazing teachers who have really taken it upon themselves to teach English and not to just be in the class while I am teaching English. It is clear that they are studying English on their own so that they can be confident for the class. They don’t let English intimidate them like some of the other elementary teachers I have worked with. They work hard and show the kids that they can do it too. And that positive attitude from the teacher really makes a difference.

With elementary school we do virtually no reading or writing and focus instead on speaking and listening. The goal is to make the students comfortable studying English and to show them that English is fun so that when they get into junior high they don’t hate it. So we sing lots of songs and play lots of games. The current  lesson (each lesson goes about 4 classes) revolved around the topic of “I like”. In this class we were playing a game where the students asked me if I liked something and then they had to guess if I liked it or not. If they thought I liked it they went to the left side of the room and if they didn’t think I liked it they went to the right side of the room. In the book they suggest you have cards and use those as the sentence topics. But we have a small class of 12 so we decided to just skip the cards and be more creative.

We let the students powwow in the back and decide on something to ask me. Then they all lined up in a straight line in the middle of the room (so cute!) and asked me “Do you like whatever-the-thing-was?” I would then make a thinking face while they all ran to the side of their guess. Then they asked me again and I answered, “Yes, I do” or “No, I don’t” as appropriate. The kids who were correct celebrated and then we started again.

We told the kids that Japanese was okay, but if they knew the English word they used it. Then they asked, "Do you like hiyoko?"  I didn’t know what that was. I looked to the teacher and he tried to think about it and then the kids did something awesome. They started to explain what it was to me with other English words they knew. “Yellow bird!” one girl said making little wing motions. “Small bird. Baby bird!” another said. I was stuck thinking it might be a canary, so I asked if it was a pet. They said no and then they started to draw pictures on the board. Finally it all clicked in my brain that they were talking about chicks and I asked, “Baby chicken?” They were so excited that I understood. And so the game continued.

I was blown away by their positive attitudes. I have many junior high students who would not even think to do those things to try to be understood. And if they did they certainly wouldn’t have used English words to do so. For many of my students once communication hits a roadblock they shut down. They stop and look at the teacher if he is around hoping he will fill in the blanks for them. It’s a perfectly understandable thing; I’ve done the same in Japanese at times. Communicating can be really hard. But these fifth and sixth graders didn’t even hesitate. The whole class was on a mission to bridge the gap in understanding.

After class I realized that if I had perfectly understood their Japanese these kids would have missed out on a wonderful opportunity. Without meaning to, the lesson became not only about a simple grammar point, but about communication and understanding. Theoretically all lessons are about that, but normally it’s me using English (my native language) to try to get them to understand something and they are the ones trying to decipher meaning. This flipped the tables around and they were the ones with the information trying to pass it on. I really feel this was the most valuable part of that lesson. I hope that they can keep that energy and passion as they continue to study English. And I hope that they all had the same warm fuzzy feeling that I did when I finally understood what they were telling me.