While watching this man, Ken Robinson, he evoked a scene in my mind from Joyce �s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the very opening scene when little Stephen Dedalus makes up his own poem:
O, the wild rose blossoms
On the little green place,
Tralala lala,
Tralala tralaladdy ...
but then is made to apologise because if he didn�t, �the eagles would come and pull out his eyes �. His creativity wasn �t meant to flourish. It had to be nipped in the bud.
The same analogy can be found in my own experience. I tutor one-on-one 4 different pupils of 4 different ages and with 4 different teachers in 4 different state schools and every time they visit me i am appalled over and over again:
- at the quantity of information on the form and use of tenses and other grammar points and at the technical language absolutely inappropriate for a 9, 11, 12 and a 14-year-old;
- at the homework assigned for the students to do at home (grammar exercises, translation, copying a text, etc.)
- at the monotonous and robotic reading of a text aloud
- at the impossibility of the students to act out dialogues (it �s always their first time with me)
I literally start from scratch with them and try to teach them not only the English language, but also proper intonation (singing the language, rather than reading sentences word for word) and body language because the three go hand in hand in hand.
The students are so uncomfortable with their bodies that it takes me quite a few lessons to just make them feel relaxed and to help them get rid of the embarrassment they feel when trying to act out a situation. They say "i can �t", I say "yes, you can", they say "no, i can �t", I say "you �ve never tried it before, how can you be so sure", they go "no, i can �t", i go "you won �t be able to, unless you try it", etc. It takes a LOT of persuading to just make them try but it pays off eventually.
But
then, when they go to school (equipped with the aforementioned tools) to their own teachers, the teachers just "nail them down upon a rock" (W. Blake) and say:
"Stop messin �! What �s come over you? Read/speak as you �re supposed to!" i.e. like an emotionless robot.
... ahhh i could go on and on and on with this ... i get on fire when i talk about this ... and on?? smoke ... lol! just take a look at my avatar!!
