Empathy is not just a noun
It’s funny the lessons you learn when you’re trying to teach…
A couple of weeks ago, one of the tutors in our CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching) course started the class by telling us a story. It was a tale of when she’d first gone to Budapest, where she taught English for a few years, but, as she spoke, she sprinkled the story with four verbs that none of us had ever heard before – like ’sprongling’. At first, most of us thought we were mishearing her, then we began to grin as we realised how cleverly she was making us see what it is like to be a student, even with a good command of English, trying to understand what the teacher is saying. ‘Worse again, being expected to work out what part of speech the unknown word is and how to use it in other sentences!
By the end of the lesson, because she is a good teacher, we were all happily ’sprongling’ around the classroom, and even supplying it in its Past Perfect Continuous form on demand.
But I hadn’t really learned the lesson…
A week later I was preparing to teach grammar. It seemed to me to be quite complex, so I prepared all sorts of charts on the tenses, and drilled the students thoroughly in them. I was amazed to find that they didn’t seem to need the drilling, though, and flew through the exercises I set them. During the ‘post-mortem’ the tutor looked at me and asked: ‘Why did you spend so long on the grammar and so little time on putting it into context?’ I explained honestly that I had felt it was going to be very difficult for them, and that was why I’d spent so much time making sure they understood the tenses.
‘But at this stage those students have spent years in school learning grammar, Noeleen’, she pointed out, gently. ‘They probably understand structure and form better than we do – it’s practice in how to use it they really need.’
I had been looking at the lesson through my eyes, not the eyes of the students who need to know that empathy means ’the power of understanding and imaginatively entering into another person’s feelings’ much more than they need to know that it’s a noun.