Making things complicated or difficult for the sake of making things complicated or difficult, well, that’s just stupid writes NYC Educator.
-I stole this post from NYC Educator and I don’t he would mind.
I’ve heard from various and sundry administrators that there must be an aim for each and every lesson. I do write one, as supervisors are always fiitting in, out, and about, but I’ve never agreed that it was necessary. For one thing, I don’t like to brag, but I’m a high school graduate. The fact is I never saw a single one when I was in school. When I taught college, where such things are not mandated, I never gave a second thought to bothering with one.
I’ve written before that an aim, if I didn’t know what I was doing, would not clear it up for me. And if I do know what I’m doing, reducing it to an aim is unlikely to make it any clearer. I now have a co-teacher, and we have dueling approaches to what constitutes an aim. I’d say that neither of us is wrong, but of course, being me, I tend to favor my approach. I suppose I wouldn’t have been using it otherwise.
I actually have multiple goals when I design a lesson. One goal, to be quite honest, is to trick the students into achieving said goal without having them realize what they’re doing. That sounds a little complicated, but it really isn’t. I’m a language teacher, and if you observe the best language learners, they happen to be babies and small children. They don’t have any aim written on any board. They just soak up language like sponges, and they do it automatically without any prodding whatsoever.
I can’t mirror that exactly, of course, and my students are teenagers. They haven’t got the language learning capacity of small children, but they’re still a lot closer to it than we plodding, miserable adults. I can speak Spanish fluently, having spent a few summers in Mexico, among other things, but I learned almost nothing in high school Making things complicated or difficult for the sake of making things complicated or difficult, well, that’s just stupid writes NYC Educator. | Fred Klonsky: