As I read J. Abner Peddiwell's The Saber-tooth Curriculum, I found myself frequently nodding my head in agreement. My poor (non-teacher) husband had to sit through lengthy passages that I just "had to read out loud" to him. So much of Peddiwell's criticism hit home.
Unfortunately, despite its original publishing date of 1939, so many of Peddiwell's thoughts and allegories still ring true today. A poorly-designed educational system not only opens a society up to attack, as seen by the warrior tribe in the text, but also leads to a steep economic/social decline of the society itself. By the end of the story, there is a deep divide between the "haves" (greedy fish chiefs/corrupt Wall Street execs?) and the "have nots" (paleo-youth playing with rocks to pass the time/"educated" Millennials drowning in student loans who can't find jobs in their fields of study?).
All of these problems stem from the main theme that the instruction students receive is completely inauthentic. Nothing that these children and young adults are expected to learn has any real-life connection to what their current community needs. Although the original system developed by New-Fist was authentic to the community of his time, as the needs of that community evolved the lessons taught to their youth remained the same.
Peddiwell's dystopic description of general education then/today also applies to modern foreign language instruction. There is a huge paradigm shift going on right now (well, attempting to, anyway) about how we teach our students language and what language acquisition actually looks like. The "old ways" of grammar-translation and audio-lingual methodologies (think workbook pages with grammar exercises and "dialogs" that have to be memorized) are still deeply rooted in language classrooms and curricula all over the country.
"New wave" instructors using comprehensible input (CI) and communicative language teaching (CLT) methods are constantly fighting against these traditional ideologies. We are sometimes successful, but often we run into a lot of the same resistance found in Sabertooth (such as the progressive teacher who started her “Real-Creek School of Fish-Grabbing”). Many curricula still insist on explicit grammar instruction and inauthentic "communication" exercises as means of assessment.
Language acquisition experts such as Stephen Krashen and Bill VanPatten are working to challenge these traditional approaches and change instruction to be more authentic, communicative, and reflective of natural acquisition. I have found great success following their advice, using CI, TPRS, MovieTalk, Communicative Tasks and other strategies in my lessons. The links below describe their theories and research to those who are curious:
http://www.educ.ualberta.ca/staff/olenka.bilash/best%20of%20bilash/krashen.html
http://learninglanguages.celta.msu.edu/sla-vanpatten/
Laura I love your comparisons to our world, the wall street excecs and millennials, it's so true. I loved that Saber-Tooth rang so true for education today. It's hard to fine ways to improve Language learning when every corner we turn there are more practice activities, conversations that do not apply to our students today. I looked at both your sites as well as the podcast you linked to me earlier and I am eager to learn more. Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteSo glad! Let me know if you ever want to meet up face to face to discuss world language-specific design! I'm so happy that you are in our cohort!
DeleteHi Laura! I absolutely loved how you compared Millennials to the Paleo youth playing with rocks to pass time. It's sad that highly-educated recent college graduates struggle to find work while being overwhelmed with student loan debt. I, too, liked how Saber-Tooth still is so relevant today even though it was written in 1939.
ReplyDeleteI took three years of Spanish in high school (mind you, that was a long time ago!). We were taught exactly how you described-direct grammar instruction and inauthentic communication exercises. I can say that I do not remember hardly anything (I can still conjugate verbs, though!). When I went to Puerto Rico after high school, I thought about how difficult it was to understand the language, even after learning it in school.
So many of my students' parents tell me the same thing! I've been working to break out of the shell...it's a long process but I'm getting much better at it!
DeleteI really liked your connections to the social and economic problems associated with an education system that's not properly preparing students for the world we live in. I think we all were captured by the more terminal consequences for the tribe but even before that the tribe members were suffering.
ReplyDeleteAlso as someone who's currently trying to learn 2 extremely different languages (Chinese and American Sign Language) I found your perspective as a language teacher very insightful. I also have, like Kelly, negative personal experiences with the traditional style of language learning from the one year of Spanish I took in high school. I ended up switching to Latin which, which you'd think would be more difficult to make authentic and practical, actually turned out to be taught in a much better manner! And I ended up loving that style so much I took Latin throughout college.
One of the best teachers in our building is our Latin teacher. He is amazing, and even works in ways to incorporate spoken Latin so the kids can use it creatively.
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