You can have an off -night with the course book and manage
not to take it too personally. It was a
boring text anyway; you shrug to yourself, as you think ahead to the next
lesson. However, a home made lesson which falls flat on its face brings with it
a deeper sense of failure. There’s always an element of personal risk with such
lessons, and I felt this strongly tonight as I hurried towards Adult Learning
with the afore mentioned Faster than
Witches and a folder of poems I didn’t understand in Polish, Slovenian,
Spanish and Hungarian.
The lesson was not tightly planned. However, as the class
filed into the room I had the strong sense that if I mentioned my plans for the
evening ahead (poetry writing and translating) the whole group would run away screaming.
I told them the thought I’d just had, and
explained that we would take this lesson bit by bit. So we started off
discussing train journeys we’d been on, and what we remembered seeing from the
window. I then asked them to tell me
what sound a train makes, and we began to choo-choo in chorus, which paved the
way for the initial reading of From a Railway Carriage. This poem’s rhythm
evokes a train perfectly, and the class were quick to see this.
The learners were each given a couple of lines from the poem,
and they repeated these lines quietly to themselves a few times, marking the
word stress and checking pronunciation with me. Then we recited the poem around
the class and the rhythm and stress were, on the whole, really accurate.
Later on in the lesson I distributed the foreign language poems,
hoping that there wasn’t anything too dodgy in amongst my selection. The
learners took a few minutes to read the poems and I asked for their response. A
few of them found a poem they really liked, while others went on line to print
out a favourite. One learner chose a poem from her school days; another chose a
song lyric. I asked the learners to
find out what they could about the poet in question and his/her circumstances
at the time of writing. A lot of this research was conducted in L1, and the
learners reported back in English. Then began the task of translation. The
first stage is simply to translate the general meaning. Next week will see the
translations taking on a more poetic form.
As the town hall clock struck eight, I had to repeat my
request for the learners to finish off, so absorbed were they in their work. One
learner said to me on leaving: You were right, not to tell us what we’d be
doing at the beginning of the lesson. We would have run out screaming.” A back
handed compliment, perhaps, but a compliment? I hope so…
