Inside Students' Heads

I'm often surprised by what goes on in my students' heads at all the schools where I teach, but more so at the elementary school. I asked them if they knew any American folktales and they said "Tom and Jerry!" I told them that Portland is two hours away from the sea and that people consider that close, and they uniformly freaked out. I told them I have an uncle who is a cowboy, and they fell into two camps: half were convinced I was lying, because clearly cowboys don't exist any more, and and half were totally unphased, if not disappointed that all my relatives weren't cowboys and cowgirls.

Today I told them an old Native American folk tale from the Northwest, the story about how Raven stole the sun from the Sky Chief, who appears to professionally hoard celestial objects. I started off by showing them a painted carving from the Sk'klallum and having them guess where it came from.


To see more pictures like this, check out the Pacific Northwest Native Flickr Photostream.

Their first guess was Japan, which seems odd until you take a look at Ainu art. (The Ainu are one of Japan's indigenous groups, closely related to the Small Numbered Peoples of the Russian North and the First Nations of Alaska.) Then they guessed New Zealand. The US was their third guess, and Canada their fourth.

For the folktale, I decided to try and translate it into Japanese first--that way, the corresponding English would be easy enough to learn from at their level. One of my teachers proofread and edited my translation. Then I bought Raven: A Trickster Tale from the Pacific Northwest as an ebook and used the pictures and my simplified text to make a PowerPoint.

After they heard the story, it was their turn to tell me a Japanese folktale in English. We went over basic folklore sentences like "she saw a ~~," "they became ~~,"and "they said/asked." There were many gestures, including a boy acting like a bullied turtle. This was the high point of the lesson for them, since they were really stoked about getting to be the first people to tell me about Momo-Tarou, Kin-Tarou, and Uroshima-Tarou.

The folktale lesson was for the sixth graders, some of whom I won't see again. The school is on the intake boundary between two middle schools--some will go to the one I teach at, and others will go to a different one. There were pictures and messages scrawled on the back cover of their paperback English workbooks.

With the fifth grade class, who I'll see next school year, there were speeches. The vice principal (who substitutes for a substitute homeroom teacher just for English classes, and has taken extra English lessons privately to feel qualitified) asked them if they had anything they wanted to say. English for them is games rather than grammar, and several students said (in Japanese) that they were nervous about English, but aren't any more because English class is fun.

The strangest part of my job is effect that I'm supposed to have. I'm supposed to be proof that the students need to know another language to communicate with the rest of the world, and I'm supposed to personalize (and personify) the Anglophone world. It's easy to get caught up in lesson planning and schedules and forget that in a day, up to 150 kids are learning from me...and forming opinions about language, culture, and even their own ambitions based on what I bring to the classroom, whether it's a folktalke, holiday presentation, or just how enthusiastically I can chant about what people had for breakfast.

It's weird to be responsible for making kids want to learn about something, and even weirder to get a peek inside their heads and see that you're actually having an effect.

The nice things they said about my class and about me as a teacher haven't made me think that I just must be good at; rather, they've made me realize just how much better at it I should be, just because they're soaking everything in.