I don't think I said everything I had wanted to say, but what I've written below captures at least 90% of what I think and feel. I've cut and pasted only the last half of my personal statement below—the half dealing with my teaching philosophy. Agree or disagree as you will.
Thanks in part to those linguistics and pedagogy courses I took in college back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and thanks largely to my own experiences in the classroom, I have formed a clear teaching philosophy. I cannot claim to implement this philosophy perfectly, but it represents an ideal toward which I strive. In a nutshell: the ideal EFL classroom is student-centered and task-oriented. The teacher never lectures, and to the greatest degree possible, students are encouraged to take control of their own learning. In Korea, students are generally trained to be passive in the classroom; most of the classes they have with Korean professors will involve lectures. Classes on English grammar or literature will also be teacher-centered lectures, and the lecturers will speak primarily in Korean, which I find ironic. Students do little more than take notes during these sessions; they are not encouraged to question the professor or to “flex their English muscles”; instead, they sit in silence, just writing. How constructive is this? In my view, class is much more exciting and beneficial when the students take control and the professor stands back to let this happen. The professor, in my ideal classroom, is merely a guide or a facilitator; it is the students who are in the driver’s seat, even teaching each other lessons from the curriculum or completing tasks individually or in teams. People learn more when they are given responsibility: to learn to ride a bicycle, one must actually get on a bike, not merely hear a lecture about bike-riding.
In French pedagogical linguistics, a distinction is made between parler de la langue and parler dans la langue: speaking about the language versus speaking in the language. The former is a bad idea, but this is what happens when professors lecture on English grammar in Korean. The latter is a superior approach because it exposes the students to more actual English and forces them to think about what they are hearing. Linguist Stephen Krashen put forward the “I + 1 hypothesis” decades ago; the idea is that, if the students’ ability is at level I, the teacher must speak at level I + 1 to force the students to make an extra effort at comprehending the teacher’s utterances. Lazier students might resent this kind of challenge.
I also disagree with modern “oral proficiency” and “communicative” approaches that sacrifice the teaching of grammar for some vague, airy-fairy notion of “fluency.” These modern approaches do indeed get students producing English faster than the old-school methods ever did, but their major disadvantage is that the students, though speaking with confidence, often cannot speak well. Their speech tends to be garbled and incoherent, shot through with errors, and this is because the students have not learned the necessary grammatical structures on which to hang their ideas. When a Korean student says, “I go school” or “When you homework?”, I hear a grammar issue. Teaching EFL students how to structure “Wh-” and “yes/no” questions, how to reply intelligibly to such questions, and how to frame their thoughts in an organized manner is an essential part of a good language curriculum.
A personal example of the flaws of “oral proficiency”-oriented programs: my brother Sean went through a French curriculum that stressed communicative competence over grammar. Because I am fluent in the language, I would often try talking with my brother in French. I found that his pronunciation was not bad, and he was able to reply to my questions with short bursts of verbiage, but longer utterances were beyond him. When I took a look at Sean’s French writing, I saw it was atrocious: my brother had learned little to nothing about verb conjugation, grammatical gender, tense control, or any of the other myriad details that make one’s language clear and coherent. This was not Sean’s fault: the curriculum had failed to stress the structural, technical aspects of French, favoring instead a fuzzy, holistic approach that produced students who could gabble in French, but who had already begun to form a raft of bad speech habits that would be hard to undo later on in life.
This brings me back to EFL in Korea. Most of my Korean students have formed terrible speech habits because no one has bothered to correct their technical errors. I have taught writing classes in Korea in which my students were horrified to see how much red ink I had scrawled all over their short essays. This horror is the direct result of a lack of mindfulness caused by curricula that emphasize production and fluency, but neglect to consider correct grammar, mechanics, and so on.
There are, unfortunately, Western teachers in Korea who buy into the myth that “Korean students don’t need to learn more English grammar” or “Korean students have had enough grammar.” True: Korean students might be very good at recognizing grammar errors on a quiz, but that says nothing about those students’ ability to produce grammatically correct language. The problem with the “Koreans have had enough grammar” crowd is that these people do not realize that Koreans might have a good storehouse of passive grammar, but they have next to nothing when it comes to active grammar. The same goes for vocabulary: university students will have studied English for years, and will have a large mental lexicon of passive vocabulary (i.e., the vocabulary that is recognized through listening and reading), but they will have precious little active vocabulary (i.e., the vocabulary that one relies on when speaking and writing). Active vocabulary can only be developed through proactive use, which is again why lecture is a terrible way to teach English. Passive students will never develop active vocabulary.
In that sense, I do agree with the oral-proficiency school that the students need to be speaking, speaking, and speaking some more. But unstructured speech, “free talk,” and the avoidance of error correction are all harmful to students’ FL learning. Grammar drills and other focused exercises must be part of a language curriculum, however corny and old-school that might sound.
I have, lately, been encouraging my intermediate students to engage in a round-robin English activity in which the students take over, entirely, the responsibility of teaching, while the teacher stands back and monitors, providing occasional correction and leading the post-activity review segment. In my round-robin classroom, the students are divided into four teams. Each team is assigned a certain amount and type of content to teach. Team 1 will teach its material to Teams 2, 3, and 4; Team 2 will teach its material to Teams 1, 3, and 4, and so on. This is done in three rounds, with the combinations of teams rotating every round. Each team teaches its own material three times (and becomes expert at it by the third round); each team is taught different material by each of the other teams. By the end of three rounds, all four teams will have been exposed to all four teams’ material. The material itself is designed to be internally reinforcing, so there is a good bit of repetition and overlap, among the teams’ lessons, to aid students in remembering what they have learned. My intermediate kids love the round-robin approach; I told them that it provides them a small taste of American-style graduate-school seminars, in which it is incumbent on the students, not the professor, to provide the material for a given day’s lessons. My feeling is that you learn when you teach, and teaching something is an excellent way to take responsibility for it.
There are two other aspects to my pedagogical philosophy: I favor the use of behavioral objectives and the use of humor. Behavioral objectives stand in contrast to cognitive objectives. A cognitive objective might be something like, “By the end of the class, students will have developed an appreciation for Impressionist art.” The words develop and appreciation are frustratingly ill-defined in this context. Meanwhile, a behavioral objective will focus on things that are tangible and, where possible, quantifiable. For example: “By the end of the class, students will write a two-paragraph report summarizing the work of one Impressionist painter and expressing a well-defended opinion about that painter’s work.” As a pragmatist, I have a strong bias toward behavioral objectives because they can be used to measure students’ progress. As for the use of humor in the classroom, this should be so obvious as to go without saying. Humor softens the hard edges of social interaction in a classroom full of unfamiliar people. In Krashen’s terms, humor “reduces the affective filter,” lowering stress levels and allowing for better learning. It is an invaluable tool, not to mention one of the teacherly qualities for which an instructor will be long remembered.
To sum up, then: I am a strong advocate of student-centered, task-oriented FL learning. I am an enemy of lecture as a teaching method because it encourages student passivity and does nothing to improve students’ active vocabulary and active grammar. I believe in the old-school notion that grammar is absolutely crucial for good and proper production of language, but I speak here of grammar as it applies to the productive macroskills—speaking and writing. I also think that the teacher, far from being the center of attention in class, ought to be as far away from the center as possible, to allow the students to take charge of their own learning. While I am not against using Korean on occasion as a time-saving device, I believe that FL students should be exposed as much as possible to the target language, not to lectures in the students’ native tongue. Finally, I am a pragmatist who advocates the use of measurable, tangible behavioral objectives in lesson planning, and I also advocate the use of humor as a way to reduce stress and facilitate better learning.
These are some of the modest insights that I have gained from years of teaching. They have stood me in good stead, but because life is always evolving and people are always learning, I know that this philosophy will, inevitably, evolve as well.
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Some days back, I rented "Being There," a 1979 film starring Peter Sellers and directed by Hal Ashby. I had seen bits and pieces of "Being There" before, but had never sat down to watch the entire movie. The story centers on Chance the gardener, who tends the Washington, DC estate of the Old Man, an unnamed character who dies at the beginning of the film. Chance looks upon the old man's corpse without registering much understanding or deep feeling, and the housekeeper, Louise, initially yells at Chance for not recognizing the significance of the Old Man's death. Louise quickly repents of her anger, though, for she recognizes that Chance has the mind of a child, and that he is absorbed by only two things in life: gardening and TV. She tells Chance that she and he will both have to leave the home, and bids Chance farewell. Chance soon finds himself on the street, and the rest of the movie portrays Chance's misadventures as, like his cinematic descendant Forrest Gump, he finds himself inadvertently walking the halls of power and prestige, with-- eventually-- thousands of people hanging on to his every word. Chance's encounters with people (business magnates, Russian diplomats, and even the US president) are characterized by how charmed his interlocutors are at his simplicity and honesty. Time after time, people mistake Chance for someone more profound than he actually is, not realizing that Chance's constant retreats to the metaphor of the garden are a function of the fact that gardening, and TV, are all that Chance knows.*
I think, though, that we need to set some ground rules when talking about Christ-figures. What does it take to be classified as one? I'd say that it takes more than the ability to perform miracles: a Christ-figure must walk a sort of via dolorosa, and must do so for the sake of all humanity. Strangely enough, just such a figure is visible in Charlton Heston's movie "The Omega Man," a zombie-apocalypse film based on the novel I Am Legend (and later remade into the movie "I Am Legend," starring Will Smith in the Heston role). In "The Omega Man," Heston's character, Dr. Robert Neville, is one of the few people to survive the zombie-virus outbreak. Because he is a scientist, Neville, who is immune to the virus, uses his own blood to create a serum that can counteract the effects of the virus and restore the infected zombies to normalcy. In this version of the story, however, the zombies are sentient and are led by Mathias (Anthony Zerbe in fine, evil, B-movie form), who rallies the infected against Neville. The zombies eventually kill Neville by casting a spear at him while Neville, having just given his serum to a group of uninfected people for replication, is standing in a public fountain. The spear strikes Neville's side; Neville slumps into the crystal-clear water and dies, arms spread wide in a beatific gesture reminiscent of Christ on the cross. Blood and water flow.
Resurrection imagery may also be a factor for Christ-figures. Harry Potter was killed by the Avada Kedavra curse: as the celestial Dumbledore tells Harry in Heaven's anteroom (a sort of cleaned-up version of London's King's Cross station-- "King's Cross" itself being a significant hint at Harry's Christlike nature), the young man is free to move "on"-- i.e., heavenward-- if he so desires. This means Harry is definitively dead, although he has the power to, like a bodhisattva, turn back from Heaven's gate to complete his unfinished work. Dumbledore has also told Harry over the course of Rowling's seven books that Harry is a being filled with love, and this self-sacrificial love is what makes him powerful. Christ's life is characterized by universal love; this, it seems, is an essential component of a Christ-figure. Harry is also carried forward by a sense of mission that is crystallized in the fifth book (Order of the Phoenix) when he hears the prophecy about himself and realizes that he will be-- must be-- the one to take down Voldemort.
Meanwhile, Neo's path in "The Matrix" cleaves to a christic death-resurrection-ascension paradigm. Neo's character, as conceived by the Wachowski Brothers, follows something of an intertwined, double-helical path, simultaneously tracking both the Buddha's enlightenment and Christ's fulfillment. But Neo qualifies as a Christ-figure not only because of the resurrection moment after Trinity(!) revives him, but also because he can perform miracles, and because he operates in a spirit of liberating love for all enslaved humanity. Once Neo realizes who he is and what he's about, he moves forward with a sense of deep purpose. As a being who confounds the rule-bound nature of the computer-generated Matrix (perhaps symbolizing the sin-shackled nature of the world), Neo is Christlike because he is a death-transcending, messianic figure of promise.**
But by the above standards, Chance is not a Christ-figure. A Christ-figure tends to be proactive and purpose-driven, whereas Chance is more of a benevolent witness to, and sometimes inadvertent participant in, the events occurring around him. Chance, being of simple mind and heart, cannot be said to be possessed of a sense of mission: he has no agenda. He is a compassionate being, true, but the film provides little evidence that Chance's compassion is synonymous with a conscious, all-embracing love of humanity. As I noted earlier, Chance's two foci in life are gardening and TV. Chance does have one distinctly Christlike trait, of course: he performs miracles-- two, in fact. The first and more obvious miracle is his walking on water, as seen in the final moments of the film. The second miracle, somewhat less obvious but present all the same, is the heart-healing that Chance brings to most of those whom he meets. Almost no one is immune to Chance's charms. But unlike Neo, Harry Potter, and Robert Neville, Chance undergoes no via dolorosa, and he certainly doesn't die a self-sacrificing death, nor does he harbor much, if any, messianic potential (although it may be that the millions of TV viewers who saw his on-camera interview might be willing to follow him to the ends of the earth). In all, Chance violates the christic paradigm in too many ways to be considered a Christ-figure. His concerns and his compassion are too parochial in scope to make him christic. It may be that Chance, taken purely on his own terms, qualifies as some sort of divine figure-- one miraculously untouched by the restrictive laws and doleful vicissitudes of nature-- but Chance's character defies any obviously Christian interpretation.
But if we insist on mapping Chance onto some religious template, then I would suggest out-and-out Taoism. As I mentioned above in talking about Zen Buddhism, Taoism emphasizes such aspects of the world as naturalness, harmonious flow, spontaneity, and present-orientation. Taoism's deepest insights are of the wordless, nondiscursive, yet painfully ordinary sort: "The Tao that can be talked about is not the eternal Tao." Simple, plainspoken Chance clearly demonstrates his oneness with the Tao in true magico-religious Taoist form at the end of the movie: by walking on water, like the legendary Taoist sages of old who rode the clouds, hopscotched along mountaintops, and survived pounding waterfalls unscathed, he shows that his non-mastery of the world is itself a sort of mastery. Like Bodhidharma, the First Patriarch of Zen Buddhism (and an Indian saint reimagined the Chinese way) who famously crossed the Yangtze River on a reed, Chance has no argument with the still water of the lake on which he stands, so the lake doesn't complain when he stands on it.
The above exchange echoes the simplicity of Chance's gardening metaphors. When the US president asks Chance for his opinion on the nation's economic future, Chance offers conditional optimism ("As long as the roots are not severed... all will be well in the garden"), refers to the progression of seasons, and ends with an allusion to the assured return of spring. Is Chance speaking truth-- even Original Truth? I should think so: Chance is responding to the demands of the present moment in the only way he knows how. By the Zen reckoning (which is a close cousin to Taoist reckoning), Chance is a Buddha. But then... we all are. So this is nothing special.
It's difficult to imagine a more disparate pair of movies than "Mission: Impossible-- Ghost Protocol" (MIGP) and "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" (TTSS). While both films are members of the spy genre, their approaches to that genre differ in almost every respect. And yet, despite their diametrically opposed sensibilities, they're both thoroughly entertaining. Holding them up together for comparison will give us a chance to explore the depth of their differences, and also to ponder what it means to be entertained by a film.