The WordPress/JetPack writing prompt for today is:
What’s a thing you wish schools actually taught?

I’ve taught both in secondary schools and, much longer, in after-school academies in both cases usually English. In the secondary school I also had to teach “Life Skills” classes which were a bit of a joke because there was no fixed curriculum, students had no exams, and every student passed simply by attending.

Now “no fixed curriculum” puts the onus on the teacher. Can you make it good? Do you make an effort at all? Most teachers saw it as a study period, something they had to attend but not teach.

I saw it as a chance to do stuff. Most of what I did that didn’t come out of textbooks or previous teachers’ lesson plans, was geared towards critical thinking.

Once, I had my students make the front page of a newspaper. They had to decide which stories they were going to write, and the hierarchy of importance and how to present that to the reader. There was a lot of team work, a lot of negotiating, and individual components. And they presented their front pages to the class, so there was some level of accountability.

At the end, each student had to pick the one they’d want to read and explain why. The teams that had decided that putting a lot of ads on the page, and thus reducing their writing effort, discovered that these choices made them less popular.

While still dealing with the idea of media literacy, I found two newspapers (on Newseum) from the same town, the same day with the same person prominent on the front page. The pictures they chose to use were diametrically opposed, with one showing a scowling, unkempt man, the other showing a proud, well-groomed man (this was not someone famous enough that anyone, even me, would have heard of him, and not from the country we were in). I gave half the class one photo and the other half the other photos, told them to brainstorm how they would describe him.

Then they collectively wrote their answers on the board, still without seeing the other’s photo. They started challenging each other as to why they’d day that about him. I then revealed the two front pages. I asked why each paper had chosen the photo they had (he was acquitted, in a high-profile case, of sexual abuse. One paper had supported his accusers, the other supported him). So we had a discussion about how news media aren’t neutral, and they can manipulate the narrative. I challenged them to find examples in the local media.

Another time, again using the divided classroom structure, I gave song lyrics to each side of the classroom. One side got “Romeo” by Shari Ulrich the other got “Romeo and Juliet” by Dire Straits. I asked them to describe Romeo. In Ulrich’s song, we see how woman perceive him as a player, but we also get hints that he’s starting to doubt himself. In Dire Straits’ song, it’s Romeo’s perspective, and he sees himself as “love struck” and sincere in his affections — BUT at the end, he repeats his behaviour with another girl.

This let us talk about perception versus self-image and how both can be wrong. I ended with an optional piece of homework: Write your name down in the center of a piece of paper, then around it write words that you would use to describe yourself. If you’re brave enough, the second step is to give the paper to a trusted friend and let them scratch out any they disagree with, and add anything they want. An example: Perhaps you think you’re funny, but maybe your friends find your silly humour tiring.

I couldn’t re-use these in ESL academies and Korean hagwons because the kids were generally too young. But one that we could do was around the idea of an unreliable narrator. There’s a song from the 1950s or 1960s America, a time when parents sent their kids to summer camp. The song is called Camp Grenada, and in the song, a young boy is writing a letter home to his parents about how horrible the camp is, that children are dying horrible deaths or getting lost forever in the woods.

And worst of all, it’s raining.

Then, as the boy notes, the sun comes out, and suddenly he doesn’t want to leave. Oh, and he’s been there only one day. It’s a home-sick child pleading for his parents to rescue him, making up any wild reason that he thinks will be serious enough to bring them, until he starts to have fun. Then he doesn’t want to leave. It makes a fun fill-the-gap listening exercise because the vocabulary is simple but the situations are outrageous. It introduces the idea that the narrator of a story may be choosing to lie to the reader, and as a reader, you need to think about the ‘why’ behind a story.

I love that ‘ah-ha’ moment when a student figures out that they’ve learned a truth that wasn’t immediately obvious, that they’ve figured it out for themselves. It’s that moment of internal learning and self-awareness, that they can think for themselves and don’t have to accept everything at the surface. It’s empowering.