Teaching French: Law v. Grace

I wish I had learned more about the dynamic between law and grace in my life.

I think that I would have been a better teacher, or I would have quit right away.

I loved being  a French teacher, or at least I loved teaching the material, as long as I was not dealing with a hostile or captive audience.

Yet public education is inevitably all about that -- dealing with a group of students who have to be there. As a French teacher, I trusted at least that the students who were in the classroom wanted to be there, but the perceived advantage of an elective turns drastically into a disadvantage to the extent that students can just as freely opt out of the class if the going gets tough, or the students just do not like you.

An elective, therefore, can create more stress for the teacher rather than less!

Yet I was one of those teachers who expected their kids to do more, not less, and for a long time I did not care if they liked me or not. Sadly, a calculation of "do as you please" means that more students leave without asking questions or sticking around to "tough it out."

I wish that I had learned this truth sooner: learning cannot be forced, but rather is maintained by the grace of the teacher and the students who want to learn. If the students want to learn whatever you have to impart, then they will stick around and take in more.

The French class which I covered at one high school proved to me the importance of letting students have some choice and freedom. When I was covering the class as a whole, I would badger students to be quiet. I would move students seats as much as I needed to. In many cases, I would have to stop, change, then restart the lesson that I was working on.

I could barely get through one lesson, and many times it appeared that the students had given upu writing anything after about ten or fifteen minutes. What a hardship it was, sometimes, having to put students through a dry lesson on exchanges of "please" and "thank you."

One student I remember specifically, a freshman with red-lined eyes (perhaps from fatigue), struggled with keeping his mouth shut while I was talking. I found that I had to move his seat a number of times.

I think of this student because I ran into him again in another class, one where he was supposed to work on math, along with the other freshmen and remedial upper-classmen. The teacher I was covering for had to leave at the last minute, since she was the coach for the softball team and the games was about to start. She did not expect the students to get much work done, and so neither did I. In fact, I was thrilled to just sit and chat with the students, many of whom commanded a quiet following with their peers or sat quietly and worked on their math books.

Those who wanted to work, worked. Those who had no interest in getting anything done, just kept to themselves without getting too loud. The kid with the red eyes was chatting with one of his friends, and immediately they started to have a good time. I noticed that I had a different attitude toward the class, toward the same students whom I had been compelled to compel into learning for the previous two hours. This time around, we were no longer at logger-heads. It was almost as if I was a different person, and I could let my guard down. Right then, I took out my practice sheet with French phrases, including slang and insults, and I gave it to the kid.

He loved it! He practiced the phrases, then started using them on his friends. They spent a good thirty minutes going over what I shared with them on the sheet. The other students asked for a copy, as well, and they had a lot of fun with it, too!

They did not have to learn French, but by offering it to them as a choice, and they would not fail by doing their best or their worst, they had a lot of fun! That is grace in action, people! You do not have to do anything, there is no force imposed on a person to get something done, and their inward interest brings them in!