This is a half-formed thought, really. The child of necessity. But it might be exciting.
I got a new student yesterday, 3 days out of DR, with almost no English. It happens. But the question is how I work him in at all, given language obstacles and the fact that we're halfway through a unit. Oh, and I found out about him when he sat down in my class. So I started with a bit of a cop-out. I told him that I wanted to see his general reading abilities. I handed him the text my other students had been working with, a Spanish-English dictionary, and some looseleaf.
I'm terrible.
So I checked in with him quickly a few times while managing my biggest and most needs-intensive class and, honestly, forgot about him for bits of time. By the end of class, he gave me just shy of three sheets of looseleaf with these translations of the first few pages of Aristotle's Metaphysics. I was floored. I guess I often forget that students come literate in reading but illiterate in speech, strange because I would say nearly the same thing about my own Spanish. But it seems to me that I can work with this.
Of course, Rancière and Jacotot came to mind. I was certainly an ignorant schoolmaster at this point, though perhaps a lot closer to the blustery fool type than I'd like to admit. But still, the method might hold something here. Todos los hombres por naturaleza desean aprender. (I would've put in ser instead of aprender . . . I'm not sure if this is intonation or intention or if I'm just wrong).
Is this a student who I can work with along the lines of Jacotot's Calypso could not . . . a word by word translation to learn a language? I feel like the pressures of a huge classroom are going to drown this. How many students did Jacotot have? Rancière never really mentions that, does he?
I always assumed that I would use The Ignorant Schoolmaster in conjunction with my reading and annotation method in an English to English translation, but this seems even more in the spirit of Jacotot's project (at least as Rancière frames it).
I'm terrible.
So I checked in with him quickly a few times while managing my biggest and most needs-intensive class and, honestly, forgot about him for bits of time. By the end of class, he gave me just shy of three sheets of looseleaf with these translations of the first few pages of Aristotle's Metaphysics. I was floored. I guess I often forget that students come literate in reading but illiterate in speech, strange because I would say nearly the same thing about my own Spanish. But it seems to me that I can work with this.
Of course, Rancière and Jacotot came to mind. I was certainly an ignorant schoolmaster at this point, though perhaps a lot closer to the blustery fool type than I'd like to admit. But still, the method might hold something here. Todos los hombres por naturaleza desean aprender. (I would've put in ser instead of aprender . . . I'm not sure if this is intonation or intention or if I'm just wrong).Is this a student who I can work with along the lines of Jacotot's Calypso could not . . . a word by word translation to learn a language? I feel like the pressures of a huge classroom are going to drown this. How many students did Jacotot have? Rancière never really mentions that, does he?
I always assumed that I would use The Ignorant Schoolmaster in conjunction with my reading and annotation method in an English to English translation, but this seems even more in the spirit of Jacotot's project (at least as Rancière frames it).
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