This “reflection” conveniently falls into the category both for Approaches and Four Skills, having sprung from the way they’ve blurred. For my Participatory Approach paper I wrote that I didn’t understand where the line should be between one’s teaching and one’s opinion. That’s no problem, generally, if you’re teaching pronouns. Well, it could be: the whole s/he debate, for example.

Now with Content-Based Instruction (I’m getting all the names mixed in my head), I am more confused than ever. The day I got the assignment to prepare a mini peer-teaching lesson for CBI I was at the library, looking for books about the approach. Our teaching task is to develop a lesson plan about “a content area we are particularly fascinated with or knowledgeable about.” So there I was waiting for the library attendant to reappear, and to kill time I glanced at the nearby book stand. I spotted Voices from the Mountains, by Guy & Candie Carawan, which I may even have at home. Anyway, I know the book. There’s a photo of Hazel Dickens, among others, on the cover. “I’ll bet I’m the only one here who knows who that is.” I grabbed the book and started flipping through.

I have a deep and long-held love of West Virginia, and a militant stance on the rape of the land and the people that has been wrought by King Coal and other industry giants over the past 150 or so years. Glancing through this book stirred up a deep longing to be there, and a deep sorrow for the suffering of its people. I flipped to page about the Buffalo Creek disaster of 1972, which has haunted me since it happened. At the end of this post I’ll past some of the research bits that I will use tomorrow as a handout, for background. Reading the song lyrics and seeing the pictures of devastation made me realize that this was the topic I wanted to present for CBI.

Two days ago Mom had told me that the coal companies had contacted her several times about leasing oil and gas rights for our land. They’ve been hitting us up for as long as I can remember, and that whole time Mom and Dad always seemed to consider their offer. Each time I would become outraged: Don’t they know anything about the history of West Virginia? Don’t they know that the power companies offered farmers amounts more than they could refuse, and then trashed their land, so they had nothing: they were displaced and impoverished.

So this topic is fresh in my head. Mom said, “They’ve offered us $250 an acre, right up front. They’d give us a check tomorrow.” I went into a helpless panic. “Don’t do it!” “Oh, I won’t,” she replied. I don’t know if she was just toying with me — it wasn’t funny — or if she really doesn’t understand a single thing about Big Business crushing the Little Man under its thumb, all in the name of money.

So I brought the book home and went on a binge, reading everything I could find online during the weekend, going to the library on Sunday night to download a heap of images and read more. The more I read, the more fueled up I became: not about the lesson plan, but about the issue.

Today I hung out with Lauren for a while and was compiling a list of the dead from the Buffalo Creek flood. “I am so angry,” I told her. “I will never get over the atrocities committed by companies driven only by profit. These guys killed 125 people. All that happened was they made more money.” I was practically shaking with rage. “Shite, how can I teach something I’m so passionate about?” I asked her. “Passion is good,” she said. “Passion makes better teaching.” I shook my head. “No, you don’t understand. I’m not just passionate, I’m furious. I am strongly biased. There are lots of subjects — maybe even most — in which I can at least see two sides, even if I don’t agree. But not here. There’s one side: my side. The coal company was wrong. They killed. I can’t teach that. What am I going to do?”

She said, “I think it’s important and to be enraged. To be a teacher you have to be enraged. Otherwise, what are you teaching? Get people thinking. Get things changed.”

“I’m going to write that down,” I told her. “But that doesn’t solve my problem. How can I teach something I care so much about, feel so strongly about? I can’t go into a classroom so opinionated.”

Still, I kept working on my lesson plan. I sorted through photos of rape of the land, and destruction of human property. I looked at the ages of the people who had died, including scores of infants who, with their families, were washed right in their houses down the river and some of whose bodies were found 25 miles downriver.

So question number one: can one teach something that incites strong emotion in the teacher? Can one be unbiased? Do we have to? I expect that the proper answer is that we give our students the tools to make their own informed decision, and that’s what I’ll start trying to do tomorrow. “What are the benefits of mining?” “What are the dangers?” But then I’m going to show them a carefully prepared slideshow I’ve almost finished — including a video I edited from a documentary about the disaster. By showing them what happened, am I being biased? I have nothing to show for the other side, except fat guys with cigars counting dollars. See what I mean: I’m way too deep into it.

I expect that another answer is: if you encounter subject matter that does this to you, leave it for another teacher. But what other teacher?

There’s another issue that has been stirred by PA and CBI. These are by far my favorite approaches so far, because I can (and must) include Real Life in the teaching: real stories and events. But what I find myself doing, in these two approaches, is wanting to teach about the topic, not about the language. I think it’s exciting that the topic, according to these theories, can drive the language learning. But I have to be careful to make sure I get to that point. And how can I tell if I’m succeeding in teaching language? For this Buffalo Creek project I carefully developed my material and then thought, “Okay, what questions can I ask or activities can I do that impose some sort of linguistic structure on it?” And I can’t tell if what I came up with is fraudulent. Am I so interested in the topic that I’m just pretending there’s a language-learning component. At least I’ve gone from, “Okay, I’m going to tell them all about this slag heap and the one that caught fire as the dam broke, and show them how many houses were washed away, and then tell them about how King Coal has ruined the land — just look at this slide — and how much money do you think they made…” to:

• What kinds of mining do you know about?
• How is coal extracted? —> Strip mining
• Why is there so much coal mining?
• Benefits and dangers of mining?

And then, rather than tell them the story behind the pictures, I’ll ask them to tell me what they see first, and fill in some details. Here’s what I’ve stated are my linguistic objectives: “ Relevant vocabulary; build discourse from series of photographic images; past-tense constructions; critical thinking: articulating ideas based on prompts. Later component could consist of writing exercise and debate.” Am I just faking it, or is that valid?

Which brings me to another dilemma. In Four Skills, the first two exercises (for listening and reading), I created the exercise sort of from top-down: that is, from a subject that interested me which I then twisted into an ESL lesson. I can’t say that I really succeeded. It’s sort of like I jammed a coconut into a keyhole. Maybe that’s not a bad start. Maybe it’s a valid way to go about things: from theme to lesson, and perhaps I just need to shave away more so that the big thing can fit into a lesson. When I did those Four Skills lesson plans, I wasn’t aware of PA or CBI, so that’s sort of interesting, because it reveals that that’s my leaning.

If that’s the case, how can I lean more correctly? Only one time did I try building a lesson plan from objective up to theme, and that bombed. Maybe. I don’t know. I haven’t tried it with Real People before. I felt quite virtuous doing it, but the creativity was sapped that way. I do prefer to start with the topic. I suppose one needs to blend both.

I worry that, with my interest in teaching leaning more toward the dogmatic/thematic, maybe I don’t want to teach English at all? I can get over my dogmatic thing. That just comes from getting excited about something and wanting to tell everyone about it. I think I can learn to back away and let other people do the discovering with the pieces I lay before them and, I hope, guide them through. But am I really someone who has no interest in teaching language, and just loves human stories (including those of students)? I don’t know.