The students are back, and the once peaceful courtyards of the college are once again bustling and rustling with abayas and dishdashas hustling between classes.
The fall from lofty theory to solid practice is seldom a soft one, and my long-anticipated, lovingly-planned lessons had mixed success. On the one hand, the students had a wonderful time. On the other hand, the very danger I warned them about in kicked in: when you teach language through the arts (or, in my case, Language through the Arts), the learning process must never disappear from sight. As aware as I am of giving my students the tools to rationalize the method in their madness, somehow things slipped in today’s first session. There was that after-holiday excitement in the class that seemed to wrap everything in impenetrable cotton-wool, and though the activities had their success and the affective filters seemed way low, the learning may have been even lower. I have analyzed this to death and found no clear answers. In the second class (same lesson) I immediately made modifications according to my post-mortem findings, and this did make a vast difference- or was it simply the time of day?
All the theory in the world does not change the fact that learning is a puzzle that has, ultimately, never been solved.
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