Sometimes I am flummoxed by my students. I don’t mean by their individual accomplishments or difficulties, their questions or assertions, but by the idea of students. If student is a category, why are mine so different from one another? Why is an intermediate student in one instance like a bumbling bear with her head stuck in a honey pot while another student at the same level is nothing like that at all, but more akin to a melting ice cream, sticky and formless, sweet, but so utterly out of his environment that you want just to shovel him up and away? Both are challenged in the classroom, yet they are so different as to be from different categories altogether. Or why does another student immediately grasp a detail of consequence while her classmate misses it entirely? Same age, same culture, same socioeconomic level, same pastimes, and so different. Each one of them, as the Spanish saying goes, is a world. Four students but also a bear, an ice cream, a block of wood, and a flowering vine.
One day in June, when I sat down to review my interactions with students from the past week, one moment that stood out was when I mentioned a magazine cartoon to my advanced class. I didn’t have the cartoon on hand, but describing it was easy enough. “The cartoon,” I told the two students, “shows a dejected-looking man standing at the information counter in a bookstore and asking the attendant if they have any why-to books.” I chuckled and looked from one to the other, smiling. Both were gazing back at me politely, and both seemed to be waiting for something. “Instead of how-to books,” I explained. Still the polite stares. “Why-to. You know, providing purpose, not know-how.” Still the incomprehension.
Okay, I concluded silently, though the cartoon was great, my description was a flop. “Do you read how-to books?” I asked, to get the conversation going. The young woman said she never had. The young man was currently reading a book about attaining inner peace through attention to the present. The book he had lined up next was about how to break free from the trap of negative thinking. Perhaps more self-help than how-to, but still. We moved on into the day’s lesson.
Considering this moment later, I decided that rather than male or female, quick-witted or not, eager, determined, or hopeless, or any other category, the most salient division was between students who could understand the perplexed “Why?” for questions about motivation, and those who couldn’t, though they would smile respectfully if you tried to tell them what you were talking about. I could call this theory my cartoon hypothesis. The test would be to describe the cartoon in class and watch the students’ reactions to see who, like the two young adults, smiled uncertainly, and who knowingly laughed.
Young students, even young adults like the two advanced students, enroll in class because English is necessary, either for their studies or to improve the chances of landing a job. “It’s important,” “I need it,” or “I have to,” they tell me, whether they are 16 or 26. The older adults—I once had a student in his 70s—are a more varied lot, at least as far as their reasons for taking an English class. Most are there because they deserve to do something for themselves, they say, and learning English suits their needs better than going to the cinema or taking up a new sport. Often they will tell me it was something they always meant to do, and if they didn’t do it now, then when? One said she wanted to make traveling easier. Another said he was in class to escape childcare duties at home. Whatever the reason, very few of these older, settled students stick it out much beyond a year. Life is complicated, and finding the time might have been difficult, or dealing with a spouse’s irritated looks when you couldn’t watch the kids might have been too high a price.
I’d have loved to show the cartoon to a few of my older students and observe their reactions. I was sure they’d appreciate it. “I know exactly how you feel!” I’d happily say, in response to their enjoyment. In a baffling world, here was a joke that was absolutely clear. But all of my older students had dropped out. I bet they just couldn’t find an adequate answer to the why-to question.
