words in context
Posted by nina on July 30, 2010
Last night I started reading “36 Children,” Herbert Kohl’s account of his first year as a public-school teacher in Harlem. Like Jonathan Kozol and Sylvia Ashton Warner, Kohl is constantly cited in my textbooks for his revelations on public education. (It’s surprising to me that classes don’t assign these trade books, since they are both more insightful and more engaging than our texts. But I digress.)
Something that jumped out at me immediately was Kohl’s account of how his sixth-graders were fascinated by his method of defining the word psyche by contextualizing it within Greek myth. Capitalizing on their interest, Kohl used the root psyche as a hook to introduce psychic and psychology, and eventually went on to replace the prescribed vocabulary curriculum with a study of the evolution of language. He writes:
Before we talked about language and myth the children, if they thought about it at all, felt that most words were either arbitrary labels pinned on things and concepts the way names seem to be pinned onto babies, or indicators as connections amongst these labels. These “labels” probably represented the way the adult world capriciously decided to name things. I doubt whether the children ever thought of adults as having received language from other adults even more remote in time.
Although he was referring to black children in the early 1960s, this observation strikes me as profoundly applicable to English language learners today. Especially for young children who have not yet learned to recognize parts of speech, English must seem like an arbitrary string of unfamiliar sounds; the direction to “write a complete sentence” as incomprehensible as asking someone who has no carpentry experience to build the frame for a house. A young student’s response is invariably a disjointed string of letters resembling words in groupings resembling a sentence. But missing are the foundation, the necessary supports, the correct type of nails…
This analogy makes me wonder if sentence construction could be taught within an ordered framework such as a plant, with subject as root, verb as stem, adjectives as flowers.
More relevant, since I don’t intend to teach elementary school, would be to introduce new vocabulary in context. I already planned to do this to some extent, selecting words for each unit from resource texts and key concepts. But in addition, we could inspect words’ applications, their etymology, their connotations. And there is truly no better subject than social studies in which to analyze the power of words on the collective unconscious! (socialism, anyone?)
Incidentally (and curiously), the WordPress spellcheck software does not recognize the word contextualize (which Merriam-Webster traces to 1934) and suggests that I replace it with conceptualize (which is not what I meant). Yesterday I learned that this type of search-and-replace spellchecking is called the Cupertino effect, which makes me happy because I love being able to assign names to specific annoyances, such as palimpsest. If you know of other terms that describe similarly insignificant irritations, please share! (For example, is there a word that adequately sums up “misuse of the I-before-E rule”? There should be.)
