יום רביעי, 30 באוגוסט 2017

And do they know the Earth is round?

I was in the car listening to the radio tonight. During the news I heard Bennett, the Minister of Education, talk about his new English program. "Children in Israel need to learn spoken English... The ability to have a conversation in English is a necessity today... Our children will know how to speak English and not be afraid to open their mouths when they're overseas."  Later I heard other speakers discussing the program "A student can do a 5-point Bagrut in English and still not be able to speak." "Children need to speak a language before they learn to read it."

Bennett's quotes made the headlines, the interviewers sounded interested, but I think I've heard this before. Oh, right, I said it yesterday when I presented my English group to parents. And in the past to school principals. My motto "English is not just a subject in school, English is a language" basically sums it up. No, I'm not Galileo. Plenty of other people have discovered, researched and said all these things.  But now the top bureaucrat of education wants English to be taught as a language. This could get interesting.

The obvious question is - Will anything really change? Written English is so much simpler to teach. Students do exercises from a book and memorize vocabulary lists. Teachers prepare them for tests and then test them on the material they prepared. Tests can be graded quickly with numbers that go into a computer to be compared. Everyone can see which students are smarter and which schools are better. 

Now Bennett is talking about extra time for spoken English, debate clubs, oral exams. In other words noise, disagreements (maybe even political), no objective standards and all that extra time and effort! Teachers will need to learn new skills, and no one will be able to measure their success with standardized test scores. 

They will only have the satisfaction of hearing their students speak English and knowing that they made a difference in their lives.

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