Taking notes; Chomsky attacks my teaching

Note-taking; Chomsky attacks language teaching

When I was a student, I took notes in class in notebooks that were meant to be kept to the end of the term. I wrote down the instructor’s central points, his likes and dislikes — with lots of doodles and fanciful drawings on the side, like Dostoevsky did in the pages of his novels, except that he could really draw (so also could Pushkin and Lermontov, but not I). In a language class I would invariably note down the main thrusts of the drills, conversations, and lectures, unless, of course, it was all too boringly obvious anyway. I would use class notes to study for the finals. It is a very good system, but one which, I note to my sorrow and dismay, students have long ago abandonned. They often sit in class as though at an aesthetic experience, like a bullfight, say, or a play. More like a play or a pantomime, I suppose, in my classes. They think, of course, that they will remember everything important. Nothing can be any further from the truth.

You all ought to do this. What’s more, you should print out my “work for the week” files and realy pour over them, beccause they are the keys to the course. You may choose not to do this, but you lose, you lose.

Still, my policy is never to instruct students on methodology of learning. Instead, I coddle them by printing out numerous copies of the work and passing them out to helpless-looking students, more out of pity than anything else. In 204 I passed out seven such copies, to seven helpless-looking, but otherwise very intelligent, students. I could go on, but I won’t.

Now for the intrinsic weaknesses of lerarning a language in an academic environment. Chomsky always told me not to teach Russian, because nobody knows how people can learn it. “It’s a hopeless, useless task,” he told me, with his usual exaggerated sarcasm. “What you will end up doing is getting people enthusiastic about going there for themselves.” I guess he was right. All the grammar we teach is taught not by the natural methods that people use to learn.

Case in point: my latest quiz, focusing on, among other things, к Ивану, к бабушке, у Ивана, у бабушки. You all had the preposition к engraved in your alpha waves when you came for the quiz yesterday, and so you started writing к Москвe, к русскому уроку in motion expressions, when you’re supposed to say в Москву, на русский урок. It’s our fault for focusing on so many details at once. A child, learning, will also over-generalize, but he will adjust with lightning speed to the context that shapes the details.

Another example: a few weeks ago we learned спасибо за книгу, спасибо за кассеты ‘thanks for the book’, ‘thanks for the cassettes’. Now in our recent 102 quiz, you were thinking ‘Vova wants her to bring something for Belka,’ so the very best students wrote принести колбасу (что–нибудь) за Белку. Not right, but a brilliant extension, or abductive jump, made with the alacrity of a child’s brain.

I still believe it is possible to learn something in a language class, but Chomsky now tells me: “Yes, they will learn something, but you won’t know what.” He’s a bit too sure of himself, isn’t he?

gmc