Why Teaching is Fun

"This is the email Carla sent," I told my beginning-proficiency Workplace English adult class.

Our lesson was about emailing, and attaching, and the various kinds of attachments there can be. The students were not only getting lost in the new vocabulary in Carla's list of documents—a bar chart of stocks in the warehouse, a graph of products for last month—they also had had little experience with computers. One fellow looked particularly bewildered.

I realized that Carla was naming five documents in her email. Impulsively, I took off my necklace and handed it to him. "This is the email Carla sent," I said. "She sent it to Tim just as I am handing this to you."

"The main necklace of handmade glass beads is the email, and you can see the five attachments. Name them for me."

Using the necklace forced the class together to isolate the five items in the text, and to see how they all moved together with the main email to the recipient when they were sent. Using concrete objects is common in ESL classes, but in addition I have learned that I'm not alone among adults in needing concrete objects to make the abstract clear, and this is just one more example. Barbara Tuchman said it very clearly:

History written in abstract terms communicates nothing to me. I cannot comprehend the abstract, and since a writer tends to create the reader in his own image, I assume my reader cannot comprehend it either. No doubt I underestimate him. Certainly many serious thinkers write in the abstract and many people read them with interest and profit and even, I suppose, pleasure. I respect this ability, but I am unable to emulate it.

Tuchman, B. (1982). Practicing History. New York: Ballantine/Random House, p. 37.