Feeling the pull...

I felt the pull today. The pull between pedagogies.

As anyone reading this probably knows, "pedagogy" has become THE word to learn in teacher training at university. If you can throw this into as many essays as you can, you'll do fairly well. It's taken me until today to really FEEL what it means though.

Today I was teaching Year 7 about past tense. We talked about the difference between "began" and "begun", "drank" and "drunk". I introduced them to terms like "past imperfect", and tried to use a little metalanguage when talking about grammar.

It was when we went over their answers that I stumbled. Somewhere between asking the first person, "What is the past tense of run?" and everyone getting the right answers written down, I became aware that I was drilling them.

I pointed to each present-tense verb on the board and said it.

They responded with the past tense conjugation.

"Swim"

"SWAM"

"Bring"

"BROUGHT"

"Buy"

"BOUGHT"

"Say"

"SAID"

.... You get the drill.

I feel like a failure. If my principal had walked in at that moment, they would have felt like they'd stepped back in time. All I needed was a cane and a blackboard. I was ashamed. It all happened so fast I couldn't stop it! And they were all so well trained!

...Which makes me think they'd done that before. Somewhere along the line they'd learnt to call out like that, in unison, with the correct answer. That's my one saving grace - I'm clearly not the only one who's done that with them. But I'm not going to do it again.