Fortress against English

Recently, one of my private weekday students left this behind:

I forgot to clean it up, so the morning teachers had to take care of it the next day. (Sorry, guys. But thanks for the pic.)

This particular student regularly builds forts which he hides in while I try to engage him in English-related activities. Two weeks ago, I managed to interest him in a book of funny sentences and pictures (Cheese and Tomato Spider, if you're curious.) before he got started on his fort, and then got him to sit through a set of Halloween flashcards.

I thought maybe the monsters had his interest, and they did. Last week he brought a library book of monsters to read. Japanese, not English.

He sat down, opened the book, and dug in while I prepared for the lesson. Pretty soon he looked up and said, in Japanese, "See! Frankenstein! And Dracula! and Arachne! And Mummy! And Zombie! Werewolf!"

I argued with him (playfully, in English) about whether the ghost flashcard I had was a zombie or a ghost, so he had to look up ghosts. The book had a ghost ship.

I'm not sure wheher his thesis was that all those monsters were Japanese or that he didn't need English to learn about them. Both, I think.

Eventually, I just pulled out the jobs flashcards, and he had the patience to listen and even try to repeat about half, then play a game with me where I set about six of them out, then said one and waited for him to pick it out, replacing as we went.

Was I surprised that he had patience?

Not really. He's a smart guy. He doesn't want to be made to do anything, and he doesn't want to be drawn into anything that is not obviously going to benefit him. But if it's new and makes him think, maybe he's okay with it.

Letting him say his piece about English and monsters, even if I disagreed with him, gave him enough satisfaction to be a little patient with me and with English. And the jobs flashcard were new enough to overcome enough of his resistance to put up with it.

Why should he have such a strong resistance to English?

Well, ...

1. It's different.
   
   • He's only in the 2nd grade in elementary. He's finally getting the hang of hiragana, katakana, and numbers.
   • He wants to understand the world, and he is absorbing Japanese vocabulary. (He's actually quite a bit ahead of the median in 2nd grade in his mother tongue.)
   • All of that takes energy and work. He's working hard, and English rules, vocabulary and pronunciation are different and distracting.
   • And they confilct with the rules he is working so hard to learn.
2. He had a bad experience with a previous teacher who lost patience with his approach to learning. He has been hurt by English, as he perceives it.
3. I'm probably the first teacher who knows enough Japanese for him to be able (he hopes) to successfully negotiate the rules system with. So he wants to negotiate.

He is not a bad kid. He's smart. He wants to learn. But he wants to learn in a meaningful way, and that has been denied him so far relative to English.

So he's going to make an English teacher (me) work really, really hard, before letting English (back) into his life.

Or something like that. I don't know everything about the guy, but this is what I've pieced together from our lessons and from what his mother and other teachers have told me.

Why doesn't it worry me? I've seen it before, many times. I've seen young students who fought English when I started with them change their minds. And I've seen a few students I couldn't reach.

It's not my decision. Ultimately it's the student's decision. My job is just to give him the best opportunity I can to make a decision that's good for him.