Our future is in their hands... My God...

Last Sunday night I came across “El Imbatible” at Susana Gimenez, while zapping. Though this programme may not be interesting at all, I can say that I found it really… worrying! Yeah, worrying. The quiz involved children between nine and twelve years old. While I started watching it, I was expecting to listen to correct answers or at least reasonable ones. However, the contrary occurred. I could listen to the most unthinkable answers to even very basic, simple sentences. To mention but a few examples, a girl answered that Egypt´s capital was Nigeria; a boy said that three hens and two pigs made twenty four legs! Maybe it may sound funny… but I think this is funny peculiar, not funny ha ha at all! Going on with the examples, another boy didn´t know that there exists a hymn to Sarmiento and, to cap it all, another boy answered that, if a car had to go along a 50 km distance at a 100 km/hour speed, then it would arrive at the destination in 5 hours! Can you believe it?

After watching the programme I realized that the same generation which usually competes in this quiz is the one that will govern us in the near future. Worse still, I realized that this same age group will be our students in a couple of months. Considering that the children who participate in this quiz are generally those students with the highest marks in their school, then it is undeniable that the educational system is in crisis.

We are going to be teachers in a short time (at least I hope so!) and we cannot be unaware of such deficiencies. If students do not handle knowledge or skills proper of their native language almost proficiently, then can we expect them to be excellent in English? Of course I don´t mean to say that ours is a losing battle, but it will surely be an uphill one. We cannot expect to teach just English, but we´ll surely have to teach them other contents and we should be ready for this. Sometimes a whole lesson can be altered if our students lack background knowledge to do an activity or to understand a listening or a reading text and hence we need to breach that gap between what they know and what they don´t.

I believe we should start worrying about our students´ knowledge. But worrying shouldn´t be seen as something negative in this case; on the contrary, it should be seen as positive. If we worry about it, then we will help them to learn better, more and even more efficiently. The best thing we can do for our students is to be ready to help them to learn, not only English but anything that they may not know, don´t you think so?