Quill English Academy

Of all the tasks that we find ourselves professionally engaged in, education might be the hardest to clearly articulate excellence in, insofar as we differentiate teaching from training. While all teachers must in some way train specific skills, education unfolds in the space between people and their environments, where experiences, trust, attention, mutual recognition, and ultimately the choices we make write the future of our world.

Life is education.

In this sense, it’s comfortingly simple (though very far from easy) to be a lawyer, doctor, physicist, chess player, or mountaineer, where the dazzling complexity and challenge is in how to reach The Goal, but The Goal itself is clearly defined.

Our modern zeal for academic success is almost as noble as it leaves much to be desired. One might begin to critically characterize our modern formal educational sojourn as:

– Essentially pitting youth against each other in a race to perform robotic tasks faster and more perfectly

– Guided by curricular goals and “standards” that bear sparingly little relevance to the actual needs, lives, and experiences of children, adolescents, and adults toiling away in a fundamentally extractive, exploitative, and adversarial economic system

– Judged by grading systems that actively detract from the pursuit of knowledge and excellence for their own sake

– Comprised of a tremendous amount of trivia-style academic pursuits that emphasize retention and recitation of largely irrelevant and often deeply misleading information, particularly when it comes to what passes for “history”

– Compartmentalized into “subjects” that rarely seek to emphasize deeper connections, foster inquisitive dispositions, or prepare young people for fulfilling, socially responsible, politically active lives

– Dictated by teaching materials that have been washed of progressive values by the capitalist money machine as it seeks profit above all else and predominantly espouses the values of the wealthiest and most influential

– Strictly hierarchical, centralized, and authoritative in nature

– Unflinchingly supportive of its own governmental apparatus, fostering an us-not-them disposition which leads to a general spirit in which brutality is sanctified with State approval

– Frighteningly similar to a prisoner’s experience, if taken in perspective.

While we can’t fix everything, we can do better.

We believe that the “cram school” can be a wonderful salve, balancing the arduous formal educational experience with an inspiring and fundamentally democratic one. Working directly with primary caregivers who are free to choose the experience for their children which reflects their values and their best estimations of excellence, teachers at privately run language centers have tremendous flexibility in the materials, methodologies, and environments in which they practice their craft.

One way to crudely estimate our educational philosophy is to say that student achievement is roughly equal to:

((Environmental quality) * (Lesson quality) * (Duration)) ^ (Quality of relationships).”

It’s essential to consciously examine how we are interacting with our students, what implicit values we are transmitting through our words and actions, what our actual expectations are and how we deal with them not being met.

An old Chinese reflection on the lifelong educational journey is:

幼兒養性，童萌養正，

少年養志，成人養德

It roughly translates as: Infants cultivate personality; children cultivate correctness; young adults cultivate aspiration; adults cultivate virtue.

As our elementary students cultivate correctness, it is imperative that they broaden and deepen their awareness, their material knowledge. However, it can be more useful to think of the cultivation of competencies as the primary educational goal, rather than simply an amassing of data in a ceaseless binary struggle for simple rightness or wrongness.

Since politics is properly defined as “anything which has to do with decision making in groups,” knowledge, though necessary, is insufficient. “Knowing is [only] half the battle.” What we choose to do about it is what makes a difference in the world.

At Quill English Academy, we believe the following list of core competencies to be a rather comprehensive approximation of what might be called “22^nd century skills.” Without a healthy dose of each, we believe most individuals would be significantly more likely to lead unsatisfying and irresponsible lives, at least in some part. In order to give ourselves the best chance of living
a fulfilling, beautiful life, some healthy, balanced measure of each of these seems prudent.

Our core competencies are:

curiosity, critical thinking, creativity, coordination, caretaking, conviviality, composure, and cosmopolitanism.

Core Competencies

We’d suggest engaging this section, and perhaps all of your interactions both with yourself and others, with Suzuki’s kind suggestion in mind:

“Each of you is perfect the way you are… and you could use a little improvement.”

We believe that, over the long term, the influence of schooling lies less in what teachers intend to teach and more in how and why students – and the teachers themselves! – are treated as they are.

As such, the best way to begin fostering these competencies in our students is by consistently refining their presence in ourselves, and sharing our passion for each of them in happy earnest, at every opportunity. It’s more like Fight Club than it is anatomy class: rather than drilling their existence and importance, demonstrate them with the example of your own life, the activities you choose in class, how you engage your students, fellow teachers, and the community at large.

Motivation and Inspiration

It goes without saying (so kindly forgive me for repeating) that motivated people perform significantly better. Knowing why our classes are valuable kick-starts the positive motivation loop.

Nurturing the growing sense of confidence and satisfaction that comes from new successes that once seemed impossible and unimaginable is what we are aiming for. This process is organic and won’t require specific attention if it’s in line with our values and expectations, provided we have enough time, compassion, and technical understanding.

The 9 P’s of motivation and inspiration are:
play,
purpose,
personal connection,
praise,
positive reinforcement,
prizes,
peer-to-peer reinforcement,
projects,
and “punishment.“

Second Language Acquisition

The first thing to keep in mind when helping beginners acquire a second (or third, etc.) language is that new input does not arrive on a blank conceptual screen. It comes with subtitles in the learner’s first language. At early stages, those subtitles are automatic and unavoidable; learners “read” meaning through them, mapping new concepts onto their extant conceptual terrains, even if they were trying not to.

With sufficient time and sufficiently high-quality exposure, the subtitles can begin to fade, and learners can attend more directly to the new language itself, appreciating more and more the mirror that a new language can provide on many previously unexamined categories present in the first.

In this section, we will take a closer look at some key concepts in foreign language acquisition, including: the communication window, scaffolding, TPR, comprehensible input, and holistic immersion.

Quill English Policies and Procedures

Now that we have broadly surveyed the terrain of competencies, gotten ourselves eager and motivated for the trip, and packed well for the trails that language teachers will be traversing, let’s zoom in as closely as we can at the actual day-to-day business of cultivating a world-class language learning experience.

Games

Coming soon!