“If you become a teacher, by your pupils you’ll be taught.” (Oscar Hammerstein)
As a new teacher, I wanted to introduce new and innovative exercises to my students. The purpose of one particular exercise was to convey the importance of language in communication. The challenge for the students was to communicate an urgent message without the use of language. The exercise was carefully thought out – with, as it happened, one oversight.
The premise was that a traveler in a rural area in a foreign country had lost all papers, passport, money, ids, etc. A designated student was taken out of hearing, and I explained the task – to communicate who he was and what he needed to the residents of this small remote village.
The students were told they would have to communicate without knowing what the subject would be. The last piece was to choose the country: it could not be a country with a romance language or any language that might have similar words to key English words such as “help” or “lost.” However, all my meticulous planning came to naught when I announced that he had been stranded in Turkey. Without missing a breath, the student said, “gobble gobble, gobble.” End of exercise: the teacher had learned a lesson.