What if they're all just sightreading?

My own experience relearning French shows me how easy it is to hide from what I don't know when I lean into what I do.

I’ve been taking a French class this winter. It’s not my first time around; I actually speak very good French, though I’ve lost all the fluency I had in my college years. 

The first night was perfect. We were on Zoom – early January fell right in the middle of New York’s omicron surge – and I got to impress everyone with my great accent. When I’m speaking French, if I’ve prepared my speech before I’m called upon, I sound great. Alternatively, if I’m reading off the page, I sound clear, even occasionally fluent, but because I love sounding good so much, I’ll read the whole passage without knowing what I just said. It’s like when I took piano lessons as a kid: I’m great at sightreading, and so I’ve always been able to pretend that I know what I’m doing, but if you ask me to summarize tone or meaning, I’m out.  

I’m at the point where my pretending can’t cover up the gaps in my knowledge. Even back in the days when French verb conjugations and indirect objects flowed through my blood, I still faked fluency by structuring sentences that would allow me to avoid the fact that I didn’t know when to use “leur” and when to use “les.” Like most people, I leaned on the skills that come easily – mimicking sounds, reading carefully, and constructing sentences creatively – to avoid the ones that don’t. I know that I need to work to recapture the language.  

Teaching has helped me to recognize both why I’ve always gotten away with this halfway-learning and that it’s worth striving for a more robust understanding. 

I haven’t been a very good student in my French class, though I intended to be. On the train to my sister’s engagement party in late January, I perused the podcast platform my teacher had recommended in class the night before. I was going to find a perfect true-crime series to listen to on my morning commute. Listening, one of my weaker French skills, would slide seamlessly into the existing habits of my life (I always and exclusively listen to podcasts on the L train). I chose a podcast, slowed it down to .75 speed, and tried to get lost in the story while I watched the light seep out of the snow outside the window. 

Then I stopped paying attention.

As I prepared for the penultimate class of the winter term yesterday, I reviewed the difference between present tense, the applications of different future tenses, the conditional – all the material we’d covered since January. If I had studied better, I wouldn’t have failed the exam. There aren’t exams at this French school. It’s just a fun school. I think: I need the exams. I’m going to find a harder school, I tell myself, because that’ll make me study more. 

I find myself slipping into my familiar, flashy habits. 

What made me want to sign up for the class in the first place? I like the accountability of a class, I told my friends, because it’s hard to study with discipline on your own time. I needed to sign up for something social with strangers to break out of that pandemic winter feeling, I told others. All of these things are true. What else is true? I signed up for an intermediate class that I knew would be review because I love to feel like I’m smarter than other people. Then, I made sure to volunteer to answer some questions so that I could show off my accent. I’m saying this because I know I’m not the only one who’s wired this way. I learn best when I feel like I’m at the top. Some people like to come from behind; I always loved racing sports, though, because I could lean on my fast-twitch muscles to get a head start and train to build the endurance I could rely on to stay ahead. 

If the classroom you’re in prioritizes your areas of strength, it’ll let you stay ahead and ignore your weaknesses; if it prioritizes your area of weakness, it’ll train you to operate from a deficit mentality. 

As I’ve already said, not everyone likes feeling ahead of the curve, and not everyone hates a deficit mentality. But what I do know is that kids, teenagers especially, build their habits around the way that their skills do or don’t seem to belong in the classroom, and that those habits have long-term implications on the way that we operate, and our shortcomings, as adults. 

I’m a disciplined person, generally. I exercise five or six days each week; I put out a weekly newsletter despite the mountains of grading in front of me. But building new discipline around the way that I learn when I know that what I already do looks impressive from the outside – that’s what’s really difficult for me. If I feel like I’m ahead, I’m going to try to keep feeling that way. 

It’s like the transition I had to make a few years ago, because of an injury, from running long distances to strictly low-impact activities like yoga and pilates. I knew that a different way of moving my body, slowing down, and strengthening myself would not absolutely destroy my life, but it took years of focus to recognize that the runner’s high I sought was more about my personal addiction to self-improvement than about health. If the habits we build are habits that others affirm to be good, they’re difficult to break. 

In French class, the habits that look to others like discipline are really the ones I lean on out of my own laziness – I identify what others will endorse as “good,” and then I lean into it, instead of challenging my own areas of weakness. 

Similarly, if a math teacher frequently rewards and lauds the student who completes problems the fastest, but I’m a student who finds more success when I take more time to think through multiple sides of the problem, then I’m likely to feel like I’m at a deficit. I might feel vindicated, even prideful, when I earn a high grade on a test despite the teacher’s obvious preference for other students. But I might just as equally disengage. 

I’ve been both the person who’s been prized for my skills and the person who’s felt like I didn’t have the capital to feel good in a classroom. If we allow people to be like me in a French class – to use and expand upon their capital by flashing impressive or prized skills, even if those skills belie weaknesses beneath – then we do both them and others around them a disservice as learners. 

This problem is the reason that I take issue with Harkness curriculum, for example, because it overvalues a particular set of oral skills that allow students (like me!) to slide by with their slick, quick-thinking verbal skills and avoid anyone checking to see if they’ve actually achieved mastery of the material. As a teacher, especially a teacher in the Humanities, I often look to change up the tasks by which I measure student understanding, to try to reveal where students who thrive in outward markers of mastery might have weaknesses. They’re not hard to find. If a teacher reading my French essays in high school were willing to really take points off for my improper use of indirect objects, for example, then she would have discovered that I was not as strong in French as I appeared. I just overcorrected for my weaknesses. Now, when my lack of regular practice slows my metaphorical “sightreading” skills down, I see the consequences.

If my class right now didn’t have a speaking element, I wouldn’t like it as much instinctively, because it would take away my easy chance to feel special. The best class for me, probably, would be one where I couldn’t talk and had clear, specific deliverables required in my writing that were designed to check for a specific set of understandings. I would only like it because I really know it would fit what I need, but I wouldn’t choose it if I didn’t know I needed it. As teachers, we must give students a chance to succeed – and to help them identify not just what they want to know about themselves, but also what they need to know about themselves. 

More and more, teachers – especially equity-minded teachers – are interested in diversifying metrics and measurements of success. This isn’t because we want to make every kid feel lovey-dovey and special; it’s because we want students to have an honest assessment of who they are and what they know. I don’t think it’ll take away the craving they – we — I – have to feel like you’re the best on day one (that’s my vice) or to have a come-from-behind victory. I do, though, think that it’ll help us to be better, more humble, more engaged learners across our lives. And, hopefully, it’ll keep people like me signing up for intermediate classes, so we can see ourselves, both our weaknesses and our successes, and know that there’s always room to grow.