4.1 Teaching Strategy
4.1.5 Summary of the Teaching Strategies
Mr. Keating fully exerted his power of being a teacher to lecture with the knowledge he possessed about literature and the embedded meaning. Mr. Keating’s understanding toward the poems, namely To the virgins, to make much of time, O Me!
O Life!, and so forth, is the foundation and source of his lecturing and interpretations
containing life educational meaning. He taught students lessons that were derived from poems such as “seize the day,” “do not be restricted by the conventions,” and“people must constantly look at things in different perspectives.” In addition, Mr.
Keating himself played an important role in imparting knowledge to students.
Teacher’s role is lecturing, guiding, and being a mentor for students. He fulfilled the responsibility of being a teacher, providing knowledge both in books and lives, and further wrapped those wisdom up with experiential learning and IRF model, making it more relevant and accessible to students. Mr. Keating’s viewpoints and the extent that he considered himself authorized would influence the consequence of his anticipatory discourse. As he deeply believed in the lessons extracted from those poems, he used boosters both in language and other modes of communication to reinforce the power of encouraging in most of his speech, which had profound influence on his students.
To conclude this chapter, an example can wrap up the two parts of findings. The effects of boosters in Mr. Keating’s utterances and the influence of Mr. Keating’s teaching to students can be perfectly demonstrated by an extract of his interaction with Todd. Todd Anderson originally was a timid and shy boy. His strict parents put most of their emphasis and caring on his genius brother and had unreasonable expectation on Todd to have excellent performance as his brother had done; as a result, Todd barely had any confidence in himself. At the beginning of the story, Todd was too diffident to tell Mr. Nolan that he wanted to join rowing club when Mr. Nolan assigned extracurricular activities. However, after taught by Mr. Keating, Todd
became more confident, and he was even the first student speaking up and showing appreciation for Mr. Keating, calling him O Captain My Captain. Todd’s transformation from a boy lacking self-confidence and fearing to speak up in public to a man having the courage to express himself and step out to be the initiator is perfectly displayed in one excerpt of classroom discourse. This teacher-student interaction is a nearly perfect demonstration of IRF, which could guide us to see the discourse strategy Mr. Keating adopted and the following reaction the strategy aroused.
The extracted discourse displays how Mr. Keating guided his student, Todd Anderson, to improvise a poem in class. According to Todd’s responses and Mr.
Keating’s intention, the discourse could be separated to three stages, and the three-stage discourse plays as not only a turning point for Todd’s later development but a miniature of his overall transformation from the beginning to the end in the novel. It is very important to point out beforehand that Mr. Keating didn’t use a lot of booster words or lexical items to convey his idea in this extract, so multimodal approaches are taken into practice to make up for the gap between lexical items and nonverbal information.
Text 4.9 shows the first stage. In Stage 1, in the face of Mr. Keating’s initiating questions, Todd replied him only with non-verbal responses, nodding and shaking his head, implying the lack of confidence. Through Mr. Keating’s previous observation and Todd’s reaction here, Mr. Keating provided a feedback saying that “Mr. Anderson
believes that everything he has inside of him is worthless and embarrassing.” Here,
Mr. Keating spoke for Todd and he should have used hedges since it’s impossible for him to tap into Todd’s mind and know his thoughts accurately. However, he used“believe” and “everything” which are booster words showing confidence and certainty.
His intention may be to reveal Todd’s hidden fear and force him to face it, for which booster can work.
Text 4.9
Todd’s attitude and mental struggle can be observed better through movie than through the description in the novel. Table 4.8.1 to Table 4.8.3 showed the transcription and description of the scene corresponding to the Stage 1 of Todd Anderson’s transformation. In this part, we focused on Todd’s reaction toward Mr.
Keating’s initiate and interpreted his psychological situation through physical clues.
First, as Mr. Keating talked to Todd and asked him to read his poem, though Todd stared straight at Mr. Keating, he frowned and his facial expression was tensed, showing his fear and nervousness. When Todd responded to Mr. Keating and confessed that he didn’t write a poem, he winked rapidly and lowered his head to avoid eye-contact with Mr. Keating. This is the sign of feeling guilty and afraid. Mr.
Keating accounted for Todd’s failure to write a poem as a result that Todd felt himself
“embarrassing and worthless.” As Mr. Keating expressed his comments, Todd looked apparently uneasy in his seat with rapid winking, and head lowered and turned away from Mr. Keating. Those physical signs manifest Todd’s agony for Mr. Keating’s revelation of his inner fear. It may be able to be inferred from the description in the
novel that Todd was too insecure to say a word, but from the movie we could find that Todd was not only insecure but also in agony and nervousness. He was nearly immersed in negative emotions. All his reaction implying negative mental state was derived from the failure to write a poem which, from the view of Mr. Keating, was because Todd didn’t see the value in himself and refused self-expression.
Table 4.8.1 Multimodal Approaches: Stage 1 (1)
Speech Scenes Facial expression Kinetic action Proxemics
Mr. Keating:
Table 4.8.2 Multimodal Approaches: Stage 1 (2)
Speech Scenes Facial expression Kinetic action Proxemics
Todd:
Table 4.8.3 Multimodal Approaches: Stage 1 (3)
Speech Scenes Facial expression Kinetic action Proxemics
Mr. Keating:
Mr. Anderson thinks that everything inside of him is worthless and embarrassing.
Isn't that right, Todd? Isn't that your worst fear?
Todd Face fell
Wore a grimace
Kept winking rapidly, and then looked down
Sometimes closed his eyes
Eyes floated
Avoided having direct eye-contact with Mr. Keating
Head turned away from Mr. Keating, and then lowered
Sighed
x
In the next stage, Todd was asked to do a yawp on the stage. The interaction is presented in Figure 2 below. At first, Todd was reluctant to do this activity. In the movie, as Mr. Keating made the command, Todd looked away from Mr. Keating and
winked rapidly (see Text 4.10). Mr. Keating walked toward Todd, reducing the distance between them, and pushed him on his arm and back to urge him to go to the front. Mr. Keating’s physical acts here functioned as booster urging people to do something without spaces for argument or rejection. Todd’s first response to Mr.
Keating’s initiate is barely audible and filled with confusion, which was definitely not what Mr. Keating expected to hear as a “barbaric yawp.” As a follow-up, Mr. Keating repeated his request, indicating Todd’s failure to meet the standard for a barbaric yawp and a second chance for him. In the following moves, Mr. Keating kept using imperative mood as boosters to encourage him to make fiercer and fiercer sound gradually and forced him to physically yell at the end. During the process, we could found that Mr. Keating’s use of booster left no space for Todd to step back, forcing Todd to break the barrier in himself. After the interaction with Mr. Keating, Todd started to have verbal responses rather than voiceless head nodding and shaking.
Text 4.10
With multimodal approaches, Mr. Keating’s and Todd’s body language also speaks a lot (refer to Table 4.9.1 to Table 4.9.3). On the stage, Todd’s eyes were not fixed and he didn’t’ stand facing the class but turned slightly away from the class. His face fell, looking reluctant. After he did a barely audible “yawp,” Mr. Keating took a
large step toward Todd as he evaluated Todd’s response (e.g. That’s a mouse.) and asked for a another yawp (e.g. Come on! Louder!). Mr. Keating stood behind Todd but approached to Todd quickly when he asked him to do it again. The sudden shrink of distance together with the lexical resources, including the imperative moods and short phrases, worked as boosters to push and rush Todd. As for Todd, he turned to face Mr. Keating when he did a yawp. With Mr. Keating’s compelling and aggressive behaviors, Todd expressed the sign of impatience by rolling his eyes and finally yelled at Mr. Keating.
Table 4.9.1 Multimodal Approaches: Stage 2 (1)
Speech Scenes Facial expression Kinetic action Proxemics
Mr. Keating:
Table 4.9.2 Multimodal Approaches: Stage 2 (2)
Speech Scenes Facial expression Kinetic action Proxemics
Mr. Keating:
Table 4.9.3 Multimodal Approaches: Stage 2 (3)
Speech Scenes Facial expression Kinetic action Proxemics
Mr. Keating:
In the final stage, we can observe how Mr. Keating guided Todd and pushed him to dig out his potential (see Text 4.11). At first, Todd was required to describe the picture of Walt Whitman hung on the wall. Similar to the former stage, imperatives as boosters were used to intrigue responses. The differences lie in the content of Mr.
Keating’s utterances. Repetition, questions (e.g. What kind of madman?), and concrete commands (e.g. Close your eyes. Describe what you see.) function to elicit more language production from Todd. The follow-up move and the initiate of the next exchange are highly overlapped. The third move serves as initiate of the following exchange simultaneously in the form of evaluation and command. For example, “use
your imagination” implies that the previous answer is not satisfactory and another
response is implicitly required; thus the same utterance is a comment and a command at the same time to ask Todd to say something more. In addition, the interaction wastensed and sped up with short phrases like “Answer,” “Quickly,” “Now,” “Go on,”
driving Todd to answer nearly with his instinct.
Text 4.11
Taking elements other than lexical and phraseological ones into consideration, we could reinforce our findings above by observing Mr. Keating’s boosters accomplished with physical acts, and the process of Todd’s transformation.
Transcription and description of the movie scene is presented in Table 4.10.1 to 4.10.7 In the movie, after the yawp, Todd attempted to get off the stage but was stopped by Mr. Keating. Mr. Keating stood beside him and stretched his arms around Todd’s shoulder to show his encouragement and stop Todd from escaping. Mr. Keating then made the command, describing the picture of Walt Whitman. Todd’s physical reaction here was rapid winking, but he was less frowned. This reaction could be interpreted that Todd tried hard to think but was less agonized than before. Then, Mr. Keating circled around Todd with close proximity and simultaneously had evaluation to Todd’s responses and made commands. According to Mr. Keating’s evaluation and
commands, Todd modified his responses. Also during the process, he looked at Mr.
Keating and traced his movement by slightly turning the upper body. Finally after Todd produced a satisfactory response “a sweaty-toothed madman,” Mr. Keating praised him standing face to face with him. Suddenly, Mr. Keating asked him to close the eyes and walked toward to cover his eyes with hands. With his hands covering Todd’s eyes, Mr. Keating continued to guide him to have further descriptions and enrich the poem (e.g. That’s excellent. Now give him action. Make him do something.) Later Mr. Keating’s hand left Todd’s eyes but still stood very close to him. While the class laughed, Todd’s eyes opened for a short time but were immediately closed by Mr.
Keating’s hand again. Mr. Keating drew his attention back to the poem, and after Todd started again, he left Todd alone on the stage and squatted in front of him. Todd at first still frowned tightly and his face looked tensed due to the laughter from the class, but gradually he relaxed. As he finished the poem, he opened the eyes looking at Mr.
Keating, seemingly stunned for a few seconds, and smiled. The facial expression was completely different compared to the previous stages. Mr. Keating approached to Todd and leant his forehead against Todd’s, telling him not to forget this experience.
This is a booster to show the high degree of Mr. Keating’s recognition and to increase the strength of his words, having Todd remember the experience.
Table 4.10.1 Multimodal Approaches: Stage 3 (1)
Speech Scenes Facial expression Kinetic action Proxemics
Mr. Keating:
Table 4.10.2 Multimodal Approaches: Stage 3 (2)
Speech Scenes Facial expression Kinetic action Proxemics
Mr. Keating:
Table 4.10.3 Multimodal Approaches: Stage 3(3)
Speech Scenes Facial expression Kinetic action Proxemics
Mr. Keating:
Table 4.10.4 Multimodal Approaches: Stage 3 (4)
Speech Scenes Facial expression Kinetic action Proxemics
Todd:
Table 4.10.5 Multimodal Approaches: Stage 3 (5)
Speech Scenes Facial expression Kinetic action Proxemics
Mr. Keating:
Table 4.10.6 Multimodal Approaches: Stage 3 (6)
Speech Scenes Facial expression Kinetic action Proxemics
Todd:
Table 4.10.7 Multimodal Approaches: Stage 3 (7)
Speech Scenes Facial expression Kinetic action Proxemics
Mr. Keating:
This three-stage discourse serves as an excellent conclusion to the first category of this chapter covering two parts. On one hand, in this series of teacher-student interaction, Mr. Keating kept pushing Todd with verbal booster devices to break through constraint in himself and express the very first idea that pumps into his mind without thinking too much. In addition, Mr. Keating employed spatial proximity and physical touch to achieve the effects of booster. From Todd’s change of facial expression and physical acts, we could observe that he turned from being overwhelmed by nervousness and agony to making efforts on thinking and expressing himself confidently. At the end, Todd successfully improvised a poem in class, showing his potential and foretelling his change from then on. On the other hand, from the view of experiential learning, Mr. Keating had Todd create a poem himself.
Through the process, he could experience the feelings of making a poem and find his own potential and confidence. This experience later contributed to his active creation of a poem and reading it publicly in the meeting, which should be delayed future event from the view of the anticipatory discourse model (referring to Figure 4.6).
4.2 Life Education: Comparison and Contrast of the Two Stories, DPS and FOC
From the first part of this chapter focusing on Mr. Keating’s teaching strategy,we have had an overall understating about how he taught and students’ reaction. The findings could serve as a model for those concerned about LE to know how to teach.
However, there is one vital problem to adopt the pedagogical approaches directly to life education: one of the main characters, Neil, committed suicide at the end. At first sight, we may intuitively accuse Mr. Keating of causing Neil’s death and challenge the positive effects of Mr. Keating’s teaching strategy on students. To figure out whether Mr. Keating’s teaching is suitable as a model of LE, we include another movie, Front of the Class (叫我第一名, FOC), which contains similar teaching strategies as Mr. Keating’s in one of the scene that worked as a turning point for the main character’s life in our analysis to evaluate Mr. Keating’s teaching approaches and what makes the two story different in terms of the outcome.
Bradley Cohen, the main character in FOC that suffered from Tourette syndrome, encountered a lot of difficulties when he was a student, and challenges kept following him even after he grew up and worked as a teacher. This character could be compared and contrasted with two characters in DPS: 1) Neil, who killed himself and made DPS a tragedy, and 2) Mr. Keating, who were praised and expected by the school and students’ parents but failed his career and was expelled from school at the end. On one hand, when Bradley was still a student, there was one teacher, the principal of the school, helped him deal with teachers’ and students’ negative impression on him and clarified their misunderstanding about his sudden yell and unusual jerk. Moreover, it was the principal’s act that day decisive for him to recollect his self-esteem and lead to his decision to work on education. Here, we found three things in common in the two stories in DPS and Bradley in FOC. First, they both have one teacher rendering them encouragement and posing profound influences on their life. Second, the two teachers both applied similar approaches to conveyed the messages. On the other hand, when he grew up, Bradley as teacher confronted challenges from school
administration, his colleagues, and students’ parents, which were also the problems Mr. Keating faced. The reasons make Bradley of two roles, as student and as teacher, lead to relatively positive ending but negative for Neil and Mr. Keating will be analyzed and elucidated in the following paragraphs.
4.2.1 Bradley as Student: Evaluation of Mr. Keating’s Teaching and Comparison with Neil
In FOC, while the principal discovered Bradley’s dilemma in school, he took the opportunity to educate teachers and students about Tourette syndrome and to be empathetic. According to the former findings about Mr. Keating’s strategy, we found similarity between the two teachers’ strategy. From the view of experiential learning, he educated people after the school’s orchestra concert where Bradley uncontrollably produced noises again. Experiencing the noise made by Bradley (concrete experience), they first felt hateful to Bradley (reflective observation). However, after the principal asked Bradley to stand onstage and informed people the causes of his behavior, they started to understand that he didn’t mean to do it (abstract conceptualization). Then, they were willing to show their empathy and stood up clapping to manifest their support to him (active experimentation). As for Bradley, this event (concrete experience) made him upset at first but turned out to be a happy ending (reflective observation). This experience dawned on him the capability of education of making change on children (abstract conceptualization), and from then on, he had been sure that he were going to be a teacher (active experimentation). In addition, in regard to the model of anticipatory discourse which was presented in Figure 4.1, the principal’s approach also coincides with Mr. Keating’s. The principal was open-minded to students, so he was willing to talk to Bradley and understood his sickness. As he possessed the knowledge about Tourette syndrome, he conveyed the messages to
students and teachers that Bradley didn’t make the noise on purpose, hoping teachers and students to accept Bradley. They later showed their approval by clapping (immediate future event). Consequently, Bradley started to view his own sickness positively and made a decision to be a teacher in the future (delayed future event).
With the two theoretical concepts, experiential learning and anticipatory discourse, it was verified that Neil and Bradley were taught with similar teaching strategy.
Therefore, we could presume that the problem of Neil’s death is not on Mr. Keating’s teaching but on other personal factors since Bradley receive similar teaching as Neil and had positive results (see Figure 4.2). In the following sections, we compare Neil and Bradley to see what make the differences, explicitly on the challenges they encountered and how they dealt with them.
Figure 4.2 Factors Influence Student-Bradley’s and Neil’s Development
4.2.1.1 Challenges Student Bradley Encountered
Since childhood, Bradley had encountered many challenges in his life due to his Tourette syndrome. Because of the rareness of the disease, most people could not understand his weird behaviors and thought that he was naughty and clowning. Not being accepted, Brad suffered from the indifference and meanness of people around
him when he was little, mostly caused by his father’s impatience, peer bully, and school teachers’ outrages for his disrupting the class. With the assistance of the transcripts and the movie (retrieved from
http://ffilms.org/front-of-the-class-2008/),
him when he was little, mostly caused by his father’s impatience, peer bully, and school teachers’ outrages for his disrupting the class. With the assistance of the transcripts and the movie (retrieved from