When the Path Can Change

For a long time, I needed to have everything fairly well under control.

The timing.
The activities.
The order in which things were going to happen.

Over the years, something has changed.

I still plan.
I have clear objectives. I know what I want to work on, especially when it comes to language, and I plan activities with those objectives in mind.

But I no longer need to control the path so much.

A few days ago, we were watching a documentary about desert animals.

And an animal appeared that none of us knew.

So we stopped.

We started looking for information.

And we got completely caught up in it.

We found interesting facts, discovered new things, and kept asking questions.

It wasn’t part of my plan.

And that’s okay.

Because while they were asking questions, searching, talking, thinking and learning, I knew we were still heading towards where I wanted to go.

And perhaps that is one of the biggest changes experience has brought to the way I teach.

I used to care much more about how we got there.
Now, what matters more to me is knowing what we’re working towards.

Are they using the language?
Are they learning?
Are we moving towards the objective?

Then, if we do three workshops to get there, we do three.

If we do two because we spend a long time talking and guessing animals, that’s okay too.

If something interesting comes up along the way and it is worth stopping for, we stop.

It doesn’t mean improvising everything.

It doesn’t mean giving up on planning.

It means understanding that planning is not the same as controlling.

And that sometimes learning happens precisely in those detours we never planned for.

Perhaps teaching is also about this: knowing where I want to go, without needing to know exactly how we’ll get there.