During a plenary talk at a major ELT conference in South Korea last year, David Nunan targeted (in nothing short of disparaging terms) "backpacker" teachers. In a bizarre attempt to make his argument entertaining and persuasive, he compared teachers to surgeons and asked the audience how they would feel about the prospect of having an "unqualified surgeon" operating on them.
Let's give Mr. Nunan the benefit of the doubt for a moment here and explore his analogy a little further...
I've known Mr. Nunan to lead major workshops and even plenaries about appropriate methods and techniques for teaching English to young learners. According to his own blog, his Go for it! series for teenagers has also passed the 1,000,000,000 (count the 0s!) mark in sales, making him (his words) "the world's leading textbook author."
The interesting thing there is that, as far as I am aware, Mr. Nunan doesn't actually have any real experience teaching English to either young learners or teenagers. Even if there is some experience in these fields, I find it hard to believe there has been much (if any) of it in the past couple of decades at least.
And I mean real experience. Not wandering into classrooms as a VIP celebrity observer, nor as a white-coated researcher with a clipboard. I mean planning out a whole term of lessons, dealing with the day-to-day challenges of teaching kids and teenagers (not to mention dealing with their parents), and managing so many different cultural and contextual issues all at once that, if they were journals, it would be like having a year's worth of subscriptions delivered on your teaching desk each day.
So here's the question then:
How would you feel knowing the detailed surgical procedures being drawn up for an operation on your children were written by a surgeon who had never really conducted the operation himself, and/or were only really based on his general opinion having observed other surgeons doing it in quick drop-by visits?
Well, I don't know about you, but I'd be somewhat more inclined to trust the guidance of that "untrained" surgeon who had gone out to the wild frontiers armed with little more than a medicine kit and learned to really save lives - hundreds of them, on a regular basis.
But then again, this all goes to show that it's probably nothing short of ridiculous to compare teachers to surgeons.
:-S
