Nothing Secret

On the last Friday, while writing paragraphs on the topic "(An/The most) important person in my life", one of my students asked for spelling confirmation on the word 'secret'.

I teach English as Second Language, mostly writing and grammar, to fourteen students at Richland Community College in Dallas, Texas. One of my goals in teaching is to share joy. This can be accomplished in many ways: by having lots of parties, by celebrating each other and each other's culture, by telling jokes, and by doing most of the boring work in groups. My mantra in this is something that my teacher, Haj Ross, said to me. He was explaining his take on the above ideas when he said that "it's easier to learn with friends." This may seem to be a simple or obvious point, or a silly one, but it really is quite foundational to co-creating a classroom that has joy in it.

I don't know if "It's easier to learn with friends" is Haj's mantra; I suspect that for him it is merely an everyday truth that needs no trumpet - something he said once and may say again, but bares no sacred meaning. I want to (trumpet/*saxophone/*trombone) it here.


Creating and Sharing Joy with your Students in the Classroom:
I. Teaching is easier when learning is easier.
II. Learning is easier with friends.
III. Joy in the classroom is derived from the success of friendship, not the success of the individual.


So what does this all have to do with writing paragraphs on something as deadening boring as "The most important person in my life" or the word 'secret'? The sentence that my student discovered, that she needed to make sure was spelled right, was this:

There is nothing secret between her and me.

The 'her and me' refers to my student and her mother, who was the most important person in her life. What amazed me was that I had given her such a lame prompt and drew up out of English, her second language, such an amazing sentence.

Initially, I read the sentence, confirmed her spelling, and moved on. As I circulated the room, helping students with this and that, little problems, the phrase was inside my mouth. Up and down my throat, behind my teeth, slavering across my tongue.

There is nothing secret between her and me. What brilliance of language, my own language in the mouth of a learner. We don't know how people learn their first language, we don't really know how they learn a second language. But here was this newbie flashing forth with a bit of my domain and it struck me a mighty blow.


So I wrote it on the board and together we explored some ways the thought might unfold:

1a. There is nothing secret between her and me.
1b. There is nothing secret between me and her.
1c. There is nothing secret between us.

2a. Nothing is secret between her and me.
2b. Nothing is secret between me and her.
2c. Nothing is secret between us.

3a. Between her and me, nothing is secret.
3b. Between me and her, nothing is secret.
3c. Between us, nothing is secret.

4a. Between her and me, there is nothing secret.
4b. Between me and her, there is nothing is secret.
4c. Between us, there is nothing secret.

Between a and b of every subset, the difference seems to be primarily in focus; c, however, collapses the difference of 'her' and 'me' and seems much better. The point of the sentence, after all, is to demonstrate the smallness of the gap between two humans, using a plural pronoun categorizes them much closer than two singular ones do.

I particularly like the sets in 1 and 4 with the phrase 'there is nothing secret' rather than 2 and 3's 'nothing is secret'. While they both seem to say the same thing, I think 'there is' emphasizes that a relationship exists and the sentence is therefore categorizing the relationship. 2 and 3 both seem to offer mere negation.

For instance, I could say "Nothing is secret between me and Genghis Khan" because there is nothing at all, secret or otherwise, between us. I could also say "Nothing is special..." or "Nothing is..."

To say "There is nothing secret..." feels much more like a positive statement of the kind of relationship, rather than just negating secrets.


I'm not entirely sure the students knew how important this all was to me. We talked about the focus issues between a, b, and c; I explained my preference for 1c and 4c as above. The reason I submit this to the outside world is that this sort of honest exploration makes for much better learning, I think, than the exercises one finds in a book. There is joy and authenticity in it; even when there is failure, I feel as though we weren't drinking from the drip bottle but from a wild stream. And that is certainly a better gulp.

One important factor to note: you have to make yourself open to these sort of experiences ( events, happenings, occurrences, rabbit trails, tangents, vectors, ect.) for it to be authentic. If I had planned a few sentences the week before to try this with, I think it would have been far less joyful - unless my sentences happened to spark someone else's fire. The point is that you can't force it.

Another mantra, one I learned from my teacher Dr. Armstrong, at Stephen F. Austin State, goes thus:

Teach to the Teachable Moment.