Alan Maley on creativity when teaching English language

On a visit to IATEFL last year Alan Maley spoke to us about being creative in the classroom.

[reginaldsims]

Alan Maley’s book, Drama Techniques is brilliant. The old one, and the re-print.

[reginaldsims]

yes, indeed: the ‘teacher’ ought to be not only allowed but enthusiastically encouraged to be properly *alive* to the evolving situation in the teaching encounter &, not rigidly constrained by some ponderous teaching plan concocted beforehand, to be able to *spontaneously* depart from any *predetermined* course so as to identify & exploit any opportunities for optimal *creative* engagement with important aspects of the underlying schema of the subject…from whence the deepest forms of *intrinsic* motivation come…

& then the teacher ought also to be allowed the option of not having to sit on the learners & hammer them into some instrumental retention of unrelated gobbets of information that are important only in that their regurgitation in the examination context will yield the mirage of understanding that is taken for success in the current system of compulsory education that is as if it were the pacification of the roiling host of the barbarian beyond the pales of ‘civilisation’, & renders them quiescent, passive, apathetic & indifferent to what is most needful for the facilitation of true human flourishing, & most susceptible to the blandishments diabolical of any would-be demagogue that happens to be by!

[EnglishVisualWords]

Romantic words, idealistic teaching environment but when it comes to reality, they don't make sense and that's the case.