The Successful and Famous, Lessons for this week

To start off the week, I decided to talk with my high school students about who the successful and famous people are in the world. I will admit first that I received help from the online resources of the BBC through the British Council Teaching English website. There are many helpful things on the web, but I find that the British Council website and the Michelle Henry Teaching English to Middle School student in France site are among the most helpful. Back to the distinction between famous and successful. Granted, there is a separation between what makes one famous and what makes one successful, but my students seemed to understand the difference as the class unfolded. To start off, most students said to be successful, one has to know a lot of people, do something great that is recognized by others, has a lot of money and power, etc. Together, we worked through this definition further, examining quotations by famous people such as Winston Churchill and George Bernard Shaw. Most of my students seemed to get the gist of what I was suggesting with these activities. My TSTGB students and TLA (both terminale groups) said that to be successful, one has to be able to keep going even when one fails. I wrote up on the board once today the word, "perseverance," or the ability to try harder the next time. Another aspect of success is learning from your mistakes so much that you don't repeat the same silly mistakes. My students at the lycee seemed to note this distinction well as the discussion continued.

As our lesson continued, we moved into scenarios, which explained different situations where a person looked successful but really was not. For example, a guy quits his job and builds a business that becomes a multi-million dollar enterprise, neglects his family, who in turn leave him. My students seemed to spot these 50-50 success stories quickly. They did see the one story that proved to be successful: a student is in a car accident and breaks his leg. But he fully recuperates and finishes his exams at the end of the semester with flying colors. This was an example of a success story. My students saw that successes could be small and still be of great importance. For some of my high school classes today, I asked my students to write down 4 or 5 things that they had done that were successful. Each student had something that may have been of little importance to the rest of the world but was in actuality, something great. For example, one student helped an elderly man who had fallen in the middle of the street up, called an ambulance, and assisted the older man as a first responder. I was taken aback at this. Clearly, the student had recognized this little thing to be great, because he did something for someone else with compassion and love for another person. That was another thing we talked about-- success as not self-seeking but others-focused. This was a great lesson to talk about with the terminale students, and I felt as though it really made the discussion rich and lively. (I.e: not everyone agreed, so we moved into debate mode a couple times.)

A truly enjoyable experience for a Monday that did not carry "That Monday morning feeling," all day but rather a sense of refreshment with a readiness to improve my pedagogical approaches all week long.