Books and Essays on Education

Charles Sandy is a writer of educational materials, essays, and poetry as well as professor of Humanities at a Japanese University. He lectures widely throughout the world on English Language Teaching and Education and has directed English language programs and taught in universities, language institutes, and teacher-training centers in Japan, the United States, Korea, and Brazil. He's written several components of the Interchange series, is co-author of the Passages series, and recently completed a new series for young learners called Connect with Jack Richards and Carlos Barbison.

Most of these essays originally appeared on ELTNews and remain available there as part of the Think Tank column. For a wider perspective, please visit that site to read the fine and regular writing of my colleagues at large -- Marc Helgesen, Peter Viney, Curtis Kelly, and Setsuko Toyama
Educational Rebellion, System-Wobbling, and Agitation My first act of revolution in an educational setting took place when I was a six-year-old kindergarten student and quite consciously decided not to follow the teacher’s instructions. We’d been given a worksheet about barnyard animals and explicit directions to color the barn red, the donkey grey, and the chicken white. I was fine with the grey donkey, but the rest of it made no sense to me. I grew up in a house with a black barn across the street and had, as a pet, a chocolate brown chicken. What choice did I have? I colored the chicken brown and the barn black, and this simple act of rebellion cost me only a recess, which seemed a fine price to pay for autonomy and realism.
Free on A Long Tether: Project Work in Language Classes A former colleague of mine once remarked quite seriously that he thought it was a mistake to give students interesting things to do in class when they were just going to graduate and go on to spend their life involved in drudgery.
Towards Critical Thought in the Language Class Anyone who’s spent much time with other people, in or out of classrooms, lives daily – on personal, community, and global levels -- with the consequences of the lack of deep, thorough, critical thought. We witness it in the student who decides not to turn in that final paper, in the colleague who responds to criticism with an angry emotional outburst, in the partner who thinks no one will ever find out or be hurt by his moral lapse, in the world-leader who resorts to name-calling and schoolyard behavior and calls this debate.
Stories That Could Be True –Fostering Imagination in the Classroom Imagine you are living in a foreign country. Imagine it’s the middle of the night. You sit alone at your desk, surrounded by the small things you love: an old book signed by a favorite poet, a ceramic cup given to you by someone you love. Here’s a child’s drawing, a seashell, a polished stone from another country where you once lived. For a moment you pick it up and go there in your mind. It is 2 in the morning. The only sound when you lift your hands from the keyboard is the ticking of the old clock on your desk. You pause to look at it and remember the day it was given to you, what you thought, how much you felt. Go ahead. Pick it up. Feel the weight of it in your hands. Bring it to your ear and close your eyes. Can you hear it? It is the only sound there is.
The Nice Approach To Language Teaching Years ago when I was working as a program coordinator for a vocational language college in Tokyo I wrote a manifesto for their teachers’ manual which Ted Rodgers rather dismissively called “The Nice Approach.” At its core was a philosophy encouraging teachers to treat students as whole people with valid and various needs, motivations, and desires rather than as language acquisition devices or charges to test, grade, and control. I went on to encourage teachers to create warm friendly classrooms and to try to be open and approachable. I even went so far as to suggest that a good teacher is no different in the classroom than he or she is out of it.

Poetry and Art


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