Lessons in life

Sometimes events change us and shift our focus onto issues and people that may not feature prominently in our thoughts in any normal week. But this last week has been anything but normal. On Monday I was asked to buy ingredients and then oversee (with four students) the preparation and cooking of enough fish pies and vegetable pies to feed our small school on Thursday. I'd never cooked for 20+ people before, so today's blog entry was due to be called 'Hey, bring me more fish!', and would record the benefits of task-based language learning as we put our culinary skills to the test – completely through the medium of English.

So on Thursday morning I made my way to school for a morning of cooking. I was psyched up; I knew who was doing what and by when. The meal was a triumph, as evidenced by one girl who needed the English translation of the word meaning to scrape off, enabling her to ensure that none of the residual mashed potato or fish bits would be thrown away. But these events had been tempered earlier by the shocking news that a former colleague (a fellow language teacher) had died. It was decided that the school would be closed on Friday morning so that as a team, all members of staff could go to the funeral, joined by older students who wished to attend. I was moved when, during the service, my late colleague's husband and her sisters played one of my favourite pieces of music – the Adagio of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A Major. The service was conducted bilingually in German and French and it was respectful.

And as we left the church to return to school, the head asked what food we had with us for lunch. Well, there was one fish pie left in the fridge – we'd made 10 pies altogether. There was some mashed potato left... and some bread. With the addition of some cheese, we then had enough for a shared meal. Eleven of us ate at the staff table and discussed, in English, everything from weekend plans to fairy tales that I'd never heard of. The rule for everyone at school is that English is the medium of communication when I'm around.

The culture at the school is non-hierarchical. Everyone addresses each other by their first name. Pupils and staff work in mutually supportive ways to reach group objectives as well as personal goals. This is very different from my own schooling in the UK. When was the last time you cooked a meal with your teachers/pupils to feed the whole school? When was the last time you had a communal meal with your teachers/pupils immediately after attending the funeral of a colleague? When was the last time you did either of these things in a foreign language? Shared experiences of all kinds do bring people closer together. But where I work, we generally don't learn for tests with disputed grading systems; we learn for life.