The student as the Subject

I cannot give any student any new thought or ideal.  I am not the Subject while the student is the Object.  This cannot be.  The student and myself must both at the same moment be Subjects who meet together to name the world and transform it.  If I act and hope for the student to receive, the student does not act but rather reacts or responds and in the receiving does not employ his or her own will to transform reality.  The student must also think and must also act.

I am having a hard time trying to imagine this Spanish class that I will be facilitating beginning January 22nd.  The cooperating teacher, a grisled veteran of the pedagogical arts, has boiled down this course to a bolstering of grammatical forms.  To be fair, she is concerned with student participation and in linking it to meaning through a few projects that seek to hold these concepts together and lead them forward.  I tip my hat to this thinking, but I must push past the temptation to settle into her pre-established ways.  If I hope to evolve with the students and give them more of the learning as we move ahead, I must see the greater language functions more and the grammatical nuts and bolts less, or at least as cogs that help turn the larger wheel of language.  The knowing of concepts is not the use of them, and the use of them may not be a precise knowing, but which is better?