“What on Earth are they?” Esther asked me.

We were moving in together and I was carrying a big box full of unopened letters.

“Bank statements,” I replied.

“Why have you got a box full of unopened bank statements?” she asked, looking rather confused.

“Erm…because they’re important and you have to keep them,” I replied, with a tone of voice which implied that I thought she was crazy not to know this.

I mean it’s obvious, isn’t it? Everyone keeps their bank statements…don’t they?!

The conversation continued for a few minutes until I finally realised that I was in fact the crazy one.

I’d been saving every bank statement I’d ever received since I opened my first account when I was 10.

One bank statement every couple of weeks. For 18 years…

You do the math.

Needless to say, once I realised what I was doing was crazy, the box went straight into the recycling bin, and I felt much lighter.

Why had I been saving these bank statements without ever questioning why I was doing it?

My dad is a retired accountant. I have this memory of him sitting at his desk, working through a pile of papers full of numbers. I remember seeing a few envelopes with some papers hanging out and asked him what they were.

“They’re bank statements. They’re really important, I have to save them.”

And so, when I opened my first bank account and received my first statement, I remembered my wise father’s words and put it away in a safe place. And the next one. And the next one…

Of course my dad needed to save them. That was his job. I didn’t know that, though. All I knew was that bank statements were important, and you had to save them. So I did.

I never stopped to consider my actions, even many years later when I should have known better. I’d always done it, so I carried on doing it.

Many years later, while travelling in Thailand, I remember seeing a big elephant with a chain around its ankle. The chain was about 3 metres long, and was attached to a small post that was stuck in the ground. The elephant was more than strong enough to pull the post out of the ground and go wherever it wanted to.

But it didn’t.

It walked around the 3 metre radius that the length of the chain gave it.

I asked a local why it didn’t just pull the post out of the ground and walk away.

“It’s the same post as when it was a baby. It will try to escape when it’s small but it’s not strong enough. After a while it just thinks it can’t escape and stops trying.”

The chain blocks the body when it’s a baby, and blocks the mind when it’s an adult.

There are so many things that we do, without ever thinking about if they’re actually the best way to do them. Or if they even make sense.

Let’s take a look at a typical classroom environment.

A bunch of tables, students sitting on their chairs in silence, copying what the teachers tells them to copy. This is how we typically teach in a school classroom.

Has anybody stopped to ask why we do it in this way?

Really, we have to ask why we started doing it in this way.

Essentially, we started teaching like this because it was considered the best way to control a group of children. NOT because it yielded the best results.

OK. If that’s how they treated children in the past, I don’t really care. I’m not interested. I am, however, interested in knowing why we still continue to use this method, even though we know it doesn’t give the best results.

I suppose we’re just stuck in our ways. Just like the elephant.

Progress is being made in kids’ schools. They’re slowly starting to introduce a project-based learning style that moves away from the classic “sit down, shut up, write what I tell you to write” that we’ve been using for centuries, simply because the brain doesn’t learn in that way. Especially in children. It’s just crazy.

In English academies, they realised years ago that real communication and conversations are the way to really improve. The trouble is that they do these activities in a classroom environment, directed by a teacher.

It’s not really a conversation. It’s a bit forced and unnatural.

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But anyway, we’re making progress, and slowly removing the chains from teachers’ and learners’ ankles.

I’m much more in favour of the learners taking more control in the classroom and directing the class as opposed to the teacher.

Who knows the real needs of the learner best? The learner, of course!

Ask yourself what your weaknesses are, your strengths; what skills you are good at and what skills you feel you need to improve. Ask yourself this question: “What do I not completely understand in English?”

The answer to that question – which should be a long list – is your learning programme.

These are the things you go out and learn. Get on the Internet to find the answer, speak to a native speaker and ask them. You can even email me and ask me.

I’m nice like that.

Then find more things that you don’t know or understand, and learn those.

These things will be the best and most important things you can learn.

When you finish reading this post, take a pen and paper, answer the above questions, and write a long list of things to learn. Then, spend the rest of the week learning those things until my next post is out, when you can learn something else that you didn’t know before.

Do that and you will have learnt things that are both useful AND relevant.

I’ll leave you now. I think I just heard the postman arrive.

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