The real message and teaching implications: "I went to the cinema"

After a long week taking exams and coping with failure, there's something I'd like to share... In fact, what I trully want is to shaKe... my mind and other teachers' as well. Yesterday, I found myself in an akward situation being even rude to a workmate.

I asked a student "What did you do last week?" - a pretty common question when taking exams during long hours and without much which has not been said before - The girl without hesiting quickly answered "I went to the cinema!" to what I reacted with another question -pretty normal by the way...- "What did you watch? Silence was the answer... I asked again and even change the question to "What's the name of the film?" when a workmate quickly adviced the student with the so common suggestion "Invent!" I must say I may have overreacted... but I told her "I hate when they "invent!" Then, in Spanish I asked the girl if she had actually been to the cinema and she said she hadn´t... All this was the starting point for this post. I don't know whether people would agree or not, I just need to shed light upon my own thoughts about this and relate it to what I was taught.

Some questions come to my mind... Aren't we supposed to foster communication through meaningful learning? What does "meaningful" mean? What about background knowledge and experience? Yesterday I felt many coworkers talk about all this without trully believe in what they say. I felt I was the butt of a joke as in April's fools since many times students are taught the so common "I went to the cinema" so as to get rid of the exam situation quickly...

I fully agree with working with chunks... but this is certainly not doing so. This is telling students: "Let me give you a tool for cheating on me and then I'll pretend you succeded!" As I see it, doing this has to do with training students to just pass exams without learning taking place and I refuse to do that! I haven't chosen teaching if I were to do this kind of things. Maybe I'm being too rude... but the reasons I was given yesterday for such decision was "We don't have enough time to teach them everything we are supposed to teach them" (or something of the sort, the idea was that 45 minutes per lesson is not enough) I didn't know professionalism has to do with more or less time alloted...

All in all, I'm fed up with teachers complaining in staff rooms about students and there's nothing we can do about them, that they don't like studying, they don't have habits or they don't even care! But what are WE doing about it? Teaching them how to cheat and telling them in a subtle way learning doesn't matter? Shouldn't we change the so common "Invent" for the more honest "Lie"?

SOME FOOD FOR THOUGHT...

At the moment I'm reading a book about teaching reading which starts this way: "There’s an old saying: “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” (...)"