Pedagogy and teaching method

La promoción con materias pendientes aplaza el problema: moving a pupil up with subjects still outstanding postpones the problem. Subjects — and that is the sense of la materia an English reader will think of last, because our « matter » went in another direction entirely. Spanish runs four of our words through this one noun. It is the physicist's: la materia oscura is dark matter. It is the stuff a thing is made of, so that la materia prima is the raw material. It is what a book or a lecture is about, which we call its subject matter. And it is the subject on a school timetable, which is the sense this list needs. English keeps a fifth use for itself on top of that: « what's the matter? » asks what has gone wrong. So a teacher who renders ¿qué materia tienes ahora? word for word has not asked the class what lesson is next — he has asked them what the trouble is.