Caveat: Teachable

Teaching is important. I found this interesting article reflecting on new reasons why.

I've been feeling kind of inadequate as a teacher, lately. And a little bit rudderless as to how to improve. I have good classes and bad ones, good days and bad ones, but how much I plan or prepare for any given day or lesson seems utterly unrelated to whether they go well or badly. So what's going on?

Today, little Jinyong had  paper cup of green tea, to which he had added a square of chocolate - as only an innovative 7 year old can do - he called it "choco-cha." Then, somehow, this concoction ended up on the floor of my classroom. The hectic process of cleaning this up discombubulated the routine, and I never recovered my stride. It was a terrible class.

Well, anyway.

Comments

[Bob]

Hey Jared,

Thanks for the link to such fascinating articles on teaching! They got me thinking about the role of imitation in language learning, and in learning to play a musical instrument, or learning to sing. Having taught singing to kids as well as adults, it's notable how much more efficient imitation is with kids. For some reason most music teachers employ a lot more analytical explanations with adult students, though adults learn by imitation as well--perhaps all of us music teachers should take a cue from language teachers and rely more on imitation when working with, say, college students.

I also had a thought--only tangentially related to the topic of this post--about your frustration in learning Korean. It occurred to me that you may have the wrong goal in mind. Maybe you're a linguist first, and a polyglot second (though it's a close second). Obviously, you have already have learned an enormous about about Korean--just like you know quite a bit about so many other languages, such as Dakota, Welsh, Arabic, or ancient Sumerian (some of my personal favorites from your resume). Even though you probably couldn't carry on a conversation in any of those languages, that doesn't diminish the value to you of having studied them. Your commitment to Korean and your investment in it is, of course, greater, but I don't think you should discount the enormous knowledge you already have about it in terms of linguistics, as opposed to fluency.

You could probably take a year off from teaching and simply enroll in an intensive Korean language course and master the language. (I suppose that might create visa problems for you, however.) In that case--to return to the original topic of your post--you'd probably be learning more by imitation, rather than by analysis. But you wouldn't ever want to give up on the analytical side of your fascination with Korean, or any other language, would you?

Well, for what it's worth, that's my thought for the evening.

Cheers!

Bob