I've frequently thought that everyone becomes a better student after they have had to teach something. Now I am thinking that the converse is true - being a student might help me be a better teacher. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how much my students will want to hear about my Italian lessons this fall.
I started a new batch of Italian lessons this week, which will continue through March for 30 hours total. This is much more structured than my previous lessons, with daily homework! Not only am I committing quite a bit of money to this, but I am also getting up at 6:15 in order to make it to the 7:30 AM lessons.
While I am only a few days in, a number of aspects of the learning process are very clear to me:
A teacher is needed to organize the knowledge.
Part of why I started with short term lessons was that I thought I could learn Italian on my own. I had a pile of books and some baseline knowledge - I spent time every day reviewing flashcards, completing some exercises, and/or learning new words. But this clearly wasn't working - these bits and pieces weren't helping me go out and actually talk to people.
Sure, I can memorize things on my own. But I wasn't necessarily memorizing the most important things. I could work on exercises that are "deeper practice" than simple memorization, but I was jumping around in the book. I was picking and choosing what seemed interesting and skipping ahead, rather than ensuring my foundation was strong before moving on.
A teacher is needed to provide feedback
As a Novice, I am not capable of distinguishing what is the most important things to work on. I couldn't necessarily recognize all of my own mistakes. This is obviously a big challenge in language, where my ear cannot even hear the difference between some of the sounds. But even when I could recognize my errors, I was not able to distinguish between major errors (that changed the meaning) versus the small errors that many people might make in normal speech.
The learning process is primarily based on the student doing things.
This was something I already deeply knew, but this experience continues to reinforce how fundamental this is. In my current lessons, I am spending the majority of my time reading aloud and speaking. This is hard! It is fairly easy to listen to the instructor - but that doesn't make the knowledge stick. There are a number of grammatical topics that I think I "know", but I make mistakes constantly in them when I speak (which goes back to the previous two points). Without speaking, these mistakes (and subsequent corrections) wouldn't be obvious.
Learning requires more work than the student wants to do.
I did my homework for today, of course. But, my instructor also told me I should be watching Italina TV. I, of course, insisted (in Italian!) that I don't have free time to watch TV - I work at home in the evenings. However, I did turn in the TV and set it to the news channel. I ended up hearing about the NASA discovery announcement in Italian! It is true that more exposure to Italian - and really focusing on it - would help me improve. Of course, I'd have to put more time into it.
Being a novice is awkward and frustrating and learning does not happen as fast as one wants.
I knew that my Italian wasn't great before I arrived, but I think I envisioned going home semi-fluent. This is nowhere near reasonable! I have made excellent progress on vocabulary and becoming familiar with a variety of new grammatical rules (and additional conjugations). However, my ability to quickly form sentences is about as good as it was when I took Italian about 6 years ago. I really want to wake up and be fluent in Italian, but it just is not going to happen. I can see that I am making progress, but I also see how slow I am when speaking and how few things I can easily say.
In the end, I don't know how this experience will change my teaching. Much of this agrees with the pedagogical principles that i have already used to guide my teaching. Will it help to share this experience with my students? It seems like some of them think they will master physics if I just say the right words to them in the right way - but this is of course not true. I'm sure that they will quickly get sick of hearing me talk about Italy and my leave, but maybe my class atmosphere can be a bit different if they know that my teaching techniques are influenced from my own experiences - and challenges! - as a student.
I started a new batch of Italian lessons this week, which will continue through March for 30 hours total. This is much more structured than my previous lessons, with daily homework! Not only am I committing quite a bit of money to this, but I am also getting up at 6:15 in order to make it to the 7:30 AM lessons.
While I am only a few days in, a number of aspects of the learning process are very clear to me:
A teacher is needed to organize the knowledge.
Part of why I started with short term lessons was that I thought I could learn Italian on my own. I had a pile of books and some baseline knowledge - I spent time every day reviewing flashcards, completing some exercises, and/or learning new words. But this clearly wasn't working - these bits and pieces weren't helping me go out and actually talk to people.
Sure, I can memorize things on my own. But I wasn't necessarily memorizing the most important things. I could work on exercises that are "deeper practice" than simple memorization, but I was jumping around in the book. I was picking and choosing what seemed interesting and skipping ahead, rather than ensuring my foundation was strong before moving on.
A teacher is needed to provide feedback
As a Novice, I am not capable of distinguishing what is the most important things to work on. I couldn't necessarily recognize all of my own mistakes. This is obviously a big challenge in language, where my ear cannot even hear the difference between some of the sounds. But even when I could recognize my errors, I was not able to distinguish between major errors (that changed the meaning) versus the small errors that many people might make in normal speech.
The learning process is primarily based on the student doing things.
This was something I already deeply knew, but this experience continues to reinforce how fundamental this is. In my current lessons, I am spending the majority of my time reading aloud and speaking. This is hard! It is fairly easy to listen to the instructor - but that doesn't make the knowledge stick. There are a number of grammatical topics that I think I "know", but I make mistakes constantly in them when I speak (which goes back to the previous two points). Without speaking, these mistakes (and subsequent corrections) wouldn't be obvious.
Learning requires more work than the student wants to do.
I did my homework for today, of course. But, my instructor also told me I should be watching Italina TV. I, of course, insisted (in Italian!) that I don't have free time to watch TV - I work at home in the evenings. However, I did turn in the TV and set it to the news channel. I ended up hearing about the NASA discovery announcement in Italian! It is true that more exposure to Italian - and really focusing on it - would help me improve. Of course, I'd have to put more time into it.
Being a novice is awkward and frustrating and learning does not happen as fast as one wants.
I knew that my Italian wasn't great before I arrived, but I think I envisioned going home semi-fluent. This is nowhere near reasonable! I have made excellent progress on vocabulary and becoming familiar with a variety of new grammatical rules (and additional conjugations). However, my ability to quickly form sentences is about as good as it was when I took Italian about 6 years ago. I really want to wake up and be fluent in Italian, but it just is not going to happen. I can see that I am making progress, but I also see how slow I am when speaking and how few things I can easily say.
In the end, I don't know how this experience will change my teaching. Much of this agrees with the pedagogical principles that i have already used to guide my teaching. Will it help to share this experience with my students? It seems like some of them think they will master physics if I just say the right words to them in the right way - but this is of course not true. I'm sure that they will quickly get sick of hearing me talk about Italy and my leave, but maybe my class atmosphere can be a bit different if they know that my teaching techniques are influenced from my own experiences - and challenges! - as a student.
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