My German class is winding to a close, and though I'm not sorry to have workbook assignments behind me, I will kind of miss some of the friends I've made in the class. (There are certainly a handful of complainers I will not miss, but who needs to talk about them?) We've gotten comfortable enough with our small class (12 students) that those with whom I regularly do "group work" have started teasing me about a) being so old and b) asking too many questions. Today's heckling was actually kind of insightful, however.
Friendly Overachieving Undergraduate #1: Have you ever tried speaking German with a cold?
Liz: No.
FOU1: It really helps your pronunciation. It's like someone was speaking Old English back in the day, and then they got a really bad sore throat, and German was born.
Liz (laughs, and says): Oh, well English and modern German both developed out of old German, so maybe someone had a surprisingly clear throat one day and decided to invent English.
FOU1: (laughs) Sounds good to me.
Military (and thus closer to my age) Undergraduate #2: Is it hard being so smart?
Liz: Huh?
MU2: You know everything. Who knows that stuff?
Liz: Oh, I had to study the history of the English language. When you've been in school as long as I have, you pick up lots of information along the way.
MU2: No. It's because you have teacher's brain. You don't even realize that you never stop teaching.
This prompted an inquiry about what he meant by "teacher's brain." He informed me that the good teachers are the curious people, and he can tell I am one of them because I ask so many "random" questions. As in,
MU2: No offense, Liz, but nobody else cares if the "green movement" originally started being called that because it was associated with Germany's Green party.
Liz: What do you mean? I always thought it was called the green movement because earthy things are green. So I was trying to figure out what was called "green" first: the movement or the party. Did you know that Germany started the green movement?
MU2: No, and I didn't care.
More laughter.
This got me thinking about to what degree my teaching is influenced by my natural curiosity about things. To be perfectly honest, one of the hardest things for me to get used to when I started teaching was realizing that other people aren't as curious as I am. It doesn't help that I live with another of the world's most curious people. I've always wanted to learn because I want to know. So it was interesting to me that the very thing which he suggested makes me a "good" teacher is also something I would identify as one of the things that makes teaching difficult for me. And I was also intrigued by his suggestion that I don't "realize" that I never stop teaching, because somewhere in the middle of the course I realized that I had been listening to my classmates' questions, realizing that they didn't understand the instructor's answer, and raising my hand to ask the question in a different way that would make the confusion more clear to the instructor so she could answer the question more clearly. I guess I just can't help it.
And then I realized, the amount of time I spent thinking about his suggestion r.e. my "teacher's brain" kind of proved his point, right?
Incidentally, today marks 2 weeks until I'm back in the classroom!
(Teacher Man is the memoir of Frank McCourt, who is probably even more famous for Angela's Ashes. It was really insightful in a realistic way, which I loved. I like stories like Dangerous Minds, the Freedom Writers, and especially Stand and Deliver, but they always seemed so pie in the sky to me that I found them more discouraging than encouraging. I could never imagine myself being that successful in the classroom. Frank McCourt, I could relate to. And I completely ripped off his idea of teaching the parts of the sentence by equating them with parts of a retractable pen... and it totally worked!)
You take after your mama....i often try to help the "teacher/instructor" make things easier to understand. It's good to be curious, just don't follow up new info with, that's interesting...it's not well received. You have several gifts and are not afraid to use them and we get the benefit!
ReplyDeleteMom, I think the reason "that's interesting" might not be well received is because "interesting" has become an empty word. It doesn't mean anything anymore. If you actually found something interesting, people expect you to explain why you found it so. Saying "that's interesting" actually comes across more like "that's not actually interesting enough for me to have anything specific to say about it."
ReplyDeletePerhaps I should also add that my instructor didn't need any help explaining things. She was great. But my classmates often asked their questions in confusing ways, and since she's a native German speaker, she wasn't able to understand their questions in the same way I could as their fellow German learner. I was careful not to step in to answer their questions myself because I know it's not my place.