Friday, February 16, 2007
From Theory to Practice
Since about the beginning of the year, I've been thinking about the future, things I like to do, things I want to do, and so forth. Despite having not taught any classes since moving back to North Carolina, thinking about teaching seems to have become an ingrained habit, and it was because I liked thinking about language acquisition that I ended up in a TESOL program anyway. As much as TESOL may have disappointed me as a discipline of study in that respect, I still have the same interests.
So anyway, I was thinking about what interests I should be pursuing more actively in my free time, and I started thinking about how my own foreign language skills are slipping a bit. One of the things that irritated me most about grad school was being unable to take foreign language classes, which had functioned as my island of academic solace in the midst of taking other, more "useful" classes ever since 6th grade.
Then I started to feel guilty. I got quite passionate during my time in Japan and at MSU about getting students to feel like English was relevant to their lives and that they could use it in their everyday lives even after they went home. I had all sorts of activities aimed at getting them to just produce language: blogging, TV journals, reading journals, watching bits of Fantasia (b/c it has no words) and then writing a description, etc., etc. But do I do any of those things on my own? Nope. What a bad example I am!
So, given that I seem to have lost most of my reading audience anyway, this seems like a fantastic time to start a blog to practice my no doubt now pitiful Spanish. Feel free to visit it, dear imaginary reader: From Theory to Practice.
Since about the beginning of the year, I've been thinking about the future, things I like to do, things I want to do, and so forth. Despite having not taught any classes since moving back to North Carolina, thinking about teaching seems to have become an ingrained habit, and it was because I liked thinking about language acquisition that I ended up in a TESOL program anyway. As much as TESOL may have disappointed me as a discipline of study in that respect, I still have the same interests.
So anyway, I was thinking about what interests I should be pursuing more actively in my free time, and I started thinking about how my own foreign language skills are slipping a bit. One of the things that irritated me most about grad school was being unable to take foreign language classes, which had functioned as my island of academic solace in the midst of taking other, more "useful" classes ever since 6th grade.
Then I started to feel guilty. I got quite passionate during my time in Japan and at MSU about getting students to feel like English was relevant to their lives and that they could use it in their everyday lives even after they went home. I had all sorts of activities aimed at getting them to just produce language: blogging, TV journals, reading journals, watching bits of Fantasia (b/c it has no words) and then writing a description, etc., etc. But do I do any of those things on my own? Nope. What a bad example I am!
So, given that I seem to have lost most of my reading audience anyway, this seems like a fantastic time to start a blog to practice my no doubt now pitiful Spanish. Feel free to visit it, dear imaginary reader: From Theory to Practice.
Labels: language, Spanish, teaching theory
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So are you still going to maintain this blog as well? I hope you are. I'll try to read the Spanish one as well.(By the way, thanks for the Tome Reader e-mail; Josh and I spent a long time looking and laughing at that blog.)
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