Learning new skills

I’ve recently realized it’s been a while since the last time I tried to learn something completely new. Something that involved rules, a sequence to follow, and some logical thinking. It hit me when my dad tried to teach me how to play Hearts. Going through this painful experience made me think of teaching grammar.

We wanted to have some nice family time and since my dad is an avid player, I thought it could actually be fun to learn from him. I became a learner for about 5 minutes. It took me 20 seconds to switch off and decide I’m just not getting it. Things picked up slightly once we started the game and I saw it in practice but my initial lack of confidence, feeling a bit intimidated and having to actually ask which cards I should play killed the joy of the game and made me feel, well, dumb.

So, am I inherently unable to understand and process rules to a game I’ve never played (or anything similar to it) or is my dad a really bad teacher? Might be both. I’d have probably written this whole experience off as something I don’t want to repeat if it hadn’t been for one thing: it made me think about the way I explain grammar to my students.

I thought about it some more and tried to break it down in order to find the reason of this Hearts fiasco (ruling out my own stupidity and my dad’s bad pedagogical skills 🙂 ). Here it goes.

Why didn’t I get the game?

• I’ve had almost no experience with card games (the last one I played was the one called War, when I was around 7 or so);
• the instructions were given to me really fast;
• the instructions contained a lot of game-specific jargon, words whose meaning I didn’t understand (and now I can’t even repeat);

Why did my teacher fail to explain the game to me?

• He didn’t want to waste time on the theory and jumped right into practice thinking I’d get it once I see it;
• he explained it to me as if I had already been familiar with similar card games and understood the terminology (while all I got was the queen of spades);
• he couldn’t understand how I wasn’t getting it;
• in order to push the game forward, he was telling me what to do when I was lost;

Pretty obvious reasons and pretty basic mistakes on the part of the T. My dad, mind you, is not a professional teacher, though. I am and I sadly identified ALL of these problems occasionally present in my own teaching, especially when it comes to grammar:

• ignoring the fact that, regardless of my students’ level, it was the first foreign language they were learning;
• ignoring the fact that none of my student to date (!!!) has been a language teacher / a linguist/ somebody who professionally deals with language acquisition on a day-to-day language;
• trying to fast forward and skip the theory (assuming my students would find it too boring) which might work with kids but not necessarily with all adult learners;
• throwing my students to the deep end of the pool assuming that they are going to deduce the rules and see the what, why and how;
• ignoring the fact that my students might not feel confident about terms like “adverb”, “pronoun” or “preposition” even in their L1
• assuming that repeating some explanation more than twice means patronizing my students;
• finding it hard to understand that they aren’t getting it and put myself in my students’ shoes;
• finding it hard to understand that they way I myself have been learning foreign languages might not be the best way to teach my students

Wow, that’s quite a list and sounds like confessions of the worst teacher ever. Then again, it’s given me so much to think about and helped me decide how I’d like to improve my teaching. Now, that I’ve started teaching many 1-1 classes, I can’t imagine any better circumstances in which to:

• slow down and stop assuming ANYTHING about the learner;
• give my students more thinking time;
• forget about how I’ve been learning English, Spanish or German as it’s irrelevant here;
• use more concept checking  in order to eliminate redundant explanations;
• hold on to the feeling of not understanding a word of what my dad was saying when he explained Hearts so that I empathize more with my students;

A lot to look forward to in 2016!