Teaching: a journey through life

I have always looked upon teaching as a fascinating and unpredictable journey in more than one way. For me it has been a journey of self-discovery, which has brought me out of my shell and provided me with plenty of opportunities to relate to people of all ages. I imagine for my students it also means  many different things.

An example of a preconception about myself which was  proved wrong thanks to teaching people of different abilities with different approaches to learning is that I am a left-brained  person. By trying to understand and reach out to people with a dominant right hemisphere, it occurred to me that I had left untapped my right hemisphere potential for quite a long time, wrongly believing that left-hemisphere thinking was the only access to knowledge and understanding that I had.

 Of course, this brings me to the next issue that rears its ugly head many a time: and that is our educational system encourages and rewards mostly people with logical analytical abilities, sadly excluding all those who struggle with a system totally unsuitable and out of tune with their talents and needs.  

When we learn a foreign language we make constant hypotheses, which, in due course, become tested and either confirmed or disproved. Accordingly we continue to use what has been confirmed as correct or decide that some of our assumptions were incorrect and seek the right answer. Our hypotheses are based on our knowledge of the foreign language at the given time, our knowledge of the world and, significantly, on mother tongue interference. It is a mind-boggling and convoluted tangle of particulars, which can only hint at the endless possibilities of interpreting new language input.

By observing the students and making a mental note of their understanding of different items and their subsequent production of the knowledge acquired, a teacher can gain valuable insights into what is at work when learning takes place.

This, to my mind, is the most exciting part as the teacher in their turn will make some hypotheses about how their students learn and try to apply a relevant method the next time or, to put it in a different way, customise their teaching. The hypothesis could be verified or contradicted, which will lead to the next hypothesis and so on.

 To cut a long story short, learning takes place on both sides: the student’s as well as the teacher’s. It is a never-ending process.