I wonder if there are any prizes awarded to those students with the most financial aid debt?
Teaching going well but the students were tired today. Mondays suck in NYC too. Just like Chicago, Prague, Nice, Paris, Usti, Dvur, Oak Lawn, and DeKalb.
Went on the annual Greenwich Village pub crawl Friday. It's organized by the Fellows Program every year. Started at 6 and finished at 2. One pub per hour made for some sore heads Sat. The high was finding Czechvar for only five bucks; the low was losing my digital camera. Thank goodness I got a call Saturday afternoon from the Leader of the Pub Crawl (a fellow teacher), who revealed that some kind soul found my camera and thought it belonged to someone in our group. Whew!
Anyway, had back-to-back seminars Sat. and Sun. and therefore little time or energy to do anything really exciting. And had to prepare for a presentation today in my classroom strategies class on "desuggestopedia." If you don't know what this is, don't worry about it.
Wanted to go see _I Am Trying To Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco By Sam Jones_ but got distracted and didn't make it. It premiered in NYC Friday, a week or so before it opens in Wilco's hometown Chicago.
Will end with
this.
I've got my students speaking British English. No, not on purpose. What happened was that I was going over several vocabulary items from the unit. When we came to
burglary I said "burgled" instead of the American form "burglarized." Well, my team teachers (and observer!) had confused looks on their faces. After opening the point up for class discussion and explaining some major differences between Br. and Am. English, I used the excuse that my Irish parents use Briticisms and Irishisms often enough. So there.
Hours later, at the pub, my cohorts and I were still conversing with dodgy British accents. No, we didn't go as far as to drink warm beer.
British English and American English have been competing for first place in my mouth since I became an English major. Teaching English in Europe five years did not help me choose one English over the other either. Still, there's something attractive about using "foreign" words like boot, dodgy, knackered, and pissed.
on the dying of a residential hotel mouse
little mouse, lying on my floor dead
why did you die right where i put my shoes?
and why was your life so short?
was it all the cheese?
was your purpose in life
to scare the shit out of me when i came home last night?
whatever may have been
or be for you now
may all the gods bless you
and watch over you in your stairwell garbage grave
Haven’t seen the new roommate since our first meeting.
Anyway, I really get a kick out of riding up and down Broadway to the uni and back. There’s always something going on, whether it be a car accident, someone shouting his or her freaking head off about Jesus and The End Of It All, or just a pretty evening scene spreading out through the neighborhood of Morningside Heights. Puts me in a Wallace Stevens kind of mood. I am glad I picked up my Schwinn Cruiser SS as it is the perfect city bike. One of those Pee-Wee Herman-style bikes that has a wide handlebar and classic, curved tubes and one speed with a coaster brake. It’s all black with whitewall tires. (I need to get my HTML skills dusted off so I can figure out how to upload some photos to this blog. I figure no one will read this drivel anyway so why not throw up some snaps?)
Tonight in my ESL class we talked about crime and punishment (no, not the novel), which is the theme of our unit this week. The students from the Dominican Republic and Ecuador had the same thing to say about drug abuse in their countries—that the kids are doing rubber cement. The Polish woman talked about how her parents’ car was stolen and how they got a call about six months later from a man who said he had it and would return it to them for a couple thousand US dollars. Needless to say, they said go to hell. They’d already replaced their old car with the insurance money they’d gotten. Then the Japanese woman joined in to say that in her country the biggest problem is that the school children beat up one another. Actually, she said that the bullies beat up the teachers’ pets. Jokes aside, I was able to introduce some new slang and idioms tonight. They get such a kick out of idioms. Last Thursday we introduced about ten new idioms. After talking about them and what they mean, we got into pairs and wrote up skits for them to act out. A typical one went something like this:
A: Hey! Spread the word!
B: What? Spread what word?
A: Haven’t you heard? The word’s on the street that Klara didn’t do her homework again.
B: Really! Well, she’s been working around the clock at her job to make ends meet.
A: Yeah, well, that’s the price you pay for not hitting the books.
Etc. Etc.
Granted, the dialog is a little stilted and cliché-ridden. But they ate it up.
Otherwise, I cannot wait till I get a full weekend to myself. The Program has been taking up weekends so far and I have had almost no time to go out and explore NYC. I did get out Saturday night for some music at the Park Side Café. It was really cool as there was live music and a cool crowd. The East Village is an area I’m just going to have to explore more of. When I came out of the subway I got a good vibe immediately. The area is so, eh, hip. Too bad you have to take three trains to get there from the Upper West Side.
Speaking of vibes, I have never been that attentive to my own sense of vibes as much as I have been lately. For example, when I was interviewing at a school in Queens last week, I got a negative vibe from the principal. Can’t explain why, just did. I’d been looking forward to the interview but things just fell flat. That’s how the job hunt goes I suppose. But then I got a great vibe talking to the woman who ended up hiring me to teach ESL at her school in Flushing (Queens). What is a vibe anyway? Is there some transfer that happens between two or more people that can be measured or accounted for? I need to look into this phenomenon. I’m sure it’ll be worthwhile. Reminds me of a lecturer from Duke who spoke at NIU last semester about déjà vu and rhetoric. Was interesting stuff though his lecture was part of a book in progress and he did not seem to hit home any sound points.
I came home from class to find a mouse running across the floor. Although he looked cute and harmless, I still jumped and reached for my sword. Got to inform the nice man at the front desk about the unwanted roommate. Can't afford to feed two people. I fear the front desk people will just laugh at me. I love New York?
The following is a short "second language learning autobiography" I wrote for an ESL class recently.
My experience with learning foreign languages began in high school where I studied Spanish for two years. Then, while attending community college, I studied Japanese for a semester. Later, at university, I learned Latin for two years. Most of this language learning was fairly typical of formal language instruction: There was an emphasis on the textbook, the teacher as model, and memorization. I cannot, however, say that I know any of these languages well. Much of what I learned from studying these languages may be hard-coded somewhere deep within my brain, but I think I gained little from more than six years of this kind of language instruction.
Much more satisfying was the kind of language instruction I involved myself with while living abroad. After university, I joined the Peace Corps and found myself immersed in Czech for three and a half years. Next I moved to France, where I was immersed in French for a year and a half. These two major foreign language immersion periods have been the most useful to me as they fostered actual second language acquisition. The foreign language I speak best is Czech but I also understand French fairly well, depending on the context.
Up until I completed my bachelor’s degree, all my foreign language instruction took place in a formal setting, that is, in the classroom of a high school, community college, or university. However, most of my adult foreign language instruction has been learned in an informal setting, that is, in public places such as shops and pubs, playing sports and traveling, among friends, colleagues, and bus drivers short on patience, all in the countries where the said languages are spoken.
The language skills I acquired included those in the four skill areas—reading, writing, speaking, listening—but I usually ended up commanding stronger speaking and listening skills. Some problems I have encountered while learning foreign languages include not getting adequate exposure to the language and not learning to speak grammatically correctly. People who have not had experience away from their native language often are surprised to learn that many people who move to a foreign country do not learn the local language well. But the fact is that the success of the language learning experience has less to do with location and more to do with practice in the target language. I, for example, worked full-time when I lived abroad, usually as an English instructor, and soon realized that I was essentially removed from the local language. I would spend my working day using English to communicate with students and even my Czech and French colleagues. I realized I had to go out and meet locals who did not speak English. This was not an easy task considering that I taught all day and wanted to relax in the evening. So being motivated about learning the language became a forced habit of mind.
One motivation I have had for learning a foreign language—French—has had to do with my hobby and passion—cycling. In France, I competed as an amateur cyclist when I was not teaching English, and I had to learn basic French quickly. I had had no knowledge of the language before moving to the country, but I joined a local team and began competing regularly. Because the team was French and made up of French speakers, who knew almost no English, I had to learn to communicate at least at a basic level. I needed to be able to tell the other guys how my legs were feeling before and during a race, discuss team tactics, and when and where our next races were. There were also monthly team meetings at which the directors would go over team business, race schedules, and general information in this, what was for me, a new language.
For me learning basic French came fast because I was doing something fun, challenging, and exciting. While I almost never opened a French language book, I spoke French every day and spent a lot of time listening to team directors and teammates speaking French, paying particular attention to pronunciation and phrases. I started buying cycling magazines in French so that I could get more familiar with the written language. Regular training and racing became a French language lesson. I have to say that I learned decent French just by going out and joining a cycling team. Because of this positive experience, I am convinced that if learners of a foreign language are encouraged to find something they like to do, such as an activity, hobby, or sport, they will be much more motivated and successful in learning the target language. They will not only learn the language faster but also find a useful inroad into the culture.
As for conclusions, I am still making them as I continue to learn and teach languages. I believe that when people learn a foreign language they tend to become more tolerant, open-minded, and understanding. To this end, I think foreign language instruction should be given to students as early in their education as possible. Students should be encouraged to visit the country in which the language is spoken and, if possible, spend time studying or living there.
Practically speaking, if I have learned anything in studying foreign languages it is that routine practice in the target language is the single most important factor. By routine practice I mean daily exposure to speakers of the language, speaking opportunities, and, to a lesser degree, reading and writing, though every learner has unique needs and wishes and therefore must adopt the appropriate linguistic habits. Too often people seem to think that the language “will come to them” or that “eventually they’ll pick it up” but I am not convinced these assertions are worth much. Learners need to get into the language, be interactive with it, and try to learn more of it in their daily routine.
Like many people, I have an interest in and fascination with language generally. After all, this is why I became a language teacher. I also am interested in learning foreign languages because when you learn a foreign language you are not only learning the language but are also learning about the way the people who use that language think, how they live, how they see you, how they see themselves, and how they see the world.
I guess this is my first real entry.
I’ve been in NYC since July 7th. So far I have enjoyed the experience, though I miss home a little and wish I could see my friends. But this is what I wanted. So be it. Actually, I have had some good luck. I am in with a good group of people in the Peace Corps Fellows Program at Columbia University, where I'm doing an MA in TESOL and teaching in an ESL practicum. We volunteers have served on almost every continent and bring a wide variety of experience to our teaching. There are a lot of folk who served with the Peace Corps in Africa and Eastern Europe. Anyway, those of us in the TESOL program teach Monday through Thursday in the Community English Program (CEP), in which there are about 80 students of English as a second language. Most of our students live here in Manhattan and are kind enough to let us practice our developing teaching strategies on them. They get a good deal too: five weeks of English instruction by native speakers for about 100 bucks. My students are from all over the world—Poland, Japan, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic. They are friendly and pretty advanced learners. I teach with two other people so there are about three teachers for nine students. We all appreciate the intense group work and closeness that the favorable student-teacher ratio provides. Overall, the first week of the course went very well. The remaining four should be even better as we all get more comfortable with one another.
I have much to do for the coming week in my teaching course and my own grad classes. The time is really flying in this summer session. A little too fast some days.
Did I mention NYC is fantastic? I suppose the best word to describe it is diverse. So many ethnicities and cultures together in one giant city. I have much to see and do.
I'm just starting this blog. I plan to put something up at least weekly. Your patience is appreciated. Check back soon!