February 1, 2011
My experience as an English student
I consider myself lucky in this respect. I´ve always had good English teachers. The one I´ve learnt the most from is the first teacher I had in highschool and the amazing thing is that in a time of teacher-centered, whole-class instruction all around, she was using the communicative approach. She had us organizing debates and one of us would be the moderator and she would be a simple spectator. Sometimes our homework was a poster, other times a comic strip. She was very creative and always encouraged creativity in her students. This may not seem like much now but this was happening some 20 years ago so it was a big deal to me and it has influenced my views on teaching. A "side-effect" of all this is that it has made me more demanding as a student, so the next teacher I had for the last two years of highschool I simply could not stand because she only used the textbook and nothing else. She seemed bored in class and she didn´t try to make it interesting for us in any way. Had I not had the fortune of having such a great teacher the first two years, she wouldn´t have seemed such an awful teacher...
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I was raised bilingual in Spanish and English, therefore I had a higher level than average. English was obviously very easy for me in school but I thought it would be helpful for my writing and reading skills.
ReplyDeleteWhen I think about it now, I think my teachers should have given me extra readings to do to then comment them. This would have been a good chance to take good advantage of my time in English class and learning something I didn´t know. Instead I sat there like one more student and had to follow the speed of the rest of my class mates, which was just boring and a waste of time. Some teachers also expected from me to follow the book and just write answers and vocabulary that had been seen in class. In other words, I was expected to forget all my "extra knowledge" in the classroom and only to remember what everybody else was learning. This means, that if I ever wrote something in American English, the teacher would consider it wrong because it wasn´t what we had seen in class. Obviously I didn´t give into that but didn´t feel like making a big fuss about it either. In my opinion, teachers who did this were those who had less knowledge of English and were uncomfortable with the fact of having a student in class who could feel more comfortable with the language than them. Maybe I was more familiar with the language since it´s my second mother tongue, but I always felt I had a lot of things to learn in regard to English, just like we had a lot to learn in Spanish. I wish someone would have thought of this and had thought of an alternative for those who had a notable higher level than average.