More Thoughts on Education in the World of Languages

Good morning, World!

What will the day bring? Oral exams. Interaction. A fun lunch with our lab director. Meetings. Working out at the Y? Purchasing that last item for the German club “Christmas Party?” Oh, yes, wrapping the white elephant. Perhaps a few moments for introspection.

I was reading Barbara Ganley’s blog entry that my colleague Pete sent me yesterday. She was asking why we need all these end-of-term exams, papers, etc.:

Which brings me to December as end-of-term season. Over Thanksgiving break, I watched my younger daughter wade into the four term papers she has to write, the three presentations to prepare and several final examinations to study for. And she attends a college that on paper, at least, understands the foolishness of grades and short-term-memory learning and the disconnect that comes from single-discipline-based majors. I also see on Twitter that people across the world are grading papers and preparing exams. Every course in every institution seems to follow the same pattern, the same kinds of assignments over and over and over. Where is the creativity? The larger view? Do we think students are that dull that they need to repeat the same exercise scores of times?
http://bgblogging.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/december-arrives-a-quasi-hypertext-musing-on-storytelling-and-stories/

Something I have to think about. Yes, what about our students? When they take German as a requirement course, what is it that they come away with? How do our exams help or hinder them?

I have morphed through so many ways of teaching the languaculture matrix, and there is actually no solution. Too many variables. Too much choice. Too little time. I don’t really long for the “olden days,” but they were indeed simpler: grammar and translation for a year, then in the 2nd year redo it, because all had been forgotten (it was called grammar review), then in the 3rd year, if you were not fortunate enough to have the money to spend abroad, read literature that you could hardly get through, and in the 4th year more of the same. You came out with a pretty good understanding of the basics of formal grammar, you knew about some of the “great works,” but you couldn’t really use the language, and you didn’t really understand the culture. Unless you were among the lucky few who grew up with the language and culture, or who had spent time abroad. If you were lucky you went on to an immersion program and then finally got a scholarship to go abroad for a year.

It was a holdover from the days of the privileged, and even today still is in some places. Those days that Wilga Rivers used to talk about, the late 19th century when the WHITE SONS of the wealthy got a liberal arts education to “round them out” as future statesmen, when they took their year abroad to develop themselves, when Latin and Greek were considered the ideal languages to study and the “modern” languages and literatures were still looked upon as vulgar, in both senses of the word.

What a different world we live in today! What a different world from the one I inhabited when I began taking Latin in 1961, French in 1964, and German in 1966. Textbooks, ideas, pedagogy, second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, connectedness to the world were either completely different or did not even exist yet.

Nowadays, it’s much different. But, whew, oh so overwhelming. Take the classroom, for example. Take technology, for example.

Yes, take the classroom. After having spent a semester with my Russian colleague Lonny in my colleague Pete’s cross-listed Russian/German translation and localization course, ideas sparked by being there, talking ideas, talking curriculum, talking collaboration and plans, and just having fun in general – after having spent a semester interacting with my undergrad and grad French, German, and Spanish students in yet another crosslisted course about ideas I’ve been reading about – a text-based, genre-based foreign language curriculum, and being influenced by their ideas as well – after having my second semester students blog yet again on my Germans-Americans website on intercultural (mis)communication, after reading and attempting a re-write on an article I finally re-submitted, after reading and interacting in a teaching circle about assessment, after talking active learning at those meetings – after all of that I sat down and did what we used to call clustering, what is now called semantic webs, I believe: bubbles of ideas interacting with bubbles of ideas, and I wrote down my wish list for an ideal course.

Trust and respect
Co-creation of content, syllabus, and rubrics
Honesty – being “as honest as possible”
The pleasure of learning
And it went on and on and on…

And then I thought again. Next semester: possibly four courses because one won’t make. Four preparations. The possibility of four ideal courses. The tiny voice in my head from Angelo and Cross’s assessment book: “start simple.” Well, let it gell over the holidays. Let it gell.

And then there’s technology. Lunch with our lab director Melissa Bowden today to get advice on where to go from here. I’m stuck – whether it’s scanning and organizing, photoshop, blogs, email, or newer technology, I’m at the next threshold, which basically translates into: I’m as far as I can go without help for advanced understanding of it all. Where to go from here. I have come to the conclusion that I will always be frustrated with technology, but each year, as I “master” more, it will be different frustrations: frustrations with advanced aspects of technology I know somewhat well, or frustrations with new technology, as last year’s frustrations become the known or better known and fade into the sphere of background knowledge.

And now, it’s off to see what the day will bring.