What I want to know is why I keep changing, why I always have new preps, or if not new ones, I constantly do more than tweak those I've taught before. Why don't I just hone what I've done in the past, as some do? Well, I guess I know the answer. I'm always learning something, always rethinking the situation, always excited about new possibilities, always evolving or trying to evolve. Just like with this idea of connectivism on the web that my colleague Pete Smith has been talking about -- how to have students make it a practice in the classes to do this connectiivism thing – take a topic, a sentence, a text, and mine it for words and phrases that one can plug into an English or German search engine, a web map with photos and youtube links, an image search engine, a youtube search engine, with the goal of getting them so accustomed to it that they might -- they just might -- continue when they leave us! At least give them some tools to use in the future. If we do that in some of the first and second year courses, then have them do a translation certificate, well, they would certainly have some good tools to use in the future -- plus an understanding of the interesting complexity of languaculture. Indeed, my next goal is to spend a week or two having students research a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT LANGUAGE and see if they can apply principles they've been learning in German to accessing ideas in a completely new language.
I'm also thinking that I want to expand on this culture sentence thing -- maybe refine it, make students more active in pursuing the underlying history, images, words connected to a sentence or thought. I'm seriously considering a wiki for fall -- maybe all classes I teach contributing to it. We'll see.
Anyway, have a great Valentine's Day!
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