Claire Dwyer
In high school, I was acknowledged as having a “gift” for language acquisition. In regards to Spanish, I probably do. I could pick up the language with little study, and I would frequently get 98-100% grades in the class. Over the decade of serious Spanish language study in lower, middle, and high school in which I engaged, I had a very wide range of Spanish teachers in regards to their expertise in teaching. For me, it didn’t matter that much with Spanish, because I could do it no matter how good or bad the teacher was.
However, I was never truly inspired by language study. The closest I came to being inspired was my AP Spanish class. We were introduced to music, literature, and culture. The class was always challenging for me, but in that challenge I began to realize that language was something I could really sink my teeth into.
Though language was a part of my life for so long, it was always pushed to the side or felt to be peripheral in my secondary studies. I never imagined I would do something with my life in which language would be so critical like medieval studies. I certainly did not know I would become a historian in high school. History was to me in many ways, the sweetest rose, my greatest love. I already had a lot of the love for the study of history that I do now. I did not, however, fully realize that I could become a historian for my career. Now that I have—heaven help me. Historian will always be the #1 way in which I identify myself.
As I have spent so much of my time studying different languages in college, I have reflected a lot about language pedagogy. As my studies have become more serious and more critical, the quality of my professors has become more critical as well. I have thought a lot about what is important to me in the classroom, the best ways that I learn, and how I might teach in the future. How I would manage a wide range of students taking my language classes for so many different reasons I honestly do not know. My own difficulties in language learning were enough to make me approach teaching them with serious apprehension.
Language studies are one area in which I think progressive education could be fairly easily implemented. If nothing else, please world, give us progressive education in language classes. Don’t neglect to teach grammar of course! Don’t neglect to teach the proper way to decline, to conjugate, to construct a sentence. But so often in language classes, the joy of the language is lost in those details. In my view, the only way to encourage a student to have a lasting relationship with a language, and to actually wantto study it, is to make it full of joy. Too often, language classes are taught as though the language can be constructed like a mathematical formula. This blinds students to the fact that languages are always living, even when dead.
Out of the Cave of Academia: My Thoughts on my Vocation 