kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4887 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish
| Message 1 of 5 14 July 2015 at 11:07pm | IP Logged |
We talk so much on HTLAL on bad advice teachers gave us, and on the trouble with
classroom learning.
Some of us must have received good advice from teachers too! Though, in my
experience, it was good advice that I usually ignored.
From the Urban Dictionary:
Bullheaded:
A person who is headstrong but to the point where they're foolishly or irrationally
stubborn; obstinately opinionated, especially in refusing to consider alternatives.
So let's talk about this for a change: what are the times when we probably should have
listened to our teachers?
I have two examples:
In high school Latin, our teacher was constantly berating us for not spending enough
time on Latin. It wasn't enough to do the homework, or the exercises in the book. If
we wanted to learn Latin we'd have to make love to our books, we'd have to spend all
our free time with our books, we'd have to sleep with our books under our pillows
every night.
We'd all laugh, and think our Latin teacher sure is a funny guy. And he'd go
red in the face trying to get his message through our thick skulls. A couple decades
on, and I think: that funny guy was right all along.
In college French, we were expected to do "Language Lab" every afternoon. These were
in the low tech days - you'd go into the lab, check out a cassette tape, head to a
cubicle, and do oral exercises with the scratchy recordings. And we were warned so
many times that we would not pass the course if we didn't commit to Language Lab.
I went about four times a semester. And guess who didn't pass the course?
7 persons have voted this message useful
|
garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5205 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish
| Message 2 of 5 15 July 2015 at 10:30am | IP Logged |
My high school French teacher was always encouraging us to watch French films, read news, basically to use native materials as people say on here. Of course, it wasn't a required part of the class so nobody did. She even kept trying to get the senior staff to set up a penpal system or an exchange or some way of talking to French kids via webcam, to make the language something "real" rather than an academic subject, but it never happened. It's a shame, she was enthusiastic and had great ideas but was limited by the curriculum, the school system, and uninterested students.
1 person has voted this message useful
|
ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5226 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French
| Message 3 of 5 15 July 2015 at 4:31pm | IP Logged |
In school, I never invested more than the minimum effort necessary to get a good grade in a class. It wasn't so much that I ignored advice, thinking it was bad advice. I'm sure that I was sure at the time that what they suggested would help me learn the subject--I just didn't care to learn more than I needed to.
1 person has voted this message useful
|
Elenia Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom lilyonlife.blog Joined 3854 days ago 239 posts - 327 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Swedish, Esperanto
| Message 4 of 5 15 July 2015 at 6:37pm | IP Logged |
Actually sitting down and taking time to do the homework (especially grammar homework) would have probably helped, and rereading through my work and checking the correction - something my teachers always asked me to do. I finally started doing it in my final year, and made a massive improvement.
1 person has voted this message useful
|
daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4519 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic
| Message 5 of 5 16 July 2015 at 5:02pm | IP Logged |
In the late 90s one of my teachers (not teaching foreign languages) suggested we note
down new vocabulary on flashcards and review them every day, advancing them in some
kind of boxes and then do not review them anymore when they are in the last box (5 or
6). Ridiculous. Learning/reviewing every day instead of the few days before a
vocabulary test was probably enough to ignore this advice.
Many years later, when starting university, I did exactly what he suggested, albeit
in a digital form. Not before though.
1 person has voted this message useful
|