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The Bullhead Thread

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kanewai
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
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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?

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garyb
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ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name
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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
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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.
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Elenia
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United Kingdom
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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
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Senior Member
Austria
lang-8.com/553301
Joined 4280 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.


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