I am in awe...

 I was thinking on Wednesday evening* & again on Thursday, about language teachers and the amazing job that they do.

The specific item that prompted the pondering was listening to 中田先生 talking us through the vocabulary in chapter 2 of Nakama 2, and the grammar that they take, because it doesn't always** do a very good job of pointing out which verbs take に or を or が or could be more than one at different times depending on context maybe.

And one of the vocabulary terms was 空港 (airport***) & another one was 海外, so she used them together in a sentence, to help us learn them by using them in context, instead of dead words pinned on a page of vocabulary like linguistic butterflies with all the life and joy gone out of them... We talked about having the new airport and if anyone liked it, and can you fly abroad from our airport**** and for overseas, we learned it can be combined into the phrase overseas travel & that got used in a sentence.  But it wasn't just any sentence - it was one that demonstrated a grammar point that we had had in Elementary 2 - "past experience" construction, a "have you ever done x before?" type of construction - plain past tense affirmative verb with ことがある・ありますか after it.  And I haven't had that construct for about 9 months, and maybe a similar gap for many of the rest of the class. So, we had been asked if any of us had ever had the experience of travelling abroad.  I just mentally filed it away at the time.

But the next day, I was thinking about how neatly that bit of grammar had been dropped into the conversation to remind us of it, without drawing any attention to it, or making a big deal out of it ("do any of you remember how to ask if someone has had a specific experience?) and then I started thinking not only about smoothly including past grammar but about the skill it must take to drop your vocabulary and grammar down to the approximate level of your students so that they can (mostly) understand you, and to constantly adjust that as the course goes on - and to do that for multiple courses, of different difficulty levels, and to hold in your head which level of difficulty this class are at and not go completely over their heads, and that has to be harder for a native speaker, because not only is their vocabulary range so much larger, but they wouldn't even remember the process of learning the language and their vocabulary and grammar expanding and how they absorbed that.  Non-native speakers would remember the process they went through learning and how things made sense to them and which order they grasped things in  The would have gone through a conscious learning process, so perhaps easier to divide things - although no less complex keeping track of where each course of students is for difficulty level to provide in interactions.

And I'm not talking about going through the text book and asking people do to exercise 3.  I mean things like the conversation to encourage vocabulary usage and retention, with your own choice of natural language.  Anyone can read a textbook and tell people to read activity 3.  It's the additional pieces - the extra wrappings that you put on it, the conversation for practice, reusing old grammar pieces so that people are gently prompted to remember them, the extra materials, whether it is producing your own PowerPoints that review the textbook content and add to it or pdfs of your own materials, and a more rational learning order***** and review materials to drill things in because there are so many grammar points to learn and by the end of the course, you will have forgotten the first few. Or producing an amazing, coherent, whole of a class notebook with links to each chapters' resources, and links for reading around the subject, and introducing people to free resources like Tadoku (& encouraging them to up their reading level to the next one, even though the assignments would be easier if you stuck to level 0, you wouldn't learn as much...^).   It is being able to understand people's questions and answer them, instead of just sticking to the book.  Or, like my maths^^ teacher, to be able to explain things once for most people, a second way for everyone else, and then to be able to pull out a third way of explaining it for Jenny.  It is that sort of thing that makes a great teacher, and I have been lucky enough to have had many of them, especially recently for Japanese, both directly as my class professors and through the Japanese Conversation Table/Japanese Club.

So yeah, just wanted to say that I think that it is freaking amazing to be able to do that.  I taught high school science for two years, and that is soooo much easier than needing to be able to do that.

* class this semester for Intermediate 1 is Monday & Wednesday evenings...

** (cough) hardly ever (/cough)

*** the kanji are sky harbour.  Some kanji are just so perfect that I really love them.  Others, even after I go and look at the glyph origins and the original depictions and how they changed over time, I just say "what were they thinking???"  This is obviously not helped by learning them in Japanese if it is a phono-semantic compound, so part of the glyph is related to the meaning, and then part of it is related to the sound, to be a kanji that has the sound that this word makes, and it doesn't even have that sound in Japanese (some kanji seem to carry their sounds in combination more consistently than others, but because of the borrowed writing system, they often don't align as a phono-semantic compound in Japanese). But I digress... which isn't unusual.

**** The name international for MCI is very like the World Series being the world series rather than the American baseball cup because they allow one Canadian team in...(or whatever, I'm definitely not a baseball expert.  That whole being English thing... :p). It flies to Mexico and Canada, and that's about it.  For a brief, wonderful time, it flew to Iceland, but no longer.

***** sugawara sensei, I am looking at you there.  We all know that Nakama does not pick the best, most rational order of teaching things, whether it is kanji order or grammar order.  My pre-class prep notes for chapter 2 grammar points 1 & 2 this week actually had a side rant in it about why is all this important stuff about the volitional form being constrained to a page of notes, instead of taught and practiced with the main grammar point for it, that it was like the way that book 1 skipped over the other usages of the ている form & sensei had to cover it in their materials instead. I've used Genki since then and it has its flaws (way too much dating, and awkward activities like practicing asking out classmates on a date...), but it actually explains the devoicing rule, one of the few places that I have seen it, and its kanji order of teaching and explanations of kanji origins are so much better.  Nakama's were so dumbed down in some cases that they were actually lies.

^ I had intended to continue to read and blog about a Tadoku book a week after Elementary 1.  Regular followers of this blog will have noticed a dearth of Tadoku posts... :p  That's going to change soon.  I have two Tadoku related posts to make at the very least - one about a surprising local connection (because I googled as soon as I realised the name's probable spelling from the katakana, not Freud but Floyd... ) & one about culture and idioms, which will be a little like the blue/green and "what colour is the sun?" post. It's one of the things I include in my answering questions comment, because that knowledge came from my staying on the zoom after class when whiting-sensei said to stay if we had any questions or wanted to talk, and I commented that I had actually started a different tadoku book to review but I had bounced hard off it - not the vocabulary, but a concept, so I did the cute cat book instead, which lead to a discussion with the four of us that had stayed about blue/green and the colour of the sun...

These upcoming tadoku book posts are prompted by our reading assignment #1 & the choice of book that 中田先生 made.  Hmm, that almost feels like a Sesame Street announcement "today's show was brought to you by the letter L and ..."

^^ It is still weird to me that we say maths in the UK as an abbreviation for mathematics and we say math as the abbreviation in the US.  That's not as large an idiom and culture shift as the colour of the sun, or blue and green, but it's interesting that one country chose to keep the plural and tag it onto the end of the shortened form, and the other one just went "we're shortening it, why would we add the ending back on?"  I was reminded of it by the red squiggly line under maths in my post - now multiple times :D