This year has been mind blowing. I’m sure I’ve overstated this fact before. At least it feels like it. And I’ve sure I’m repeated that it’s been a year of remembering and writing. It is the first time in my life I’ve done this. I’ve never written much. And I’ve never submitted any writing for public consumption. In college, I wrote only what I had to, and, most of the time, I was told I wasn’t writing nearly enough. In TESOL, writing for my professors has been really tough, but not because of their exigencies. It isn’t that I’ve written deeply confessional dsicourse. Even the personal narrations that have alluded to moments in my timeline feel deeply personal, even embarrassing.
I wrote this artifact last year at the beginning the TESOL program. I was asked to review my experiences with language learning. This paper describes some these key language learning experiences, good or bad. It also describes some takeaways that have stayed with me through the year. First, that every powerful learning experience has been accompanied by a powerful personal experience. (e.g.,1 learning German through my first wife, Gudrun, 2 my love of German was tied to my love of Schubert, 3 my love of Schubert was tied to some deeply mysterious expressive power I felt when listening to Schubert.,4 my love of Flamenco, my present wife, Gabriela, and any picking up of Spanish, 5 the hierarchy of French as maternal, Italian as paternal, and English as neither) Professor Michael Perrone and I have often discussed how pivotal educational experiences from our pasts have been the fuel for intrinsic motivation in our present teaching. This artifact begins to take account of this notion. I am a much more empathetic teacher than I used to be. This measn that I am motivated to assess my students, and that I am more realistoc about these assessments. I understand that students can have different kind of motivations, and, therefore, I’m more comfortable with students having different modus operandi. I also understand that there is a tensoin between accuracy and fluency, between prescritptive and desscritpive approaches. It’s not either/or. Students might want to concentrate on different modalities, whether speaking or writing. I will be there for them.