Final blog post

This course I found extremely helpful in learning about teaching methodology. It’s strange to me that though I’m surrounded by teaching every day, and have been for my entire life up to this point, all it took for me to become more aware of teaching methods was 4 hours’ worth of consciously focusing on how I’m being taught a foreign language.

The thing I found the most helpful in this course was the way Miranda presented new words, as well as her overall manner during lessons. She was always right there, up in front of the class, teaching us directly. We were taught straight from the source – there was no messing about with a textbook or tons of outside materials. She created her own materials with the vocab and grammar she wanted us to know. Overall, I found this method to be more engaging, and I really appreciate the amount of effort she must have had to put in in order to teach us like this. Miranda was a very accessible teacher as she taught – I always felt like she wanted us to learn and would teach us anything if asked. She was always engaged, demonstrating how certain words were said and correcting mistakes, asking us to say the things we were learning – she didn’t leave us to figure it out on our own.

Methods in this course that I didn’t get anything out of were the part of the handouts with the list of words and their translation. It doesn’t help that I, personally, never really look at vocab lists in the first place, but with the formatting (translation spaced very far apart), the length, and the apparent lack of reasoning behind the order they’re listed in, I found the lists particularly ineffective. Although the handouts in general were good (having the dialogue written out on them, and afterwards short lists of phrases and how to construct them), this part always threw me a bit off.

I think it would have been really interesting if Miranda had taught the sessions only in Dutch, as if we were taking a Dutch as a Foreign Language course (if they have that?) in the same way that many of us will be teaching EFL learners while having no common language with our students.

My general impression about teaching a foreign language is that it’s a lot of work. Preparation is key. Having your own materials is important, as it not only makes you a more effective teacher, since it allows you to design the course as you want, but also shows students that you’re putting the time in to teach them and that you actually care that they learn. Obviously, this isn’t always possible, whether due to time constraints or the policies of the school where you’re teaching, but I think it should be done whenever possible. Learning how to teach, I think, is a lot about examining the methods that were used on us and mashing together the ones that were good and avoiding the ones that weren’t. This course was a good opportunity to take a step back and start that process.