A SHORT AND ANGRY SCRIPT FROM MY PERSONAL DIARY FROM 2007
Many ESL teachers especially primary and secondary school teachers never really take the trouble to learn another language, coming up with excuses like not having enough time. I am not saying all ESL teacher are like this, because I personally know many who do, but still, this is the general tendency. Seeing these English teachers I thought to myself: how can they expect students to learn all those vocab lists and grammatical categories and get on with their work or school subjects at the same time when they themselves don’t make an effort. And nobody needs to tell me how loaded a teacher’s day can get. However, how is a teacher’s day different from a student’s day who is in school 8 hours a day studying 12-16 different subjects which they need to prepare for in the afternoon, or how is it different from a business person’s day who revolves around his/her work and clients all day round, has a family, a house to maintain, a dog and 1 million other problems to worry about?
Another excuse is: “I don’t really need to learn another language.” So how on earth do you know what your students are going through day by day when they step on the wobbly ground of a new language? How are you then a role model of a good language learner? How do you tell your own personal experiences in language learning? Surely you don’t want to tell throughout your whole life how you learnt the language you are jus teaching. It must get boring after a while. How do you discover new ways of learning? How you do feed your own passion? Because if you want to make sure your students develop a life long learning attitude towards English and other languages how do you inspire them to do that if you yourself don’t take the trouble to do so? How do you make them believe that they CAN find the time when you can’t?
In my personal experience if students see that their language teacher is having fun with studying another language in which he/she is a beginner, I promise you won’t need to think of ways to inspire them anymore. But this is not something you can fake. You have to develop a lifestyle, a life long learning lifestyle, exactly what you are preaching about in your classes...