It takes a lot of preparation time and I know a lot of the students won't learn as much as they could (learning a language is way more the responsibility of the student than the teacher, I know that from experience), but it's fun!
And it's easy! I don't feel insecure at all about my grasp on the subject, after all, besides teaching my mother language, I have a BA and a teaching licensure in it.
One of the hardest things for me when I was a graduate student instructor was that I often felt like an impostor -- that I was barely ahead of the students in a lot of the material. I did teach several books I analyzed in my dissertation and I was wholly prepared to teach those. However, many others were not really my choice, they were books often taught in those classes (standards that I felt I had to include).
I always longed to teach a class wholly designed by me (and I still do), but I often thought of language teaching as something I wouldn't really enjoy. Good thing I was WRONG! I won't bore you to death with details now, but I expect I'll be blogging about some of my experiences teaching. And I do enjoy being back to work (and having the boys in a school they love), but that's the subject of another post.
So happy that you're enjoying the teaching-- that's a great feeling. And I have to say that I think that most of us professorial types end up teaching classes where we feel one step ahead of the students. After all, you can only be a super-expert in a very narrow area or two, and teaching is nearly always broader than that. After a couple of round of the same course, that feeling pretty much goes away. Anyway, it's great that you're enjoying teaching your language!
ReplyDeleteYes, that's great that you are enjoying teaching Portuguese! What level are your students at? I'd love to hear more!
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