parasitegirl | more thoughts.

I woke up at 12:30 at night and was kept awake until 5;15am thinking about parallels in learning about music for dance and what it is I do as a language teacher. This means I will be less than my best today as a teacher, but hopefully better at teaching down the road. There will be more later but it will also include this:

I am an English teacher, but I don't teach English at my job. I teach my students how to learn a new language (and why they might want to).It is only once they know that will they be able to learn English (or any other language).

Listening is important. It is only once you begin to understand what you are hearing that you can start to figure out how to respond. Communication isn't about giving a command and getting a set response, it is about understanding the prompt and figuring out how to respond.

You do have to drill language and grammar eventually, in order to speed up your understanding, response, and prompt generating time and to have a wide array of ways you can respond and responces you can understand, but drilling isn't the same as learning.