FORCED TO LEARN SLOVAC

If a student were to learn a language, it would ideally be up to his/her choice, one would say. Nonetheless, let us think for one minute of the implications that forcing a student to learn a ‘strange’ language would have. That happened to me when learning Slovak, which I had never even heard.

I was absent from the first class, to my own detriment, but the reason why I was absent means good and bad news: the disadvantage was that I obviously felt lost and clueless in the second session, not being able to recognize one single word either hear or read. The advantage was that having recently traveled to Sweden and Germany, for instance, I had that sensation of being lost really fresh in my mind: I had gotten used to moving around a city where no one spoke my language –sometimes not even English-, just by relying on a metro map. When approached by people who told me something I did not understand, I simply smiled and shrunk my shoulders, (like when the Slovak teacher asked me something out of the blue in the third session). Then I listed some languages I could either speak or understand (the romance languages, due to their similarity with Spanish, of course) and it worked like a charm.

This process does not remind me of when I started to learn English - because that happened more than two decades ago, and I never attended classes taught in English- but it reminds me of the time when I had to teach introductory courses to true beginners. My students were adults who were generally afraid of being taught in English, but had a burning need to learn it because of the usual reasons: work or studies. I remember feeling like an octopus as a designed material, prepared class, and used the context and personalizations to convey a message; like a clown when I explained vocabulary and even grammar solely in English; and like a rabbit after I had taught the class: sometimes scared of what was yet to come, and other times jumpy and enthusiastic about the next challenge. I guess teaching is a passion that reveals itself after you, over the years, remove its countless masks.