On Being a Student Again

The experience of being a student again has been an interesting one. I've been taking classes off and on over the years, but this is the first time that I feel like I am a student in the way that my students are. I'm in a program, I go to class every day and I'm living in the culture where I'm trying to learn the language.

The first day it seemed like I was going to be the oldest student in the program and while I never expected that situation to make me feel as out of place as it did, it seemed that we really had nothing in common. Fortunately, it turned out that there were more students at the school than those in my "program", and I have Mike and Anna in my class, who are both closer to my age, and the Chinese students, who although they are younger, are easier to talk to than the American kids.

I also have been wondering since the first day if I am misplaced and should be in a lower level. These doubts resurface from time to time, and there are times when I feel like I fit in perfectly. Marcela, one of our teachers, makes me feel very comfortable, but the activities we do, often make me aware that I am the lowest in terms of ability in our group, at least academically. Yesterday for example, we watched a video on the history of the Obelisk, which stands in the center of the Avenida 9 de Julio. I tried writing things down as we watched, and the only thing I got was 1936, which was apparently the date it was built. After that I didn't understand anything in terms of the content of the show. Mike seemed to understand everything and Anna understood enough to understand what she didn't understand - she was able to hear expressions that she could ask the meaning of.

Next Marcela did an activity where she gave us each a little picture of a painting and told us we were owners of art galleries and we had to convince her to buy our painting. Again, I noticed that my sales pitch was the shortest of the four of us.

So, I'm in an odd position. Level 5 is definitely not the level for me because they are still studying the imperfect and preterit (the two forms of the past that used to confuse the hell out of me). I would be too advanced for that level. But since level 6 is the most advanced level, students are very advanced and I'm feeling like I am not high enough for the level.

I was thinking about what I could do as a teacher for a student like me and I am stumped. I want situations where I can improve my fluency while being supported by being given different structures, vocabulary, etc., that I can use to develop my fluency, but I don't want to study grammar. Cynthia, the Chinese student in our class, is very talkative, and when we have an open forum, she dominates the class, doing most of the talking, while the rest of us sit and try to understand what is going on (that's the other thing I'm noticing, when other students in class speak to the teacher, I understand very little of what they are saying, but when they speak to me, I understand them).

Last week, we had an assignment to write a description of a movie - not just what happened, but a little bit of analysis of it. I wrote about "West Side Story" because I use it in my class, and know a little bit of how it was made and some trivia relating to it (i.e., Natalie Wood was such a terrible singer they had to dub her singing). So, I spent a lot of time typing up this assignment and then had to go to an internet cafe to print it out, and the printer was bad, so I went to another internet cafe and printed it out again. When my teacher returned my paper, all I saw was that I made a ton of mistakes. She had numbered the mistakes on my paper and written corrections on a separate piece of paper. I felt defeated, like I had worked so hard on this thing and I made so many mistakes. I completely forgot my constant mantra to my students - mistakes are your friends, learn from your mistakes, etc... I put my assignment and the corrections in my bag and they stayed there the entire weekend.

Yesterday in class, Marcela asked us if we understood her corrections. I was honest and told her I didn't look at them. It was then that she told me she had written a question to me. I thought she just corrected the mistakes and didn't write any comments or any praise or anything. I looked at the little piece of paper and saw that she had also commented on the content of what I wrote and did indeed write a question for me. Still, I could see that from the perspective of a student, her method of correcting my paper was ineffective and time consuming (for her and me). I still haven't looked at her corrections, though I think I will try to make time to go over them and see if I can understand my mistakes.

This is a great experience for me because I am really getting to see what it feels like to be in a class not as a beginner, but as a more advanced student. But I am stumped as to what a teacher can do to meet the needs of a student like myself. Maybe it isn't up to the teacher, maybe it's up to me as a student to figure out how to get my needs met.