Slowing It Down

Slowing It Down

	 Slowing It Down

For several years now I’ve meant to start a blog, and I’ve even come up with a title: Teaching Language. I first began teaching Spanish as a graduate student in Georgetown University in 1990. To say I was wet behind the ears is too kind; as a first-generation college student who stumbled into graduate school, everything was new and foreign. I had to learn everything from scratch, for myself, and on the fly. I guess everybody does, when you get right down to it. (And now that I look back, my friends from that time of my life did too. When you study languages and literature, most of your cohort is not from “there”, but from “somewhere else.” You study “the other” and “the other” is really you all along.)

Now some 25+ years on, my love for the objects of my study has not diminished in the slightest, but I am not a greenhorn in my profession anymore, and I bristle when someone treats me as though I were. As a younger person I had very few firm opinions on anything, but now I am an educator with certain CONVICTIONS, many of which have to do with teaching and learning (a second) language, and some just with teaching and learning. I am quite taken with the title I’ve chosen for my blog, since it speaks to the activity that occupies most of my time, but especially since it means I get to muse on the kind of discourse that occupies a significant portion of my thinking, that is, why do we talk about language teaching and learning the way we do? I want to linger on that topic for a while, since we tend to hurtle past the intricacies to meet impending deadlines.

My desire to write about teaching language has come up in response to a paradigm shift I’ve witnessed in teaching undergraduate writing in English, a first language for many US students. This new way of thinking about writing supports the student writer, considers the writer a legitimate entity worth listening to, and repositions the teacher of writing language as a reader who responds rather than merely corrects a defective copy. This acknowledgement of the agency and autonomy of the writer is frequently disruptive both for the student and for the teacher, but I am convinced that the time has come. When you teach someone to write in a second language, the vulnerability exposed in the writer is even greater, and some traditional methods for teaching second language further diminish the student writer’s sense of creativity, control, and worthiness. Teasing out the threads of these practices, in writing, in teaching writing, and in teaching writing in a second language, is a task that takes considerable time and patience.

My fellowship with LAMP has allowed me to slow it down, to be deliberate in my thinking, and to solicit some valuable advice on my idea before venturing out. I believe I have plenty to say, and I think there are sufficient “niche” readers, but I needed to figure out how to address some of my concerns. One was breaking down what I have to say into digestible chunks for an audience, getting fine-grained enough without becoming too repetitive, or even worse, too precious. I want this to be a sustainable project, one that will yield a good run of pieces over a decent amount of time without leaving me exhausted (of ideas). Another worry I had was dealing with unconstructive criticism: writing online while a woman opens you up to nasty little comments. I hope that my topic, though compelling to me and many others, is unlikely to excite the interest of most garden-variety trolls. Finally, I know that I myself will have to actively resist taking the easy way out and descending into snark or self-congratulatory wit. I want to be sure to honor my colleagues and my students and avoid resorting to strategies that could undermine what motivated me in the first place.

The members of my LAMP cohort were generous with their feedback and reassured me that the concept is viable, that there are readers for such a blog, and that this is a topic that has not been played out. They allayed my concerns about sharing my perspective on what I learn while I teach. I thank them for their encouragement, and for their patience in helping me slow it down.


IMAGE CREDIT: Image is licensed under CC0 by 1.0.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Melissa Simmermeyer is Lecturer and coordinator of Advanced Spanish Writing courses in the Department of Romance Studies and a former LAMP Bacca fellow (2015-2016).