Words that any teacher would love to hear, right? One of my first-year students has told me this and written it in her feedback a couple of times already (and it's just the beginning of the school year...) Last Friday she explained.
In high school her classmates weren't into speaking in English. She's been overseas on exchange programs, but when she returned to Japan, the other students just didn't want to talk in English with her. It seems like it wasn't "cool" to speak English.
In our class all the students enjoy using their English to communicate & do quite well at staying in English when they're doing any kind of "free conversation" type activity. She can relax and enjoy speaking in English knowing that her new classmates don't think she's a geek for being into English. If she's a geek then they are too. She didn't use that word, but I think she knows the feeling quite well. Not wanting to show enthusiasm for something that others see as uncool.
There's a tendency these days to call anyone who is really into something a "geek". Or use it as a self-deprecating way to describe oneself. Maybe we've so assimilated the "lowest common denominator" approach to life that we're afraid of showing our true colours and enthusiasm for the things that we love. It's not just the "square peg" teenagers in a "round hole" society that feel like this. Our supposedly individualistic western societies perhaps don't celebrate the individual as much as we think they do. Otherwise, why would there be such a long Wikipedia entry for geek?
So, I'm gonna say it loud, I'm a teaching geek & a "quotation marks" geek and a journalling geek, and I love teaching the English-speaking geeks!
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
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