What my teachers taught me

(Oops, forgot to post this last Friday.  Yes, it's another post that's basically serving as my diary.  Dear Diary...)

Today was my last day of class, definitely for this module, probably for this school, and possibly for Dutch.  I want to continue learning the language, I am nowhere near thinking about being able to express the possibility of someday reaching the verge of becoming fluent, buuuut…  How do I say this respectfully?  I don’t know how, I’ll just have to hope my last teacher doesn’t read this.

The main thing my last Dutch teacher taught me, was how NOT to teach language.

This was actually of tremendous use, and since I am lucky enough to live in a country where they speak the language, and my partner is fluent in it, I don’t really need a good teacher.  Nice to have, it speeds things up tremendously, but I can learn it elsewhere.  It’s not like I’m trying to learn Swahili in Korea, and if my teacher funks out, I’m left stranded.

Actually I have been very lucky with regards to my Dutch teachers, both in their ability to teach me the language, and in their ability to teach me about teaching.

The first teacher was perfect for a first level class.  She was ferocious.  She grilled us on pronunciation, and hounded us on the basic details  She would seemingly get angry at us for making mistakes.  A third of the class dropped out, one poor little Polish lady, bonelessly sluffing down the stairs after her last class before quitting saying “I…can…no more!”  (But she said it in Dutch!)

So I learned the importance of being demanding on students, especially beginners, to help them avoid establishing bad patterns which will be harder to dig out later, but also the importance of patience, pacing, and encouragement.

My second teacher was much more relaxed, with a friendly classroom where no one was frightened (or as close as language classes ever get) and systematic mistakes were corrected, while the gazillion details of forming a correct sentence were given some leeway.  I think this friendly approach is particularly appropriate for adult education classes, where we are already a little uncomfortable about talking like children, we don’t want to be treated like them too.

But for a class of young learners especially, I would be a little harder.  I think students will rise to whatever level you require of them.  (Though I fear/suspect it may be different for something as fundamentally difficult as a new language, and with students who may not have much experience of education.  I have a lot of opinions for someone who has never taught a single day of class, no?)

Then there was the current teacher.  One of the key things a language teacher does is present the students with authentic language models.  This teacher certainly did that, talking a lot in class.  A lot.  Okay, pretty much the whole damn time.  Buuuut, the language needs to be scaled to match the learner’s ability.  If the students don’t know the vocabulary or structures you are using, and you don’t ever (EVER) explain them, then it is wasted time.  Wasted, passive, soporific time.

Presenting authentic language is particularly important when the students wouldn’t otherwise hear it.  But we live in Belgium.  We are going to hear Dutch all the time.  We didn’t need to spend all our class time listening to incomprehensible language that washed over us without leaving any silt of knowledge.  We already have the radio for that.

This last class was an utterly passive experience, where I experimented with new techniques for falling asleep sitting upright.  I spent more time in Lala Land in this class than I have at any time since that one sociology class in college that I stopped going to altogether after my snoring disturbed my neighbor…I suspect because it interrupted his nap.  (That professor had to average six syllables per word, twelve words per minute, seven minutes per sentence.  And it was an evening class, 5:00-7:00 with air like blankets.  I am getting sleepy just thinking about it.)

Back to this Dutch class, a couple weeks ago a classmate documented my somnolent experiments with the camera on his cell phone, so there I am on facebook, falling asleep in class.  Thanks Hamad!

The only speaking we ever did was when the teacher went around, prying into each of our personal lives and finances.  How much do you pay for rent?  How much do you earn or receive in welfare?  Do you work?

Those were all just really pleasant exercises, thank you.  Not at all awkward.  But the best was “when was the last time you cried” which was complete with several stonefaced moments of minimalist answers clearly unwillingly given.  Life is hard for everyone, but when a large percentage of the class may never see their family or home again, or when that family and home is engulfed in war, maybe making them talk about their sorrow in front of the class is not really a good idea.  I’m just saying.

So anyway.  The first teacher gave me an appreciation for intensity and really nailing the details, especially at first.  The second gave me a comfortable and productive model that I can ratchet up a bit.  And the third showed a classroom presence that was affable and completely useless.

God, I love how much there is to learn in this life!

In Dutch class the other day

In Dutch class today we were learning the words for facial features, the teacher supplementing the book with things people actually say, noting that they may not be particularly polite.  Big ears, little ears, flappy elephant ears.  Big nose, small nose, sharp nose, vulture beak, potato shnoz.

In the process of doing this she naturally pointed out the feature she was speaking about on her own face while writing the terms on the chalkboard.  Unsurprisingly, this lead to her wearing a big smear of white chalk on her lower lip.

My current teacher generally does 90% of the speaking in class, so we are pretty used to sitting passively.  We sat there passively while she wore her new chalk lipstick.  Gradually it became clear that she was not wiping it away.

She kept talking, we all held very still.  Started shooting glances at each other.  Are you going to tell her?  Held still some more.  By now she was talking about eyes and ears and curly hair, so if someone said something now it would be clear to her that she had been wearing it for some time, us saying nothing.  Plus now it would be obvious that all of us had been conspirators and accomplices in not telling her.  To say something now would be to betray the code of silence we had all stumbled into.

She moved on to eyebrows and we no longer snuck glances at each other, all just hoping she would happen to wipe it away before seeing a mirror or walking out the door.  If it was still there when class was over I was going to run out the door and not look back.

She told us how to say “cleft chin” and then was telling us the expression for a cleft palate when the giant and extremely serious Pakistani man interrupted- “Uh, sorry mevrouw, uh, you hebt, um, witte…chalk on your…lippen.”

Suddenly I found an urgent need to write down some notes, and look intently down at my paper as I did so.

In Dutch class the other day we were doing an exercise on the present perfect tense, producing sentences like “I have already made an appointment with the lawyer” and “I have already baked a cake.”

The Dutch word for “cake” is “cake.”  Convenient for me, but not for the giant Chechnyan guy.  Apparently the Russian word for cake is not “cake.”  Thus his utterance of “I have already baked a cake” turned into “I have already baked a kaka.” Kaka being of course, poop.  He had a very good sense of humor about it.

A fine day for another multi-lingual argument over which country has the hottest women.

Movement is oddly effortless when it is raining.  Riding home from the train station I suspect the warmer air of improving the functionality of my chain and gears, and I wish I could bottle some velocity for tomorrow morning’s cold arduous trudge.  But this is not another blog about bicycling in the rain.  It’s an entry into my long-overdue virtual diary that you can read if you want.

Dutch class today was fine.  Good.  Normal.  I don’t really remember it, it was so long ago. Oh yeah, I remember, it was an impressive show of patience by my teacher as she tried to do a “word slide” exercise.  We each got little squares of paper with a verb in the infinitive on top and an incomplete sentence below.  The exercise is that someone reads their sentence, which is completed by the infinitive verb on someone else’s card, who then reads their sentence, which is completed by someone else’s infinitive, and so forth.

It’s a great idea which normally works well, but today my little cohort was just not up to it.  Long pauses before someone would grudgingly give the infinitive form of the verb, when the whole purpose of the exercise is the present perfect.  I could not believe my teacher didn’t throw anyone out the window.  I expected to show my imperfect skills to the Belgian police when I told them “My teacher has just defenestrated the Albanian.”

Work was good.  I got a kebab with the Italians and a Polish guy and we told football hooligan stories and alcohol stories and they argued about whether Polish or Italian women are hotter and ended up agreeing that Russians were the best.

And even the work part of work was good.  I chatted up some secretaries and nurses, and no one hung up on me all day (although one of my favorite things is calling hanger-uppers back and saying so nicely that pure honeyed niceness oozes out of their phone onto their clenched little chins “Hi, I’m sorry, I think we got disconnected there.  Sorry about that.  I was just calling to see if…” and listening to them squirm their way out of being called out for jerkish behaviour.  Plus my pleasant amiability is contagious, and I reckon they actually go away a smidge happier, so hopefully it is one small point for the Positive Feelings of the world.  I have not been tempted to call back and tell anyone off in days and days.  I am the spirit of equanimity, reaching out across VOIP lines to a bored and irritable nurse in Indiana.  You’re welcome Sherrie-Christie-Janet-Sheila-Kelly.

I was also entertaining myself terribly with a fax or two.  I have sent about 468 faxes, and have heard back from precisely 0 of them, so have logically concluded they are an utter waste of time and paper.  I am okay with the former, but in order to assuage my guilt at the latter I’ve started altering my form letter a bit more.  I think I addressed it to “The Musketeers of Oncology at” such and such hospital, and can’t remember what all else I put in there, but it tickled me a bit, I confess.

But the best part of the day was the wee Dutch girl, who for some reason is calling Thailand, despite not speaking any Thai.  She sits on the other side of the room, but her voice carries overhead as she asks doctor after nurse after doctor after nurse about their ultrasouuuuund.  I noticed the progress of their accents infiltrating her own speech, and I think her frustration opened the floodgates, so she carries that last vowel for a good ¾ of a second, with a nice little melodic fluctuation.  Periodically she’ll say things like “no, no I’m not pregnant, I want to talk to you about your ultrasouuuuund.  You are nurse?”  Another impressive display of patience.

Now I’m going to bed.

Actually, here's a totally unrelated picture from last weekend in Gent.  Now I'm going to bed.

First week of class

New Dutch class!  Gone is the pint-sized Armenian in tall shiny leather boots, the crazy-eyed Romanian advising me to try killing pigs for a living, and the teacher yelling at us for making mistakes.  (I am sad to say the crazy-eyed Romanian did not pass the course, though the good news is that now you can move here during the summer and take the class with him yourself next Fall!  Go for it!)

Nope, new class, new school, new town.

My old class was a twenty minute bike ride away and in the evenings, but now since I don’t get home from work until ten o’clock, I had to find something else.  That something is a morning class in Lier, a larger town just up the rail-line, then continue up a little further to Antwerp for work.

By the end, the old class was 14 (or 16) people and 9 (or 11) nationalities (depending on if you count the Russian and Latvian guys who dropped out at the very end).  So far the new class is 12 people and 11 or 12 nationalities, since one guy from Chechnya sometimes says Russia while the other never has in his life and never will.  I hope I never jokingly say anything pro-Moscow in front of him or he will crush me like a bug.  The dude if frickin huge.  His massive wool coat somehow spans the Chechnyan Steppes of his shoulders, left dozens of naked sheep, and on me would hang down to the knees like a pea coat.  I picture him at dinner with a large plate piled with sausages, taking whole boiled potatoes out of a bucket on the floor next to him, and drinking vodka from what can only be described as a goblet.  He has the mannerisms of a criminal underworld player and the face of the cute little boy down the block who you could tell your mom kind of thought of as another son.

Poland, Armenia, Cuba, and Russia still have delegates to my Dutch learning experience, but Congo, India, Romania, Latvia, and Puerto Rico have lost their seats to Albania, Thailand, Iraq, Syria, Macedonia, and China.

So the more urban environment of the larger town has a heavier Middle Eastern quotient than the more rural town of before; this is also reflected by the people on the street.  During the mid-class break conversation is mostly in Arabic, though Russian is a close second, and I think that is Farsi in the hallway.

The classes are held in a somewhat decrepit old schoolhouse, raw plaster patches, buckled tiles, and hanging wires, but it is warm and dry.  Small vents and decorative lines on the building opposite make little faces that smile at me across a brick courtyard sectioned off by yellow caution tape, a little bicycle rack in one corner,  and a few cars parked with the obstinate inefficiency that always results when there are no marked spaces.  Battered lines of past soccer fields show up here and there, and stains mark areas that hold continuous puddles for most of the year.

Half of the building is devoted to adult education classes, just Dutch during the day, while the other half is general education for children who have emigrated here, and are learning Dutch in addition to normal schooling.  The men’s bathroom is downstairs, out of the building, and across foyer named after somebody where stacks of lumber and building material await workmen, and through a fractured cafeteria space where a handful of mid-teens were having class Friday morning, one fellow banging on the table and shouting “Meneer!  Meneer!  Finito!”  That is: “Sir!  Sir!”(Dutch)  “Finished!” (Italian).  The kid was middle eastern.  The teacher ignored him with the resolute ease of someone used to this dynamic.

My classroom is long and tired.  Mismatched shelves stand self-consciously in the back, empty except for an inexplicable dusty gnome.  Behind them is a tinny ladder, and in the corner is a chaos of stacked chairs.

On the desk I generally sit at are written “Fuck a duck and try to fly” and “You’re all mother fucking huslers.” (sic)  This reminds me of the other school, where I took my first class, where one of the dictionaries stacked in the corner proclaimed “SEX” in blue ink capital letters.  Actually, these notes remind me of basically every classroom I have ever been in.

Back to school

It’s not really raining in my part of Belgium tonight. Just that pittering of tiny drops on your face. Cricket morse code, beginning tap dance class for lovable spiders, limited engagement precipitation which only shows up quicking under a street lamp, making facet instants on the gutter water, and those pecks on your cheeks.


Riding home I pass through and over sounds and smells that are coming to mean Belgium to me. The honest reek of a field soaked in horse urine, the stink grown mossy and powerful in the damp, like incense in an ancient cult that’s going to take a lot of getting used to. The pop of acorn husks under my tires. When I get to the rich oil smell of the fries-shop, I know I am almost home. Just come abreast of the pharmacy with its sleepless and standard electric sign chanting the time and temperature religiously in little green dots like a Night Bright, then I’m home.

I am coming back from class. The first time I realized I needed to go to bed early because it was a school night I felt a chuckling nostalgia for the grimace that came back with surprising familiarity after all these years. School.

So I am a student again. I bought a textbook with matching workbook. I bike to class on Mondays and carpool on Tuesdays. I bring two pens, a pencil, and a notebook, though I generally scribble any notes in the book’s margins. I need to buy more lead for my mechanical pencil before it runs out.

I am taking Dutch classes at a local night school with all the other immigrants and mail order brides. This tongue-tied community is deepening my welcome to Belgium with their Filipino names, Cuban gold teeth, Polish haircuts, Romanian giggles, Dominican accents, Congolese cool, Armenian eyebrows, and ridiculously broad Latvian shoulders. The Eastern Europeans came for work, the Latin Americans married Belgians and moved here, and there is a rumor that the Congolese guy plays semi-professional soccer, which may explain his customary absence.

Our skill levels span a decent range of the very bottom of the scale. I think the Spanish speakers have it the hardest, especially since the Cuban and Dominican accents heavily aspirate (to the point of deleting) “s” and the ends of syllables, which just doesn’t fly in Dutch. And none of us are proficient at the Dutch “u” sound, where we almost always replace it with “oe.”

But spirits are generally high, though Tomasz the Pole still whines horribly at any sliver of homework, and also-Polish Bogdan’s absences are competing with Congolese Tchite’s. Bogdan’s wife still comes to class, and I wonder how long she can keep up her explanations for his absence; he has gone from sick to working late to breaking an ankle playing soccer. But that’s probably okay because when he did come he refused to take notes, insisting that his wife was doing it for him.

Oh and one time, Tomasz, the whiner, on his first day actually, knowing full well when class ends interrupted the teacher with 6 minutes left to say “isn’t it time to leave?” I thought that was about the balsiest stunt I’ve ever seen from a student.

But other than those couple humorous Poles, the class is sweethearts. There is Shushanit, from Armenië whose husband has finally stopped patrolling the hallway outside the class with their daughter all three hours. I suspect she is the best Dutch-speaker in the class but she is so soft-spoken it is hard to say. Or the other Armenian woman, Lilit, whose eyes are always laughing. I biked home with Romans from Latvia the other day, whose bicycle has no brakes, and though I couldn’t understand all of his enthusiastic English I enjoyed the company. Eduardo from Cuba had a son born two days ago. I think Traian has a crush on Ewelina.

So even though the class moves pretty slowly, I am happy to be there, watching my classmates, learning the language, integrating with my new...home?