February 22, 2016 - 13:26
Table of Contents
1. Moving Upstairs
2. Real School
3. Penguins and the Rain Forest
4. École Active Bilingue
5. Back in Town
6. Away Again
7. Math Team & Middle School Dances 8. A New Home
9. What Can I Say
10. Trees in Transit
9. What Can I Say
“Wait - no, but you have to multiply it first. And then you get x squared over two and then we need the derivative...” I said, thinking over the math as I spoke.
My classmates and I were struggling together to reach a solution to the equation. I had my thoughts on how to solve the problem and my classmates had theirs. Each of us explained our ideas, trying to convince the others that we were correct. I was as wrapped up in this conversation as any one of my peers, to a point where I had forgotten that I was speaking in a foreign language.
It was my senior year of high school, and I had been in Spain for about a month or two by this point. Living my life in Spanish was still a daily struggle, and even mundane interactions were stressful when I could not think of a word or when I knew that my grammar was way off. However, sitting in math class talking over this problem, I only realized what language I was speaking when one of my classmates said (in Spanish, of course):
“Wow, you’re speaking Spanish so well.”
“Gracias,” I responded, noticing for the first time that my words had been flowing freely. I had not been mentally translating my words from English to Spanish, nor had I been translating my classmates’ words from Spanish to English. I may not have been the one with the correct answer to our math problem, but I had made a separate academic achievement unrelated to the task at hand.
The four years of Spanish classes that I had taken in the United States had given me a useful foundation of grammar and vocabulary, but they had not prepared me to live my life and go to school in the language. It took living abroad and many frustrating, incomprehensible conversations to eventually achieve a sense of fluency. More than that, I had to get out of my own head and focus on something other than the Spanish language itself in order to speak with relative ease. Over the course of my eight months in Madrid, the moments in which I spoke most like a native were those in which I was more focused on art or food or a joke or connecting to a new friend than I was on sentence structure. Of course, in these conversations I made tons of grammatical mistakes and often struggled to find words. Nobody would have mistaken me for a Spaniard, but I could comfortably communicate what I needed to communicate and that was a victory in itself.
In a classroom environment, it can be hard to achieve the kind of natural experiential learning that can be so valuable not just for language learning but for any kind of learning. The extent to which I felt completely unable to speak conversationally during my first weeks in Spain speaks to the limitations of grammar worksheets and vocabulary lists. My high school Spanish class felt quite rigorous, and I put a lot of effort into the course. However, in a couple of months of living abroad I had made about as much progress as I had in four years of classes.
For many reasons, not everyone can (or wants to) live in a foreign country or work as an apprentice in a lab or write for a magazine, even though these might be some of the best ways to learn about foreign languages, science, and writing. Experiential learning is hard to come by because it requires resources and because it disrupts the routine. In order to learn as much as I did about Spain’s language and culture, I flew overseas, left my friends and family, and dealt with homesickness and culture shock. Although I do not by any means regret spending my senior year away from home, I understand that this kind of exchange cannot be a part of everyone’s academic career.
However, elements of the kind of learning I experienced can be brought into the classroom or used to supplement what is taught in the classroom. Field trips, lab work, pen pals from other countries, and other activities can also facilitate learning in a real-world setting. It is during these activities that students can forget about the process of learning and instead actually learn. Of course, there is also value in the more standard pedagogical approach to learning. If I had not had any background in Spanish structure and grammar before arriving in Madrid, it would have taken me much longer to achieve the moments of fluency that felt so rewarding. It is impossible to write a novel without first learning basic spelling and one cannot become an engineer without memorizing mathematical formulas. Experiential learning and classroom
learning have a symbiotic relationship; the more equipped you are with one, the better you can do with the other.
Learning comes in many forms, and all of those forms have their own significance. It is important to learn the grammar and formulas and historical dates that make our world what it is. However, all of this information is meaningless if it is not applied to build machines, make policies that affect communities, cure diseases, or simply connect with other human beings and build meaningful relations. I continue to make an effort to include experiential learning in my higher education by taking courses that allow me to teach off-campus, by volunteering as a tutor in a prison, and by applying to study abroad next semester in a country I have never visited. The beauty of applied or informal learning is that it can either be a difficult but rewarding struggle, like not having the words to talk about your feelings and values, or it can be as easy as telling a joke to a new friend, and realizing that while doing so you correctly used the imperfect tense for the first time.