Evaluation

As I think all educators do at the end of a term, I'm now going through the "what I could have done better" phase of reflection. I don't think a lot of us really think as much about what we did well (and I will leave that to my students to judge), but I know that I always end the term thinking, "Well, it was a good class, but . . ."

Generally, I think that I would have done more to acclimatize my students to the kind of connections that American-style education does very well: that of taking the personal and connecting it to the materials at hand. Added to that, I would have stressed more strategies for owning the course material rather than just parroting it back on an essay.

My students were initially puzzled, I think, about spending some time in class discussing their own complex language histories in their families, but we used this as a way to understand how the French and English must dealt with each other in medieval England when both languages were operating side by side (with Latin thrown in for good measure), separated largely by social class and status. Once we had that personal discussion out of the way, they seemed to be very savvy about why someone might choose to learn English or French or Latin in the complicated language stew that was medieval England. Though, in reality, it wasn't as complicated as the current language stew in Daugavpils, Latvia . . . Once they got the sense that their own personal experience as linguists was relevant to the class material, they were willing to go with me. But it was something that they were not used to.

Furthermore, students in Latvia are not really as used to class discussion as American students are, and my courses in the States are all about class discussion. This makes it hard for them to take notes -- they are not always sure what exactly they should be taking notes on -- and I could have a better job of separating lecture and discussion of lecture material. Latvia does this very well, actually, dividing courses into "lectures" and "seminars," where seminars means specifically discussion of material. I'm not sure that I would use that artificial construct myself, but I do think that helping students know what to take notes on and doing more work of summarizing discussions would have helped them, and probably would have clarified more for me what I thought was important about a class.

I would definitely have discussed strategies for note-taking. My own strategy is to write everything I can down, and then pare them down to essentials later, recopying them into a more organized format. Time-consuming, yes, but I can recall the content of lectures I listened to thirty years ago with clarity because of this. And I would definitely have discussed the importance of paraphrasing: that is, not simply cribbing materials from sources but putting them in your own words so that you understand and own the material. This was a big problem in my final essays, and I am guessing that Latvian students are so used to going to sources as The Authorities that they don't fully realize that they bear some resposibility for making sure that they only use sources but also synthesize them into their own knowledge banks.

All of these things I would do point up two things. 1) Working in a different educational system is eye-opening because you are never sure what your students know and what they don't know. This is not a bad thing; you get a Fulbright, after all, to learn how a different educational system works and how to integrate yourself into it. 2) This one applies to Latvian and American students: educators need to remember that teaching is not just about teaching content but also teaching how to learn: that is, what practical skills you need in order to succeed in the class and beyond. This means teaching how to listen to a lecture, how to take notes, how to study, how to write and format a paper -- in short, how to own material and then show others that you've owned it.

But enough beating myself up. I can always do things better, and I go through this same process every term. But under some trying circumstances -- basically, substituting for and eventually replacing a faculty member when it was obvious the tenth week of term that for health reasons she would not be able to return to the class -- it did not go badly. Students did learn some basics of the history of the English language, as their final essays showed me. Several of them wrote lovely things about having me as an instructor at the end of their essays. They liked having a native English speaker and hearing my American accent. I find this amusing because nobody has ever told me that he or she likes my accent. I'll take it.