I’m learning Italian as an experiment.

I’ve been a language teacher for a long time. I started as a French teacher, but when my adventuresome spirit brought me to different countries around the world, I got the opportunity to teach English as a second language (ESL) too!

When you’re a fresh graduate, you’re brimming with original ideas and excitement for learners to grasp the language you’re teaching… but that shine eventually dulls with time. Teachers have to work under the confines of the school system. Students want to achieve high scores so they can get into their desired universities. School systems structure their courses to follow a specific teach-and-test pattern so they can provide report cards that display specific data.

And thus, we forget our passion to help students learn a language, and we focus instead on teaching from a textbook and helping students memorize grammar points and context-less vocabulary lists.

So, I’ve decided to re-inspire myself. I’m going to learn Italian to remind myself what learning a language is really like, so I can become an even more effective language teacher and curriculum writer. I’m going to try all sorts of methods and see which ones stick, and I’m going to use what I learn to inspire my future writing projects.

Teaching French at

Regis Jesuit High School