As previously stated on my Creative Pursuits page, taking and maintaining the perspective of a learner is vitally important to my personal pedagogy. How can I hope to help my students learn if I forget what it’s like to learn something for myself? To that end, I enjoy taking up new skills and expanding my knowledge, although I’ll admit I’ve always liked doing such things outside of a teaching viewpoint anyway.
One area of learning that has held my attention since my own school days is foreign languages; seeing how different cultures express similar ideas and organize language structure made me feel like I was learning about the very cultures themselves. My current learning goals are to become multilingual – French and Japanese alongside my native English.
My current progress in Japanese on the DuoLingo language learning app.
While the progress may not look like much, I have come to realize that I learn language skills better when I take my progress slowly rather than trying to gain many levels all at once. As such, I only do one lesson a day right before bedtime, when I’m most likely to store new words in my long-term memory.