(to) teach: ‘to impart the knowledge of’
For years, I loved teaching. This passing on knowledge used to make my heart swell with joy. But, then, after many years of teaching, learning who to teach well, finding my own way of doing it, and becoming a good teacher, my heart started to swell less.
Call it a crisis of faith.
I always believed in teaching and the value of passing on information and knowledge, but then, as the years were passing and I was teaching every day and learning languages myself too, I started to feel that there was some inherent knowledge inside of us that couldn’t be passed on and that each one should be able to discover themselves at the same time we learn the language. And as a result, I started to see my job less and less valuable, my purpose, less and less meaningful.
I am a language teacher and I believed that the language itself (in my case, Spanish language, culture, and mindset) was something I could pass on since I was an expert on it, I was a figure of authority, and I also had the skill set to teach it well.
But as I was going deeper and deeper in my personal development (dismantling blockages around self-expression and lack of confidence) and language learning myself, I saw that there was a gap between the “knowledge” I was given and me, and how I expressed it. No matter how much I worked on my English, there was always a gap between “knowledge” and “expression”.
You see, for years I believed that a language is something you can “acquire” as one can acquire happiness. But the reality is that you can’t “get” happiness, in the same way, you can’t get a new language. It’s not an outside job but a work that starts and ends on the inside. It’s something you practice and it’s something you are (or become).
I realized that as long as I didn’t do the hard work of discovering who I was in the language I was learning (in my case English), I would never be able to communicate confidently in it. It wasn’t about having a flawless grammar or a wider vocabulary, it was about finding myself through the filter of the language.
Languages allow for way more than communication.
They allow for connection.
One of our deepest needs is to be seen. And to be truly seen in any language we speak requires of a certain nakedness. It’s not wearing a different dress whenever we use a language that is not our mother language but about finding how the language shapes us and who we are/become in it.
Often, when we learn a new language we focus only on the externalities of it (language, culture, mindset) but rarely on how we, as individuals, “merge” with the language creating a unique voice. How the elements inherent in the language mix with our own language, culture and mindset.
When, as language teachers, focus only on providing language, culture and mindset knowledge we hand a cloak for the students to put on, but we don’t necessarily enable the students to weave their own thread within the language fabric to create their own voice. To shape their nakedness.
So I stopped teaching Spanish only and started guiding the student. I not only provide the tools to be able to understand the language and express in it, but also about how to discover the way language shapes them (or wants to if we let it).
Because finding our confidence to express in the language we are learning has nothing to do with perfection or reaching a certain level, but with knowing ourselves through that language, with being in it, and with removing the blocks we have about getting naked in every language and allow ourselves be shaped and transformed by it.
Confidence
Identifying blocks
Find our voice
All this happens at the same time we learn the rudiments of the language: grammar, vocab, mindset and culture/cultures, and how it combines with our own grammar, vocab and cultural background.
We “create” our own idiolect. We make the language ours.
To make the language ours, we need to know who we are and why (through that language and that worldview).
And then, we get naked.
And we are seen.
