Today I want to encourage you all that teaching anything, but especially a world language, is an act of courage and bravery. It takes a lot of nerve to stand in front of a group of students of any age, and speak in a different language. It's challenging enough to engage students in their native language, right? In fact, it takes a lot of courage to be a language learner yourself in the first place. Why?
Obviously, each of you values and believes in this process of becoming multi-lingual but unfortunately, not all of our students, parents and colleagues have the same value. I encourage you to be an advocate for language learning at every chance you get. Lead With Languages is a great website to help with advocacy. Share this video with students, parents or admins when they ask, "Why languages?"
I also had the opportunity to spend time with some of our international teachers, both new and returning. I am impressed with your courage and strength of spirit to come here and adjust to our students and our culture, to risk being misunderstood by students or parents or co-workers, and yet to persevere. You bring a great wealth of language, culture and experience to Lexington One, and we thank you for that.
2 Comments
Tracey Z Hagerty
9/14/2017 01:12:53 pm
Awwww! I LOVE that quote from Amy Chua!
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Addie H. Sabina
9/14/2017 05:41:01 pm
Thank you for the article and the video. We have this wonderful opportunity to share with our students so much when they learn another language. I appreciate what John Greerty said in the video: "Dive into the culture to know the language." I will be sharing the video with my students and their parents, because we still need to be ambassadors of World Languages.
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