So last week I completed my first wave of finals here in Germany. WTO, Venture Capital, EU Law, Comparative Intellectual Property. Check, check, check, and check.
Now, after a feverish week of studying and test-taking (4 days straight of early-morning exams), I have an entire week off. Many in the exchange group are traveling and enjoying themselves. I have decided, somewhat masochistically it turns out, to remain here in Hamburg and take intensive German classes for 4 hours a day.
The class itself is one of the more diverse collections of people you’ll find outside of a meeting of the General Assembly of the UN. In our group of 10 we have representatives from: Albania, Poland, China, Croatia, Mexico, Brazil, Britain, Kenya, and the US of A.
The people are friendly and the peer environment supportive and non-judgmental.
The teacher/student dynamic, however, is a bit different.
It’s not so much that he points out our plentiful errors, which, fair enough, is kind of what we pay him to do. No, it’s that he sees every mistake as a reason to mock us mercilessly with some sort of long stand-up routine.
Mercilessly.
To give an example of what I mean, imagine you are a non-native, limited-ability English speaker. You are trying to say that the boy “was running” around town, but you make an error and say “the boy was runny” around town.
That's mildly funny right? Sure.
Now imagine that the teacher, even though he is perfectly aware of what you mean, looks at you incredulously.
“Runny? The boy was runny?” he says, a faux-confused look on his face. “Like, he was a liquid? What, was he melting? Was he some sort of alien or mutant or something that had special powers and could turn his body into liquid?”
You quickly correct your error, but the class has begun to laugh at his outlandish examples, encouraging him.
“Was he like some sort of snail-man who oozes snail goo all over the place?” He continues, pointing at you and gathering steam and doing his best impression of what a snail-man would move and speak like. “Hey, everybody, look at me, I'm half snail, half man! Does this creature even exist? Who knows? Apparently Nick thinks he does. Nick literally thinks that there is a creature out there that is half snail, half man. Don't you Nick?"
He pauses and looks at you, as if he expects a real answer, and you nod wordlessly and hope he begins to start mocking someone else soon.
This, as far as I can tell, is his method. I have mixed feelings about it.
On the one hand, it’s cheap and mean and dehumanizing.
On the other hand though, I’m starting to think it might be kind of brilliant. It might even be the best way possible to learn a language: one humiliating mistake after another.
Take law school, for example. The only way I can ever guarantee that I will remember something from class is if I screw it up. Or I suppose if someone else screws it up. I still remember a kid in 5th grade running out of class crying because he couldn’t remember the answer to a question about the human body (answer: tibia).
And that’s the point. You know all those memories that make you catch your breath in shame or embarrassment when you think about them? These tend to be instructive memories. And there’s this place in your brain where those memories are all indelibly recorded in high-definition to be replayed for the rest of your life. I think ideally, you need to get all your language mistakes into that part of your brain to succeed.
This is the Bob Knight school of language acquisition. And though the Bob Knight philosophy never really worked for me in basketball (it caused me to freeze-up and become erratic), I’m hoping it will be more effective in this field.
So, Mr. Professor Man, I’m going to put my faith in you. I’m going to trust that you know what you’re doing and that you are, like Bob Knight, a professional. Go wild. Next time I misuse the dative, pick up a chair and throw it against the wall. Next time I misconjugate a routine verb, call me an asshole, punch me in the gut and storm out of the classroom. Seriously, do it. You’ve got my blessing. The more outlandish and memorable the better.
It’s the only way I’ll learn.
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