Long ago I posted a blog on Bon Journal called “Teaching from the Gut.” By the title, I meant teaching a subject you know so intimately that it feels as though it’s coming out of your gut. You’re so confident of the subject that you don’t need to do additional research to make sure you got it right.
That’s how I felt about teaching math, piano, and now, Mandarin.
How does one teach from the gut?
Hawaii Strategy Institute 2015, UH Maui College delegates at Leeward Community College, Oahu
I always feel more confident speaking from experience than from research. Having done it is more powerful than having read about it. By the same token, having used it is more impactful than having studied it.
However, doing it doesn’t always help to understand its usage. Take language, for instance. While a native speaker may pronounce a word correctly, he or she may not necessarily know the origins of the word or why it cannot be used in certain situations. We would need to consult a linguist or a grammarian.
When I ask native English speakers about the use of certain prepositions and articles, which are a rarity in Chinese, they will repeat the words until they feel the correct choice is in place. They can’t always explain why, only that it feels right.
Something similar happened to me when my Mandarin students asked about the difference between hui4 [huì] 会 and neng2 [néng] 能. As a native speaker, I hadn’t given much thought to why I would use the verbs in different situations and not interchangeably. Luckily such questions have been asked before, and a quick search on the Internet revealed good explanations.
So, teaching from the gut has merits. But equally, it’s important to have studied the subject the way a scientist or a scholar would, i.e. approach it independently and without bias.
A seasoned teacher is like a well-versed actor or an experienced performer who has given the same concert program a thousand times. He or she has anticipated all the questions and feedback with all possible answers. How many hours of practice does it take to achieve mastery of a subject and then be able to transfer the knowledge?
Hawaii National Great Teachers Seminar, Big Island, August 2014
Being an expert doesn’t mean you can teach the subject, however. “You are domain experts, but have you ever been trained to teach?” This was one of the key messages of the Hawaii Great Teachers Seminar I participated in August 2014. This week-long seminar is held on the Big Island, a.k.a. Hawaii Island each August. Funding for it is one of the ways universities provide for teacher training.
Hawaii National Great Teachers Seminar (August 2014)
To learn to teach, I attended professional development workshops given at Maui College and actively engaged in conversations about different ways to teach. I applied exercises on the flipped classroom taught by my nursing colleague at a 1.5 hour session at the 2015 Hawaii Strategy Institute on Oahu. I learned ways to teach language from my Spanish language colleague. From my English writing colleague, I learned to use free writing as a way to warm up my students in my Writing Intensive Music Literature course.
A walk on the maze welcoming the new chancellor at UH Maui College, 8/14. Photo: Harvey Reed
For me, Mandarin Chinese is value-laden and full of cultural context. As my mother tongue, it is the language I use to count and to speak to my mother. I miss it if I don’t get to speak it. And when I teach it to a class of eager adult students, I’m transferring not just the language but the culture and history as well.
Piano is likewise something I hold very dear. I learned to play the piano from a Japanese teacher before I knew how to speak English and long before Japanese. I didn’t learn to read notes using the alphabet or solmisation. I can’t divorce the notes on the score from the black and white keys on the instrument. They are one and the same. Yet when I teach sight-reading to beginning pianists, I have to introduce the intermediary step of letters CDEFGAB or do re mi fa so la ti.
In the latest adult education catalogue (Edventure, Fall 2015), I said that continuing education inspired me to forge new pathways in my professional journey. “There’s a saying that the one who learns the most in the classroom is the teacher,” I said. “As a lifelong learner who is curious and passionate about learning, I found my niche and now I’m teaching two subjects closest to my heart: piano and Chinese.”