To all of my regular readers, I owe an immense apology. It has been several months since you last received a dispatch from the Far East Side Minyan. I ought to say that the stresses of graduate school have precluded me from corresponding, but in fact I have had opportunity to blog. I have simply felt as though I had very little of interest to say. In school, my life has not extended much further than the campus library. While this library is located east of my apartment, this fact alone did not create much material worthy of publication.
Well, things have changed over the summer. I had the great privilege this summer of attending an immersion program in Portuguese at Middlebury College. Middlebury is famous for summer language programs that involve what is known as the Language Pledge--a pledge each student in the program takes to use the language he is trying to learn as his only means of communication (exceptions are made for keeping in touch with your family or in the event of a genuine emergency). Besides gaining leaps and bounds in my knowledge of Portuguese, I feel I've learned a few things about myself, and about language teaching. I would even say that this program has reinvigorated my love of and interest in language teaching, to the point that I could imagine myself doing it professionally again. I've also gained a better sense of what was going on in the mind of my students as they struggled to speak in English.
More on my experience at Middlebury will follow, probably on La Lingua Frankly.
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