#1
School times: My timeline beggining
My first experience in English learning was in the fourth year, at school. It was a small school of the neighborhood, and they tried to teach us the numbers from one to ten, some colors and the verb to be. It was really non-sense, that time, not to go further, but the next year, at another school, I began to have real classes.
In the school, we adopted a book from an English course which was developed specially for schools, but it was very similar to the course’s one. We had two books, one with texts and one with homework. The second one brought a “mask” for us to cover the answers, which were in the same page, and probably most of the students didn’t use. I did, and in fact what I didn’t like about that was just to hold the mask, instead of writing freely.
My teacher, that time, was someone who is special for my English learning still nowadays. I don’t know if it was because of her fame of scary or because I was too young and wanted to impress her, and specially, I really liked studying that time, and really wanted to speak English fluently with the classes I was supposed to have until the last year of high school… the fact was that I really learned with her. The teacher was kind of demanding and asked us to copy some lists, with about a hundred words, and check their meaning in the dictionary – and if we couldn’t write, we should repeat that word like 50 times! Of course I never did it, repeating, but I could pay attention to the words I wrote wrong once and try not to repeat the mistake.
What I most liked her was that she read the lessons and made us repeat in group, and later, individually. So I could practice reading it to myself while somebody else was being corrected – I repeated each phrase at least four times, once each student in class had to tell a line.
In fact, I asked myself how could students not to learn with her. When I was in the 7th year and an English course finally appeared in our town, all the students in my class were from the 8th year of the same school I studied. Everybody was really impressed with how fast I could get all that information and use it, they thought I had something special in that area. But I remember one of them said to the others “You see, that’s what we should learn at school. We don’t learn a real English which we can speak. I wish we had seen this at school, so it would be easier now.” And I said “But it is in our book, we just saw it at school, that’s why I can get it so fast, because it isn’t the first I see it.” And they just couldn’t remember.
Later, when I moved to another city and continued in the same English course, but with a new teacher and an old subject, I gave up of studying English. But that is in a future page of the diary.
#2
Answering Sergio's answer
See, I don’t think she was really severe, just a little demanding, and as we were too young we were kind of afraid of her. I, nowadays, agree with some of her methods. I mean, the problems was that she asked us to make activities, but in all subjects they had activities too. And, as I said, I did NOT obey her suggestion of rewriting the same word to fill a page. What I thought it was interesting is that she made us speak a little in classes, something I didn’t had in the last years of school, for example.
Because of PSS, the only thing we made at school was to read texts and answer questions about it. At that time, even being young and in the beginning of the English course, I was able to understand, if not the whole vocabulary, the essence of the text and do the job in few minutes. In fact, most of the students were in the same situation, so English classes, at school, became a talking time. And we didn’t study or made homework, because we didn’t like the teacher so we didn’t really respect him…
You told me you couldn’t learn with teachers you didn’t like, and neither can I, I guess. I fact, the reason I gave up of the English course was that I moved to another city and I wasn’t able to find friends the course. I mean, I am too shy and I used to study with my sister, and she used to make friends and, as I was always with her, it seemed to be enough. When, because of health problems, she had to abandon the course and because of school weekly “news”, I was always changing my schedule and was never with the same people for a whole semester. In fact, in one semester I’ve changed of class four times! And I was always able to get, for four semesters, the same teacher – whom I didn’t like – in different days and turns of the week. See, without company I could not face that, it was boring and I gave up.
Feeling lost
Something that annoys me when I study English is that it seems like it was much easier before, I mean, I wanted to learn every word I could, and I felt able to, nowadays it is like a new content wouldn’t be absorbed… I never feel like I already know all English I need but it is like I already knew enough not to learn more. New words don’t stay in my memory, even if I write them down probably won’t take a look later, I don’t know… it is as I am demotivated, but in fact I would like very much to improve my English, I’d like to speak with the proper words instead of the describing their meanings, I would like to go further with my phrases, to speak about any subject I want, and I feel it is not possible now and it won’t be in future if I don’t do something now to change this situation. I would like to recover the enthusiasm I had before, for songs, for grammar, and not to think they are “repeated” anymore. I would like to think: hey, we are going further on that subject!
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