Peer encouragement teaching : the new school that could be

Musing about the phenomenon of language self-learning. It's not self-learning the salient point, but the peer encouragement ecosystems the Net has made possible to bloom. I believe self-learners don't simply go to discussion groups for ideas on how to start learning or progress. They also go there because they find encouragement among peers doing the same thing and chronicling their efforts. They exchange tips and they dispense encouragement. Where is the school where you get a sense of encouragement? Where is the school where you get courses on encouragement and self-motivation, courses explaining and encouraging the "joy of learning" despite the harship? It has do be found inside, or so the untold story goes. Learning communities are telling a revolutionary story, a totally different story.

And this points at what a new school could be when teaching languages, and mathematics, and physics, and whatever. A source of learning AND resourcing, or call it motivation. I want to remind again to myself that exchange of mails I have seen passing around as a single course teacher in a French school here in Tokyo. A part-timer with a single course on introductory interpretation doesn't belong but in the viewer's seat at the edge. That exchange of mails and concerns about curriculum stressed twice the argument that students have no contact with French language besides their attending school. I was blown away when I read this assertion first time, but puzzled when I read it again. Let' say students do not have contact with the language outside the courses. In 2009 isn't it insane to think that way? What is "having contact with a language"? Is it "conversation with natives" only and solely? Reading books, listening to songs, podcasts, conferences, etc. is no "contact" because it lacks the interactive factor? Obviously, no school of Japanese would suggest their students to look and be inspired by AJATT. First, they would have to know the site. Big hurdle. Second, they would have to understand the concept, not in this world. If they get it though, they would have not to choke at the repeated "school sucks" slamming. Now we are outside this universe. Then they would have to be convinced that once they grow up enough not to reach for the revolver with that sucks thing, they found the biggest hint of their life over all the generations of schools directors having run the show. The big hint is in the message, so big that probably no school will see it. Let's say I go to my school, bow at the power in charge and tell the big guy with iron fist who lashed me back a more polite way to tell "what the fuck!?" when I tried and explain that clown gentleman about "shadowing" :

I have a new course in mind to offer : "How to discover and make the best of French resources all over the place in Tokyo and the Internet and learn mostly on your own".

That's when I'll get fired on the spot and jeered at by most of the teachers' rooster, including the young cool ones making their courses pleasant and fun. In another school in a different world, the students would rush outside the classroom after the course and run for more language in the city, a map in hand. On that map would be featured the school location too, the alma mater that nurtures, because ... but read the following:

I think what a new school is to teach should be mostly about strategies to learn outside the school. And that's where the schools' morons will scream, foam at the mouth and reach the hatchets. Because they will read that as a call to blow the ship. How could a school be kept afloat when teaching students how to do without the school? Simply because the school will be :

- a place where you learn less language but strategies on how to do it
- a place where you come back because you get inspired, encouraged, peer learners interaction, insights, and ...
- .. interaction with natives who encourage the learners, show them new tricks, check with them how far the tricks they suggested last time are doing now
- in a nutshell, a docking station where to get the juice, the food and the warmth to go on

A new school would load students' hands with dynamite like lust for learning more, doing their chores at home and how to do these.

Could this school exist? Yes, I have no doubt about that. Not in Japan though.