Summer professional development for language teachers.



Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. I wanted to dedicate this episode to my language teacher, colleagues. And I wanted to tell you how very much I admire you. I’m astounded by teachers. I think teachers are amazing. And obviously I’m biased. I’m one of you, but I wanted to honor language teachers because I know how hard you work. I know there’s very little time that we get to have as downtime. We’re constantly working to give our kids input in a way that they can understand to make it comprehensible and to make this journey of learning a language enjoyable and pleasurable, even if you’re not naturally gravitating towards it. And it can be really hard work. You got to deal with the rough bits. You’ve got to deal with people’s insecurities of not being successful at something right away and how difficult that can be on people.



And I wanted to share with you specifically some ways that I’ve spent my five weeks over the summer as a teacher and why, and I hope that you get some takeaways from this that are really useful for you. So my very first summer tip is to fill your cup. I can’t tell you how important I think that is. As I said, I think teachers are amazing. And in my many years, it was the early nineties when I started teaching. And I never imagined that I’d still be doing it now. And it’s been a journey. It’s one foot in front of the other. It’s a few things improving every year. And the summers have been really instrumental to that. When I first started teaching, I’ve done a master’s during the summer. I worked during the summer things that I felt that I had to do, other commitments.



Summer professional development for language teachers: being a student.



And I still looked forward to the first summer that I didn’t have to do either of those things. And that was a great fill my cup summer. I read for pleasure for weeks. And then I actually went to Spain and did Spanish language study, and I felt so ready to go back to school. And that was my first real fill your cup summer. And I realized that we oftentimes don’t have choices in what we do during the summer. A lot of times, that was sort of a dream summer that I just described to you, but it’s not my typical summer, not by a long shot, but whatever it means to fill your cup, I think you need to do it.



Summer professional development for language teachers: fill your cup.



And I think people often think teachers have the summer off and we really don’t, oftentimes we’re considered unemployed or we don’t earn enough money so we need to go do another job. It’s not free time. It’s actually getting eight hours of sleep. Teachers during the school year, we spend so much time in meetings, reading emails and as language teachers, we’re constantly trying to make this thing that’s really difficult in many ways, for people really seamless and fun and accessible and easy, but challenging and rigorous at the same time. Right? Really bringing people from not speaking a language to being able to communicate with people all over the world. And there’s no really easy way to do it in the school environment. We got to just every day do comprehensible input in the target language and give them opportunities to communicate and make our room a safe place to make errors and mistakes.



So filling your cup, whatever that looks like to you, doing fun things, having your dream summer, which probably doesn’t happen for many of us every time.