I sat at my computer all week, fresh out of motivation.
Truth be told, I didn't even want to post today.
My sister-in-law recently called to chat. When she asked, "How is your sabbatical going?" I merely groaned in reply. Because honestly, it wasn't going great this week.
Over the summer, I've shared excitedly with friends and family about all the new things I've looking forward to learning and doing.
That was back in August, when that back-to-school feeling was as fresh as a pack of new pencils. This week, I finally hit a wall. All at once, I could finally see why some of my own students' August grooves often became ruts by October.
Sometimes learning gets boring.
In the first days of sabbatical, I followed a precise schedule. After blowing my husband a kiss on his way to work, I'd run a mile and do my French and math work. After lunch, there'd be more creative work, like photography or writing.
I'm an absolute sucker for schedules and routines. If you superimposed video clips of the first hour of my day over a year's time, I guarantee you'd see no differences except the clothes I'm wearing. The same goes for restaurants. I almost always order the same tried-and-true dishes every. single. time. So this sabbatical schedule was going to be a cinch. Or so I thought.
Unfortunately, routine get monotonous. This week, it most certainly has. While doing my daily jog a few days ago, it seemed my treadmill's mile counter wanted to torture me. I already wasn't feeling it, so I decided to get the thing over with as fast as possible. I upped the speed and ran - sprinted, really - until I was gasping like a goldfish out of water.
...only to look down and discover I'd only gone as far as 0.2 miles.
Later, I was determined to NOT look at the distance gauge and only go by the amount of sweat I produced. I ran until the entire surface area of my face was coated with an impressive sheen of sweat. And what did I find when I finally looked down? 0.4 miles. Apparently, I was just a really sweaty person that day.
When the amount of effort going in produces little to no output, it gets discouraging. Or sometimes it just gets hard. Like my French lessons as of late. I've been using Duolingo, and it was all fine and dandy while it was still bonjour here and merci beaucoup! there. But this just week, the app decided I was getting too cocky and threw all kinds of new words at me. In just one sitting, I had to contort my mouth in all kinds of new ways to try and get words like immeuble or dangereux to come out properly.
All of that's been combined with the fact that I'm juggling three languages on the daily with the tired processing power of a brain in its third decade of life. It's like I've become the worst kind of trilingual person ever. Unlike most normal multilingual folks, my brain struggles to keep hard boundaries between French, English, and Korean...especially when I'm tired or hungry. So on days that I'm not careful, I might ask things like, "Have you seen 내 - I mean my - portable? I mean, phone!"
Theoretically, I know every learner hits a rut. As a teacher, I was all too familiar of the warning signs. The groans, the eye-rolls, and the exaggerated sighs that told me that somewhere inside that child, he or she was tiredly thinking, 'Here we go again!'
And as an educator, I was full of the happy speakisms and memes in response. You know, the ones that encourages learners to think about how struggle and hard work eventually pays off. Like this one -
Doesn't that look so optimistic? So neat and linear? It's so...hopeful.
But now that I've actually been in my students' shoes for a full three months on the struggle bus, I say screw that graph. Because learning how to do something new feels way more like these -
Yup. That was my week.
Thankfully, there are still a few teacher tricks in my bag that I'm planning to pull out big time on myself this upcoming week. Whenever my classes seemed to be hitting a wall with their work, I'd do one or more of the following -
Change the strategy.
Change the context.
Create a game.
Commit to a timed break
I'll explain those a little more thoroughly later. At the moment, I'll tinkering with some ideas for how I can apply that to this upcoming week. So part 2 soon!
For now, I'll leave you with an unfortunately accurate graph, with grand hopes I'll report back with a very different experience next week.
