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The Writing Life of a Tadpole

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The Writing Life of a Tadpole
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Tag Archives: tutor

Learning, wise owl

My experiences learning French: Part 3 – Return to Asticou

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
December 7 2015

I had been back at Asticou about five weeks when I realized that the passive receiver of language learning was not working for me, and I spent a weekend thinking about some of the challenges I had gone through in the previous year. I kept coming back to the tutor’s analysis — I wasn’t letting go. Except I had, at least to the extent I could i.e. the extent that was within my personality and my learning style, and it hadn’t worked. I needed a different option. Since letting go wasn’t working, what if I took full control?

Lots of people might read that sentence and think, “Oh, of course, the student has to drive their own learning, be responsible, be engaged, etc.”. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about something much more dramatic.

I went into my first interview on the Monday morning and it was with a teacher I knew well. He started by saying, “Today we’re going to …” and I stopped him there. I said, “No, we’re not. Here’s what we’re going to work on…we’re going to talk about the work I do at CIDA, my three main tasks, and an experience from the past. And the only thing you’re going to note for feedback is if I get gender wrong.” Nothing about pronunciation, nothing about structure, nothing about vocabulary. Just gender. He tried to argue, and I said no, this was the new game plan, I kept making gender errors and I needed to fix it. 45 minutes, only gender feedback. He relented.

The second interview, the third interview that day, and two more the next day. I gave them their topics, and only on gender for feedback. They felt they were able to give me more, but I hemmed them in and said gender only. The second night, I took their data and analysed the crap out of it. I was convinced that there were some patterns or rules I could discern that would help. I swear, I had asked multiple teachers for the rules and had been told repeatedly that I just had to memorize it for the various words. I knew it was crap, but I couldn’t prove it. (Future teachers later told me of course it was crap and gave me the rules, but Asticou apparently didn’t believe in them.) Anyway.

On day 3, I went in and did the same thing — just gender feedback. But this time, I had my rules ready. In 45 minute interviews, I went from making 30-40 gender mistakes on words to making 1 or 2, and sometimes none. Gender problem fixed.

On day 4 & 5, I focused on some structures and eliminated another batch of errors. Over the next three weeks, I worked through four or five “problems” that I had been having for almost a year of training, major stumbling blocks. I used to get a page of feedback in interviews; I dropped to a handful of mistakes. Finally, a feeling of progress.

I found out that I could get more “training” by asking for a supplemental tutor, which I did when I was six weeks from my hours expiring. In the morning, I had Asticou interviews; in the afternoon, I had the tutor. With the tutor, we quickly dumped the work conversations and focused on weird and wide-ranging topics, some of them intensely personal, so that I would deliberately struggle with my structures. She also agreed to record some words for me that I mispronounced during our sessions. She would say it once normally, once or twice slowly, then normal, with space in between for me to repeat it too. Classic “learning by tape” technique. But whereas lots of those things were generic words, I combed through three months of feedback on pronunciation errors to find common words that I would need for work — multilateral, organization, policy, process, bilateral, meetings, etc. Most of them I was fine on, but often when speaking quickly, I’d drop a syllable or anglicize the pronunciation. I learned to slow down for those words, to control my pronunciation before moving on. Words I used regularly, a frequency distribution if you will, not some random “office” words that I might use.

Teachers in my interviews were asking, “Why are you still here? Go, get tested, get early parole!”. Repeatedly, I told them, “I’m here until I run out of hours.” I was down to about a month left, and they were giving me interviews with those teachers who taught more advanced students, partly just because it was summer and they were covering off. One day, I ended up with Gemma again.

This is the time where you might think the story takes that classic fictional spin where the student impresses the teacher, and violins play in the background. But this is real life, and that woman was a witch. She was the third interview of the day, and I’d already aced the previous two. Both of them had said, “Go, do the test, stop wasting time.” Gemma, by contrast, asked me, “So, how many hours do you have left before your test?”. I told her, expecting a compliment. Nope, she asked if I could get more. I said, slowly, “Nooooo”, and she said, “Oh well, miracles happen.” Fucking cow. I said, “Okay, we’re done here.” She tried to give me my feedback sheet and I crumpled it up, and left it on her desk. I told her she was a worthless piece of skin, and no wonder nobody at the school liked her and she needed the union to help her keep her job. I left her sputtering, and went to see the director. I informed him if I was ever assigned to her again, for any purpose in the last month, I’d file a harassment complaint the next day. I still think I should have done it anyway.

I knew I was as ready as I ever would be, regardless of what the cows thought.

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Posted in Learning | Tagged Asticou, CIDA, French, learning, PSC, public service, tutor | Leave a reply
Learning, wise owl

My experiences learning French: Part 2 – My first tutor

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
December 6 2015

Even though all of us said that we weren’t ready (My experiences learning French – Part 1), the school sent us for the oral test.

And all of us except one failed. The one who passed? The weakest one among us. Partly as her “stories” for telling what she did for a living were pretty simple in comparisons — she was a clerk who did very basic admin work. No one asked her how she answered the phone or sorted the mail. No follow-up questions, ever.

One of the other people in the group was a policy analyst, like me, and during their test, they were asked to explain “How do you go about analysing a policy?”. Umm, what? That question makes no sense. It’s like asking a car mechanic what steps they do to “mechanize” a car. Asking how to do research or do data analysis might be real questions, but an analyst couldn’t answer it well in english, let alone french.

Whatever, we tried, we failed. So back to the grindstone.

Except now that we had our reading and writing done, we could concentrate 100% on oral. This meant interviews every day, two or three per day depending on the day’s rotation. You would go to the teacher’s office, they would ask you questions, you would answer, and they would give you a list of all the errors you made that day. I was following their methodology, but it wasn’t really helping me. I didn’t feel like I was progressing at all.

And I had a time clock clicking away my countdown. For work, I was set to go to New York for three months. I had to go in early September, so whether or not I was done or not, I was leaving the school at that time. So, I pushed and pushed for the eighth month, and I tried the test again just before I went to New York. I failed, again. Although, technically, you don’t fail. You get a level, “A”, which is basic, but I needed “B” intermediate to graduate.

I went off to New York for three months, a hotbed of linguistic diversity, and I did listen some days to the french translation of some of the speeches, but my comprehension wasn’t high enough to do it when it counted. I couldn’t speak it well enough with other delegates, it would seem too unprofessional to speak french so badly in representing my country, but it was never an issue fortunately. When I came back to work in Ottawa, I thought I would go back right away to the school but they had no space for me at the time, and I had to wait until the new fiscal year. I convinced my boss to give me a tutor for a few hours a week to keep my hand in, and it was the best experience I could have had.

My first tutor

I don’t mean that he was the best teacher and I suddenly “got” it. Quite the contrary. Every session was a demoralizing battle of wills. We struggled and fought daily. But after about three weeks, he thought he would “show” me that I wasn’t as good as I thought. So he brought in a recording he made of a news item off the radio, talking about corruption and business practices. Then when it was done, he asked me what it was about. So I told him. And I got it all right.

He was shocked, incredulous even, that I understood it. I said it was easy, it was a topic that was familiar to me, so I grasped it easily. Plus it was radio french, with a clear crisp speaker. It broke the ice between us and we started talking about “how to learn”, not the learning. He told me, with some trepidation, that he thought I was the worst student he had ever had — not in a bad way, that I couldn’t learn, but that I was so quick to figure out his method and jump ahead, I would throw up roadblocks to how it worked long before I tried it. I wasn’t “letting go” to just learn the language from him.

It was the start of a break-through for me. I realized, perhaps for the first time, that the passive reception method they were using, counting on, was not going to work for me. I don’t work that way in anything. A slightly different nuance than “control freak”, but that’s close enough for this purpose. And I was ruminating on that when I went back to Asticou in April.

Since I was now facing two strikes on my language test, with a rumour that you could only do three or you were “out” (and for me possibly out of a job), my work coordinator basically said “Stay at the school until you run out of hours”. Which was about 3.5 months. Nothing like a guillotine hanging over your head to motivate you, I suppose. (Note that I didn’t know then what I know now, which is that the 3x rumour wasn’t exactly true — nor was losing my job necessarily true. It just meant that I would have used up all my formal training allowance, and I would have to do the rest on my own dime, and I would still have another six months to actually pass. Even then, I would have likely been moved to an English Essential position leaving me free to keep working on it while still working. In other words, I likely had some options, although not guaranteed by a long shot.)

I settled back in the routine at Asticou, just interviews, and doing my own work on the side. And while I was actively trying to “let go” and see what happened, I was back at my plateau from the previous fall, before I went to New York. I could speak french well enough to handle the questions, but my pronunciation and grammatical structures were too error-ridden to pass. I was holding steady on my plateau, but I wasn’t progressing.

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Posted in Learning | Tagged Asticou, CIDA, French, learning, PSC, public service, tutor | 2 Replies
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