The Effects of Teaching
I first started studying Chinese back in 2001. At that time I was spending my junior year studying abroad at the University of Melbourne in Australia. I just took one semester of Chinese in order to meet the foreign language requirement set by my liberal arts college in order to graduate. Unfortunately, at the time, I was an awful student of Chinese and really I only passed by the mercy of my professor.
However, despite my poor performance that semester, I did learn some of the important fundamentals of Chinese, namely pinyin, tones, pronunciation and character stroke order. This basis allowed me to progress rapidly when in fall 2002 I moved to China and started to seriously study Chinese in my free time. While my Chinese today still isn’t where I would like it to be, it is enough to get by on in most situations, and I can read and write to a degree as well. I’m thankful to my teacher for the initial foundation he helped me to build.
I know that many of my teachers, particularly my high school teachers, did not always see the effects of their teaching in me, but as with Chinese, in fact I still feel their effects today, and I think that I am a better person because of their teaching. Really, they did a lot for me, and while I know that most of them may never know this, I can take comfort in this fact as a teacher now myself, that in the future my students may continue to feel the effects of my teaching, even perhaps the ones that today I feel as though I am making almost no impact on at all.
