How a Bad Language Teacher Can Ruin Your Skills

Hello! Today I'm here to discuss the importance of a good teacher, especially when it comes to languages, and how it impacts our language learning journey. I will do this from my own personal experience as a student and my recent one-day-old enlightening epiphany that left me quite devastated.

Miss Rottenmeier in 1974's 'Heidi, Girl of the Alps'

Grab a cup of coffee or pretend coffee that is actually hot cocoa, sit back, and relax because it's story time. Everything started during my third consecutive year of German lessons, but this time around, I had a new teacher. Let's call her Frau Von Rottenmeier. From the start, I already saw some signs of her personality and strict method, hence the comparison to Heidi's Miss Rottenmeier. She was nothing like my last teacher, who was attentive and taught us in a fun yet effective manner. Von Rottenmeier's methods were the opposite—not fun nor effective. It felt like living in an authoritarian regime where everything was calculated and measured to the tee. All we did was write and do exercises. Of course, just like Hitler claimed to make Germany a better nation, my Lehrerin promised to have us fully prepared for the Goethe German Official A2 level exam. Spoiler: she mislead us and we all fell for it.

Yesterday was the day of the exam. It was all quite a bizarre experience, from the timing to the people. But it wasn't until my German Oral Exam that all my hopes really went down the drain and were flushed by Frau Von Rottenmeier's bare hands. I forgot how to formulate cohesive sentences in German, and it was partially her fault.

See, learning languages is
like a muscle; you have to exercise that muscle in order to keep it strong. You know those people who go to the gym and pretend to be doing something useful but are actually working out as much as I do while sitting on the couch on a Friday night? Well, I was one of those people for a whole year, thinking that I was learning and practicing German, you know, really exercising that muscle, when in reality, I had forgotten more German this year than I had learned in the previous two years. At the time, I thought I was one step ahead in the game and that it was just a teacher and it wouldn't change anything. Oh, silly me. Even though I analyzed her exasperatingly, I wasn't fully aware of the whole picture and the terrible consequences one bad teacher could have on my German.

But why did her methods fail? Basically, because we didn't speak German. In fact, I'm pretty sure I spoke more German during my speaking exam than during the whole year. Besides barely practicing the speaking part, we also didn't learn that much vocabulary since all of our exercises were grammar-centered. It's true that this method of teaching may work for other students, and I'm not trying to say it's inherently wrong. My goal with this article is not to negatively frame teachers who use this method; it's simply to expose my experience and why it didn't work for me.

In conclusion, teachers and their methods can profoundly impact your language level, so take this as a warning. As soon as you see that your teacher isn't benefiting your learning, don't be afraid to change. Save your wallet and yourself some suffering.