Whether the learning is face-to-face, blended, or online, the basic principles of learning English remain. You have to be engaged with the text (printed, visual, aural) and with the teacher (real or virtual). How to learn English well, in the Age of COVID 19?
Listen to the teacher. When the teacher repeats a point two times or puts it in capital letters in her PowerPoint, red flag it and take notes. That means what she is saying is important, that is why it is repeated twice.
Read everything thrice. The first is to scan the text, like an eagle surveying the field, before it swoops down for the kill. The second is to read slowly, marking important points on the margins, or underlining key words in the text. The third is to summarize the points in your head, in your notebook, or on the last page of the text. Unless you have summarized the text in three sentences, in your own words, then you haven’t gotten it right.
Master the four skills. Being a teacher of the old school, I tell my students the four skills of language learning are still important. The four skills are reading, writing, listening and speaking. But because of the four so-called skills I enumerated earlier, some students no longer want to read. “Why did you go to school if you don’t want to read?” I ask my students in mock horror. Writing well, of course, means reading The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White.
Listening, with the headphones of your iPod off, works best. And speaking, of course. When one day, I asked a student for his insights into Guy de Maupassant’s “The Jewels,” he answered, “I have none.” I said, “That is good. Therefore, your oral recitation grade is also nothing!” Then he immediately gave an an answer that pleased his English teacher.
Manage your time. A student studies; it is as basic as that. I went to graduate studies in English in the US and read 600 pages every week, I asked my classmates, “How do we survive this?” “Read the pages,” Boho said, “then go to the gym three times a week – and dance in the clubs on Saturday nights!” And so we did. We read tomes on Islamic Mystical Literature, the Nineteenth-Century Novel, and Literary Criticism. Then did the treadmill and danced at Splash in New York every Saturday night. In short, you study hard – and then you play just as hard.
Consult with the teacher. Your teacher has placed her e-mail address and consultation hours in the syllabus. Go and make use of these. If you get low marks in Composition class, go and talk to the teacher. If you cannot get it why old man Potapov, who has just lost his son, begins talking to his horse at the end of Chekhov’s story, then talk to the teacher.
With the patience of Job, I am sure she will explain why that sentence is a fragment. She will also tell you that “occasion” has two Cs and one S. I am sure your teacher will also enlighten you on the way Chekhov writes fiction. For him, fiction is revelation, where the unsaid words and the absent gestures are as important than what is said and shown.
Use the library. I taught for 30 years at Ateneo, which happens to have an excellent multimedia library. During the first weeks of class, I require my students to attend the library orientation. The reasons is so they will know how to dig in that fabulous archive of knowledge. I also tell them that the library subscribes to Time, Newsweek, The Economist, The Financial Times and the International Herald Tribune. In short, sharp analysis and the crisp writing in accessible formats can be had, right there at their fingertips. Now that we have social media, why, YouTube can also be a rich source of documentaries, audio books, and even films that deal with the subject matter in the classroom.
Use your imagination. When studying literature, let your minds fly! Ravyi Sunico, my teacher in Philosophy, once said in class that the imagination has no boundaries. Therefore, let the wings of your mind and heart touch the sky when you read. When the French master wrote, “Monsieur Lantin was caught in the web of love,” do not tell the teacher that this means life is complicated.
First, you answer that “web of love” is a metaphor that means falling in love is like being caught in a spider web. It reminds you of that time when that “fat dimpled spider” (in Whitman’s poem) comes charging along to eat the unwitting fly. In short, it is called falling in love because “at first, you are in love, and then you fall.”
Open your minds. You go to school to have a liberal education, especially in the Humanities. In the Jesuit Fr. Roque Ferriol’s book, that means “magpakatao” – to be fully human. That means never being afraid of ideas. Freshmen jump out of their skin when they hear the word “Communism” or the name of “Sigmund Freud” in their Literature classes. We cannot discuss Ninotchka Rosca’s novel, State of War, without talking about the class contradictions in society. Or talk about Little Red Riding Hood seducing the wolf in Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves,” without discussing Freud. Time now to forget your high-school class in Literature. In high school, your teacher pinned a moral lesson on every poem, play, story and essays in class. In this way, she also reduced the beauty of words to dead butterflies pinned on the wall.
In short, enjoy your English and Literature classes. Have fun in the world of words. Read everything as if it is a love letter, which means reading between the lines. Or better yet, as one of my professors would put it, read not only with your eyes and heart. You should also read with your genitals!
Which means reading everything at the level of the groin where, as Rilke once said in a poem, ”the vital seeds of life begin.”