When I was 15, I chose to go to high school in France for one year. I had three years of French language study under my belt. I wasn't necessarily prepared to speak and understand what was said to me (that would take many months of immersion in the country, during which I heard little to no spoken English), but I had very good reading comprehension skills and I could write fairly well for the amount of time I had been studying. Upon my return home to the U.S., I discussed my upcoming senior year with my French teacher. Besides expressing horror at my newly-acquired Parisian accent which she found to be "très vulgaire", I received the unfortunate news that there were no advanced courses that I could take. At a time when my peers were pursuing AP-level coursework in a variety of subjects, I was left with no such option. The year was 1989.
If this scenario had taken place today, according to the article Teaching in the New (Abundant) Economy of Information, perhaps a 15-year-old me would have had more access to advanced French study:
"In this information scarce environment, the main form of instruction was a lecture, and the tools that dominated the classroom were just as understandably those that distributed the limited information: textbooks and chalkboards."
These days, I am a middle-aged adult learner pursuing an online graduate degree while working a full-time job. I am not limited by scarcity of time and place because my Master's is 100% online. I benefit from abundance because my online degree pairs perfectly with the ability to create a personal learning environment.
Fear not, for my story has a happy ending: I eventually grew up to be a French teacher in the late 90's and as online learning resources became increasingly abundant in the first decade of the 21st century, I began to share these modalities with my own students. An example of which is TV5MONDE, an early proponent of the abundance mindset in education:
If this scenario had taken place today, according to the article Teaching in the New (Abundant) Economy of Information, perhaps a 15-year-old me would have had more access to advanced French study:
"In this information scarce environment, the main form of instruction was a lecture, and the tools that dominated the classroom were just as understandably those that distributed the limited information: textbooks and chalkboards."
These days, I am a middle-aged adult learner pursuing an online graduate degree while working a full-time job. I am not limited by scarcity of time and place because my Master's is 100% online. I benefit from abundance because my online degree pairs perfectly with the ability to create a personal learning environment.
Fear not, for my story has a happy ending: I eventually grew up to be a French teacher in the late 90's and as online learning resources became increasingly abundant in the first decade of the 21st century, I began to share these modalities with my own students. An example of which is TV5MONDE, an early proponent of the abundance mindset in education:
TV5MONDE offers various levels of self-paced French language study through audiovisual aids with accompanying reading comprehension and grammar lessons
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