Learning Language by Sylvia

Learning Language by Sylvia - June 2019 Scholarship Essay

Dr. Benjamin Dreyfus was one of my more interesting professors. He was my teacher for physics and my instructor for becoming a learning assistant. One day during our learning assistant seminar, Dr. Dreyfus was going over the most effective ways to communicate information to struggling students. One of those ways was to remind ourselves, the learning assistants, that we are essentially speaking in another language because we already understand the information we are trying to help other students understand. And because of that, we need to know how to translate that knowledge to our other students since they are only interacting with the new material for the first time, they do not grasp what the learning assistants are trying to tell them if both parties are speaking two different languages.
With that reality being brought to light in my eyes, it has changed the way I speak to people. It has made me more mindful on how to approach problems in my classes and questions I may have for my other professors. My peers and I speak from the what we all have been taught together, however, those from a different department who were taught a similar thing but in a different subject, (i.e. inorganic chemical structures in the point of view of a chemist versus the point of view of a mineralogist) will communicate the same ideas but with a different vocabulary.
This realization has also made me more aware of others at my job as a learning assistant. While I may know what I am saying to the students I am tutoring, they may not fully comprehend what I am saying. It is not because they are dumb or are not trying, but because they are just now learning the language of knowledge that I have been studying in far longer than they have.
I am grateful for this new insight into my life. This lesson has helped me take a step back and reevaluate how I going about thinking things, gaining new perspective I am more than certain will help me in the future. I am grateful to Dr. Dreyfus for opening my eyes to a new world I did not know existed.