Dungeons & Dragons and Language Acquisition
I taught a class today on D&D, Roleplay, and its potential use in language acquisition. The students and I had fun. Well, I definitely had fun, and I sincerely hope that the students did, too. After the class was finished, I packed up my materials at a snail's pace, the whole while feeling that familiar "exhausted but good" feeling that I know my fellow teachers know. I came back up to my lab and the staff said they got a call from the academics office. It wasn't on the books that I was basically volunteer-subbing for the English teacher that day, and all the classes are digitally-recorded, so when they were checking the recordings and saw me instead of the regular teacher, they were slightly shocked. But the cool part was that, they were impressed with the lesson. Officially, I haven't been an English teacher since 2009. But after today's lesson, and remembering the life of a teacher, I felt not only overly nostalgic for my teaching days, but more importantly, I realized that in my life, I need to be involved in Education in some meaningful way. When I was a teacher, I thought I would be that until I died. Then I wanted to do graduate school, so here I am. But in truth, I suppose that in some important way, I will always be a teacher.
