Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!!

Lifelong education

It's our last year at university, at the end of which nothing is really certain.. Indeed, we have expectations, plans and dreams, but our future still waits for us to give it a proper and personal shape.
Yet, there's only one thing we ca be sure of: we'll never stop learning. Our education can not stop at the end of our university experience: we'll still need to become more mature, improve our skills and knowledge, widen our horizons...
To understand the value of our future learning it's necessary to become aware of the path we have been walking so far. Especially as far as language learning is concerned, I've tried to think of all the ways in which I've been improving my language skills during these years. Then, taking Sarah's and Martina's mindmaps as a model, I've developed my own PLE map. As you can notice, it's a very simple map. It focuses on three main aspects of learning: gathering information, storing and sharing information and people involved in the learning process.

Despite the simplicity of my PLE there's one point which in my opinion is quite interesting: developing my own map I realized that, among the formal opportunities to learn a language, giving private lessons plays an important role in the improvement of linguistic skills. It may sound a paradox but I'm convinced that if you really want to teach something you need to make sure you actually know what you are talking about! This is not only the case of English lessons to Italian children, but also of Italian lessons to foreign people: as they don't know Italian at all (they all come from Sub-saharian Africa), English is for me a fundamental vehicle to teach them the basic elements of my language. This gives me the chance to deepen my knowlegde of English, as well as that of my mother tongue. Giving private lessons of music in London has been for me a further and extraordinary way to improve my language skills: teaching music in English was not only amusing but also extremely useful to get to know and use specific words and expressions. In general, teaching can be a wonderful experience we, as teachers, can take advantage of in order to develop our own abilities...this is something we should always keep in mind, since it proves that education never ends...