"I say follow your bliss, and don't be afraid"
- Joseph Campbell -
The best teacher I ever had died
I was 14 and living just outside of Vancouver, Canada. My viola teacher was an 84-year old World War I veteran. I can assure you that 4 years in the trenches made him tough as nails. But, he had an ability to reach into your mind and pull out the best you had. And, he got my best, too. He helped me find what Joseph Campbell called, “your bliss”, an inner-energy you feel when you do something you truly enjoy.
He died two years later, but I continued the viola at university. Unfortunately, a wrist injury developed and the doctors couldn't fix it, so I was forced to quit the viola.
And when I closed the lid of the viola case for the last time, the bliss disappeared.
Eventually I became a teacher
That's no surprise. Educators have been in my family for generations. I left Canada and taught English in a beautiful Japanese hidden in the mountains. I enjoyed the work and the students seemed to enjoy my lessons. However, you could compare my lessons to white bread - it tasted great, but there wasn't much nutritional learning.
then I went From a 'white bread' entertainer to a 'Nutritional' educator
Eventually, I traded the nature for neon and moved to Tokyo. I took my entertaining style to schools, companies, corporations and government agencies. And then I encountered one particular businessman.
This guy took a bat and smashed my entertaining style like a plastic toy.
On my teacher evaluation he complained that, while I was entertaining, I wasn't helping him learn English. My bosses went ballistic and my ego was bruised - it was my first negative review in 7 years.
I set out to fix the problem. And this started me to search for truly effective language teaching methods.
Education filled in the missing pieces
Soon afterwards, I started graduate studies at Nottingham University in England. The focus was on teaching English as a second language.
This was critical for my development.
I studied what the best psycholinguists knew about language acquisition. They confirmed some of my intuitions and challenged others. Thanks to my university thesis I developed important insights about motivation and teaching methods. I also became infatuated with psycholinguistics (the process of language acquisition) and drooled at technology's power to increase learning efficiency.
And then something changed
My craft was maturing, I was beginning to see myself as a teacher, like my viola teacher. I wondered about starting my own language learning company. And that's when something unexpected happened, something I had not experienced since university - The bliss returned.
Nowadays
I work as a part-time English instructor at Hosei University and also with some Tokyo high schools. I also work part-time for a Japanese company where I do public speaking (in Japanese), sometimes to thousands of people a month. I also teach intensive business courses at one of Japan's largest corporations during my university breaks.
And, I work extensively with my favorite student, my daughter.
Would you like to do explore how to master a language? Then join me in the podcast and blogs. Lessons will be coming soon, too. And, if you'd like a transcript of the podcast then click below and every month I'll send you the next podcast's transcript a few days before the podcast comes out.
Happy Learning!
Stephen Harris
