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                                Be ready, wide open,  adventurous, and brave in Language Acquisition  

                    ---2017春公派出国留学高级英语培训之旅  

2017春季，我部又迎来了一批参加国家公派出国留学高级英语班的新学员。 学员们来自全国多所高等院校及科研单位，他们将和我们的教学团队一起共同开启一次英语语言学习与文化探索之旅。在本次培训的开班典礼上，学员代表华中农业大学杨帆表示，要珍惜这份难得的提升机会，乐享学习外语的美妙旅程。本期培训，我部在课程设置上又有新的调整，增加了阅读及写作课时，希望学员们能有更多时间与老师沟通，更新外语学习的理念。我部将秉承品质教学的工作作风，让学员们在愉悦、丰富、有趣的外语学习氛围中与英语对话。

    让我们再次阅读外籍教师Robin女士在开学典礼上和学员分享的精彩感悟。  

…As some of you already know the thoughts I bring to such an occasion come together in rather mundane fashion.I start with nothing to say and wait as patiently as I can for something to say… About a week ago on a beach in Vietnam a well worn expression came along,

“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”To be honest, I was more than a little disappointed.  Having become a pretty tired cliché cheapened by self-help industry gurus, self-proclaimed philosophers, and every blast of hot air in between, those words struck me with all the inspirational potential of stale white bread.I listened hard for anything else, but the words insisted.“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” I turned to researching its origins hoping the root of it might lend me a spark.I discovered that many Buddhists attribute it to the Buddha meanwhile many other Buddhists say this is false.Elsewhere it is ascribed either to a slightly mad 19^thcentury European Theosophist - one Madame Blavatsky, Lao Zi, or Kong Fuzi.

Finding the root so obscured as to be untraceable, I was, after all, alone with it.“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear."

I thought, perhaps, cracking open the words themselves would reveal something useful…?   On its face, the noun‘student’is simply a practical referent used to identify someone proposing to learn something.The real meat in the first clause comes with the adjective‘ready’.  Something vital is added to the mix by defining a particular student’s precondition; the student we are invited to consider here is – ready.Readiness is the key, but… ready for what?Ready for‘the teacher’as the saying goes…   Shall we also read‘the teacher’as literal – a concrete, embodied magician intervening and performing miracles – the one without whom‘the student’remains inert and untransformed?After decades of being a student and 10 years of formal classroom teaching in two very different countries, I encourage everyone who hasn’t yet to thoroughly reject that idea along with that image.Cracking open the noun‘teacher’ becomes far more revealing if you do; it contains multitudes.  Wise children understand that‘the teacher’is the rich soup of experience and interaction into which they’ve been born – in which they find themselves at any and every instant.If everything is‘the teacher’; then what and evenIFthe student learns is dependent on her state of readiness – for anything.

Learning begins and ends with the student then.Those people in classrooms we have trained ourselves to call teachers are nothing more or less than companions to that process.The student who is ready is wide open, curious, adventurous, and brave enough to recognize ‘the   teacher’ in every thing and in every encounter.If the student has already decided who or what the teacher should be and how the lessons should unfold, learning will be painful, shallow, and slow.

So… having found for myself yet another teacher in – of all things – a worn-thin mouthful of recycled aphorism,  what I’ve  learned is  actually very good advice to students anywhere.I can boil this whole thing down to two simple words:be ready.