Teaching one-on-one comes naturally to many people. Perhaps it is a fundamental part of being human. But teaching a group is another matter. You know how most people have no problem speaking one-on-one with another person, but get nervous at the idea of giving a speech to a group? Well similarly, a lot of people get nervous at the idea of teaching a group.
The idea began with a request from a language student. The student wanted to find teachers of various subjects who wouldn't mind a language learner participating in their classes - in subjects like art, gym, music, story writing, cooking, math, etc.
So a goal was proposed: let's encourage regular people (not necessarily language teachers) to teach their subject to language learners. The goal would be to allow people to teach whatever thing they wanted to teach, to get good at imparting their knowledge about that subject in whatever creative way they could.
Upon posing this, a more basic goal was posed. Let's encourage new teachers to teach. That's all. And the rest would fall into place. Teachers would offer their class for free, in exchange for a place to iron out their nervousness or test out their ideas. And students would take their classes, for whatever reason.
It is not just language learners who might benefit from basic classes in various subjects. For many people, the pandemic was the first time experiencing how isolating isolation could be. Now that the pandemic is over, more people understand how it feels to be marginalized - how it might feel to be elderly, disabled, displaced, still working from home, anyone experiencing the weight of loneliness. Well, participating in a classroom, in simple subjects, where there is some attempt at comaraderie, development, interaction, learning - this could also benefit such people.
The idea of an experimental lab started forming. Here would be a place that new ideas could be tested and experiments could be run. New teachers could showcase their development, could learn from participating in the classrooms of others, could try out lesson plans shared by others.
It seemed kind of fun.
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