Mr Hayden (Interview)

 A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed a professor at my school named Mr Hayden. I got the opportunity  to ask questions and hear about his language background and personal story. My Hayden is the director of languages at the Bishops School. I have had him for Spanish in 9th grade and Latin this year.

Here are some questions I asked, and here are some summaries of his answers. I find it neat to discover the personal stories of different people. 

 

His personal story/advice (in summary): 

-His family does not speak any other language than English

-his father studied some languages but only spoke english 

-grew up in Southern California so many Spanish speaking neighbors

-college/high school: studied Spanish, but major was anthropology/anthropology with music

-year abroad in India: spent time in hill stations and studied Hindi at a language school as an undergraduate, but more focused on music and anthropology

-his wife is from Mexico, so he felt this urge to speak Spanish 

-spent a lot of time with Mexican friends and family after he got married

-raised children in Spanish as their first language -raised children to be trilingual (Spanish, French, and English) 

-placed his children at a French school

-discovered himself as a language person when he applied to graduate school where he recognized that every educated person from the last 2,000 years had learned Latin

-wanted to go into the depths of education and with that Mr Hayden believes that Latin is a whole world that he must know and understand for educational purposes (it is the root of many romance languages)

-Latin is a used functional language rather than a native language, it is different than a classic dead language

-went to work for a company after college which helped with worldly education for students, which helped inspire his desire for teaching

-Mr Hayden started his own business for test preparation and educational tutoring, until he got the opportunity to work at the Bishops School and devoted himself to teaching 

-He feels he has a desire to know and understand, and he enjoys engaging with those who have the same type of curiosity 

-Mr Hayden says that his revolution in Spanish language has been more social rather than literary and academic, but he enjoys Garcia Marquez 

-he also enjoys observing different books and pieces in Spanish that are meant to target different levels of fluency

- being exposed to language in a social setting is the best way to fully integrate yourself and become knowledgable and gain more complexity 

-growth is being able to see a word you don't know and learning by expanding your exposure to people

-fluency does not mean knowing every single word in a given language, words that are particular to a complicated subject such as Chemistry, could not be understood by majority of fluent speakers (being fluent doesn't mean being a total expert on a language)

-importance of circumlocution is vital, where you can find other words to describe a word that you do not know