I once read a sentence in a book that stuck with me forever "Some things happen in life, that are like questions. It might take a minute, or maybe years, but life will eventually give you the answer"
I am a big believer that things happen for a reason, and this story is yet another proof that we have to trust our path.
That morning I had a annual check up at the dentist office, and it changed my life.
There was a new chair assistant and we started talking about the usual superficial things: where are you from, you have an accent; Oh, Italy, so cool; do you speak other languages? and so on. Not sure why I told her something like "I would love to teach languages but I don't really know how. One thing is being able to speak, teaching is a different set of skills".
She said "You must meet my friend Tony Marsh, he invented a new way of teaching languages, he can help you with the methodology".
And this is how we met, Tony and I. Tony is a very passionate guy, but not the nerdy kind, that loves to study and overthink it. He likes to makes things as easy as possible, in a natural way. He went on and he told me about his experience in Iraq, where he was learning Arabic within the army, to soon realize that what he was learning in class was not useful in an everyday situation. He started thinking about what language he really needed to converse with people, and that's how THE LANGUAGE MATRIX was born.
This methodology instantly resonated with me, because that is how I learned my 4 foreign languages. It simply made sense and it would work! Thanks to Tony I found the courage to start teaching, and I further developed the Matrix system based on my personality, my clients' feedback and the results I was seeing.
The biggest takeaway of Matrix system is what I like to call "the eagle's view". Look at this image below, and imagine it represent a new language.
What do you see? big buildings, the river, main streets. What is there that you do not see? The cars, the people smiling and talking, the garbage cans on the corner of the streets. You do not see details. An eagle will fly over the city and try to grasp the entirety of it, before heading down for a specific prey. With languages, you need to see the entirety of a language before you start understanding the details of it. In the common school teaching system, students study details BEFORE understanding the big picture: what is a language? Tony always says "Perfect is the opposite of good", meaning that if you aim to speak perfectly (with all details) from the get-go, you will likely end up more frustrated. Toddlers don't speak perfectly after all, they only aim for delivering the message.
This taught me, as a teacher, to not focus too much on perfection: grammar points, vocabulary choice, noun's gender etc. We have to chose our battles: what is THE MOST IMPORTANT part of speech we need to focus on to deliver the message. The learning becomes more laid-back and fun if it is built on small victories. You must feel good that you reached your goal: say what you need or ask a question. As broken as it can be in the beginning, one must learn to trust the process: it will make more sense, the language will shape itself and become more accurate as you go.
Build your learning on small victories, and you will end up winning the whole tournament!
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