South America

                                       to learn is to live

Years ago I arrived in Panama for a reclycing project at the Chiquita banana plantations. I was convinced people would talk English, but this wasn't the case. It felt terrible. Not being able to express myself at all and I was not able to make connection. I felt almost like an alien, helpless and lonely. This circumstances gave me a big push to learn Spanish as quick as possible. And after three months I could express myself in Spanish.

I remember I started writing down every day 10 words which I translated into english and dutch and I found a way to master the grammar. And I fell in love...that helped as well :-)

Freedom

Learn at your own pace

During my time as teacher on a primary school in Amsterdam, we experienced Covid and because of that we had to switch and we had to experiment with online classes. I experimented with embedding learning material in interesting and powerfull stories with audio/visual and textual support. It was playfull with quizzes, challenges, funny video's, short tutorials and freedom. Freedom to choose a topic, freedom to choose the moment to work on it and freedom to choose out of a variety of weekly assignments. And it worked!

After this online period, my specific group of students was performing much better then comparable peer groups. This fueled my belief that finding the intrinsic motivation is the key to learning, to embrace technology and to use powerfull stories.



I started with giving Dutch lessons with Dutch songs at the time I was working at a homeless centre in Amsterdam.

Last thing to know about me is that I studied Business Administration at University and after working for years as financial analyst I started with performance arts school and became singer singwriter. This also brought me to the idea to start this academy where we sing together and learn Dutch forever!

Kind regards,

Geert Damstra