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My days are filled with talking to people:
Introducing our program, answering questions, establishing partnerships. The one thing everyone wonders about - How come a non-native English speaker has created an English Word Tutor?
Someone who is not an English teacher or enmeshed in the educational system? Someone who may be caught mixing in a German word here or there (I grew up in Germany and still speak German with my daughter) and who sports a pretty strong accent?
Someone who loves words, but is by no means an English language expert?
The answer: eSpindle somewhat happened to me.
The idea came to me in a rather casual way, while helping my daughter learn her spelling words.
Have you ever had an idea that just doesn't want to go away?
No matter how often I discarded it, the idea for eSpindle kept coming back, bringing with it the allure of the new and the temptation of a great adventure... When the idea for eSpindle started to take roots in my mind, I was VP for Sales and Marketing at AromaLand, an Aromatherapy and Spa company based in Santa Fe - a stimulating and creative job that I could attend to from my home in California, with lots of flexibility and a regular paycheck.
Oh, no, I had no use at all for this idea that started flirting with my imagination.
But my unwanted idea kept coming back to me, persistent, nagging.
Pointing out news about students struggling with vocabulary, or dropping hints about how this "good" idea could be turned into a "great" idea. Reminding me of how I had struggled to learn English as a foreign language without having proper audio support, how it would help my daughter and so many more students - I started researching, looking for that very solution that I wanted to see.
The more I reviewed what was available, the more aggravated I became.
I saw programs using misspellings of words (a pedagogic sin according to brain research), lots of programs where parents were asked to record and enter information for the words to be quizzed (gee, that certainly helps a lot!) and programs that focused on limited word units, normally comprising between 50 to a few hundred words. The largest program I encountered featured 1,000-some words, but was unaffordable for most students. Just looking at the class of my daughter, I saw struggling ESL students next to book-devouring word whizzes who delighted in learning new words.
How could these students be served with uniform, unit-based study?
It was obvious that what was currently offered was patchwork at best, and a complete let-down for a lot of the students, especially the bright and the struggling.
The part that surprised me was that most programs I found on the Internet were basically virtual translations of text books into online format.
A little bit of animation was added here or there, teddy bears and butterflies, but it seemed like their designers either did not understand or did not care for the new opportunities powered by the Internet and computer technologies.
And slowly, "the" idea became "my" idea. I started talking with other parents about it, and received enthusiastic feedback and support.
Yes! Why wasn't there a better tool to help students memorize new words?
Why were we still doing good ole' spelling word lists with our kids in the age of information technology?
And what about families where parents did not have the time, resources or skills to tutor their children?
Why were teachers still wasting time and resources on spelling tests, which are long proven to not be very effective at all?
And wasn't it a shame to have a large number of students go through school without every learning how to read and write with confidence?
Now that my idea had convinced me of its necessity, I let it occupy the "guest room" in my brain, not really knowing what to do with it. Then, a friend of a friend introduced me to an educational software development firm, their quote sounded okay, a network of editors, writers and English teachers formed, I cracked my piggy bank and found myself tempted to trade my job for my calling...
There was only one more question left:
If the idea was so important and splendid, why had nobody done it yet? Well, it is late at night right now, and I will write about that a bit more in my next blog…
