Going to a fast-paced language school like KISS, you get to have a lot of different teachers in a short time. I've had five in three months, although two were just for one class each. And if you pay attention, you can learn a lot about teaching. (All of the teachers are infinitely better than I was in China, but all of the teachers at KISS have professional qualifications and months of training.) I try to avoid jumping to conclusions about people, and I usually fail. And often I'm wrong - I was in despair after the first day of the phonetics class but Bent has turned out to be my favorite KISS teacher so far.

Anyway, when you're in a language class and paying attention, there's a lot of different things you could or should be paying attention to.

• Mentally converting written Danish words to the correct pronunciation
• Including glottal stops and gutteral vowel sounds
• Emphasizing the appropriate words
• Listening to your own pronunciation
• Listening to the teacher's pronunciation
• Knowing the correct positioning of your lips, tongue, and mouth.
• Knowing the actual position of your lips, tongue, and mouth.
• Remembering memorized sentences
• Remembering the meaning of words
• Remembering rules of grammar
• Applying rules of grammar
• Knowing your turn in the class sequence
• Knowing the current class modality (is the teaching echoing what we say or echoing only words we did wrong)
• Determining whether the word the teacher just said to you was a correction of your pronunciation in the last sentence or your prompt for the next sentence.

In order to function in class, you need to be doing at least four or five of these things at once, and in order to excel you need to be doing almost all of them. It's impossible to do them all consciously, so you have to prepare as much as possible so as to automate many of these things and then just think about one or two current problems plus whatever the teacher directs your attention towards. On a good night, on material I've prepared well for, I can just about pull it off - keeping three or four threads active semi-consciously and focusing on one at a time. If you are doing all of this and you make a mistake, you usually have the correct answer somewhere in your head, and to retrieve it you simply need to be nudged in the right direction - given a hook or a clue that your subconscious can use to focus your thinking mind in the right direction. And sometimes our current teacher does this. Unfortunately, her first reaction to mistakes is usually one or more of: gasps and dirty looks, banging her fist on the table, feigned shock, or "criminal!" or "do you want to make your teacher cry?" The effect of any of these, and especially of the fist-banging, is simply to trigger the fight-or-flight response. Since humans didn't evolve in an environment where pronuciation and grammar were immediate life-and-death concerns, the human brain doesn't typically retain this information when reverting to fight-or-flight. It flushes everything that doesn't pertain to possible incoming sharp teeth or claws, escape routes, or physical counter-attack. I'm amazed when any student ever gets anything right on the second try - I'm usually only able to by saying things that I know are wrong - which triggers a fist that I can ignore because my act of choosing to say something wrong grants me a bit of control - while working my way back to the correct answer. It's probably not the best way to pass the class, but it's the best I can do to perform the learning act in this environment.

So, despite my efforts not to jump to conclusions, as of week three in this latest class I'm willing to say that I don't care for the teacher.

Today, Sunday, the temperature is over 10 C and the sun is shining through a bit of haze and very scattered clouds. It's a week early (it's not even the Ides of March yet) but it feels like spring. Yesterday, it was right at freezing all day, the sky was almost featureless gray, and a mid-afternoon rain developed into mid-afternoon wet snow.

Guess which day Peter and Branimir and I went to the beach and to the royal park at Klampenborg?