Becoming a Beginner Again: Reflections on Learning, Struggle, and Pedagogy

Reposted from my LinkedIn articles, first published January 30, 2026.

Back in the classroom at 65 — rediscovering the value of beginnerhood, struggle, and learning as practice.

Returning to the classroom at 65 to study Chinese prompted a series of reflections on what it means to learn as an adult — from the value of beginnerhood and problem-solving, to the role of pace, fatigue, and agency in meaningful learning.

I’ve always enjoyed being in classrooms. I was once accused — slightly tongue-in-cheek — of having a thirst for knowledge, and I think that’s probably true. I like learning. I like being in learning situations. And perhaps more importantly, I like the position that learning puts you in: the position of not knowing yet.

That sense of being a beginner has mattered to me for a long time. When I first started learning Tai Chi, and later when I began coming to China regularly to study at Tai Chi schools, I realised that beginnerhood isn’t something to rush through or escape from. It’s actually a useful place to be. Being a beginner sets out goals. It positions you as someone who has something to learn from the people and situations around you, rather than someone who arrives already armed with opinions, habits, and assumptions. It’s a mindset of openness — of accepting that learning is ongoing, and that it comes from encounters as much as instruction.

Returning to the classroom recently to study Chinese has brought all of that back into focus. At 65, sitting in a language classroom again didn’t feel strange or uncomfortable. It felt familiar. Enjoyable, even. What surprised me wasn’t being a student again, but how much being a student reminded me of things that are easy to forget once you spend most of your time teaching, facilitating, or leading learning rather than inhabiting it.

One of the biggest lessons was about engagement. There were moments in class when I felt fully engaged, energised, and absorbed, and other moments when my attention drifted. That contrast was instructive. The moments of peak engagement weren’t necessarily when something was being explained clearly or efficiently. They were the moments when I was actively involved in problem solving — when I had some ownership over what we were trying to work out.

Being given the task of constructing sentences, negotiating meaning, testing word order, and arriving at a workable solution made a real difference. Those moments felt active rather than passive. I wasn’t just absorbing language; I was trying to make something function. That sense of agency — of having a say in the solution we were working towards — was where learning felt most alive for me.

This is something that’s easy to talk about in abstract terms when discussing pedagogy, but it feels very different when you’re inside it. As a learner, you feel the difference in your body. Engagement isn’t a mood; it’s an experience. It shows up as alertness, curiosity, and a willingness to stay with difficulty rather than retreat from it.

That difficulty is important, especially in language learning. At beginner level, there’s a peculiar frustration that comes from wanting to express complex thoughts while only having access to very simple language. At times, it really does feel like being reduced to the expressive range of a small child. You might want to explore an idea, make a joke, or reflect on something that matters to you, but all you can reliably talk about is how to get from the supermarket to the pharmacy.

That gap — between what you want to say and what you can say — is uncomfortable. But it’s also where learning happens. The moments that worked best for me were the ones where that frustration was channelled into a task: finding a way to express something within the limits of the language I had. Those moments felt creative. They were about inventiveness rather than correctness.

I’m not sure I can say that Chinese has fully shifted from being an object of study to a lived practice for me yet. I’m still very much a beginner. But there have been small moments where a shift feels like it’s starting. A brief exchange with a taxi driver. Catching fragments of conversation in the street. Recognising words rather than just hearing noise. These are tiny things, but they matter. They suggest movement. They suggest that the language is beginning to function, however imperfectly.

One thing that became very clear over the four weeks was how physically and mentally demanding sustained learning is. Studying six classes a day, five days a week, involves a lot of thinking. On Monday mornings I’d often feel energised and alert. By Friday afternoons, I was usually exhausted. Not bored — tired. There’s a difference.

At times, the pace of learning felt slow. I occasionally wondered whether we could have moved faster, covered more ground, pushed further. But I’m not convinced I could have coped with that, physically or mentally. Faster isn’t always better. Slowness, in this context, felt less like a lack of ambition and more like a necessary condition for endurance. Perhaps slowness isn’t the opposite of intensity, but what makes intensity survivable over time.

This has made me reflect on how adult learning is often framed. There’s a tendency to equate effectiveness with speed: accelerated courses, rapid results, measurable gains. But learning — especially learning that involves embarrassment, uncertainty, and cognitive overload — has limits. Fatigue is real. Attention is finite. And those limits aren’t failures; they’re part of the ecology of learning.

If there’s one thing I would experiment with more in adult language education, it’s autonomy. While there were moments where I could look things up, test ideas, and bring new language into the classroom, there wasn’t much space for autonomous research feeding directly back into learning activities. I found myself imagining what a fully immersive, problem-based language course might look like — one where learners actively investigate language in the world, bring it back, and generate meaning from it collaboratively.

That kind of approach wouldn’t suit everyone, and it wouldn’t replace structured teaching. But I suspect it would deepen engagement, particularly for adult learners who bring curiosity, experience, and intrinsic motivation with them. Adults don’t need to be protected from complexity; they need ways of working with it productively.

What I’ll take back into my own teaching practice is a reaffirmation of things I already value, but now feel more strongly. Problem-based learning. Project-based learning. Learning that is active rather than merely receptive. Learning that positions students as agents rather than vessels. Being back in the classroom reminded me that autonomy isn’t a luxury — it’s a condition for meaningful engagement.

Perhaps most importantly, it reminded me that being a beginner is not something to outgrow. It’s a stance. A way of approaching the world. One that keeps learning possible, even — or especially — later in life.

Thank you to Omeida Chinese Academy for a pleasent 4 weeks intensive language study at their school in the charming town of Yangshuo, China.