Using her own experiences of keeping a journal while learning advanced Spanish creative writing and beginning Chinese during the same semester, the author illustrates that composition teachers' second language learning experiences--intimate and challenging encounters with a second language that multilingual composition students experience every day--can develop the cross-language and cross-cultural knowledge as well as the humility and empathy necessary both to "multilingualize" not only one's teaching, but the field of composition as a whole. She shows how teachers' second language learning studies might supplement or replace some of the translingual writing literature that often naively duplicates and redundantly reinvents or rediscovers the longstanding, research-based, sociolinguistic and multilingual perspectives on language from applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and second language writing.