Having just my 90 minutes and a very short brief on “where they were in the book”, I launched into my “lesson plans” relatively quickly,  extending the subject to areas I thought would be more fun, viz. I had one class creating and marketing a new type of hamburger in groups. The other was given the task of defining the role of dwarves pre-Christmas and writing a letter to Santa to invite him to a meeting and to present their complaints.

But what I totally forgot is that when working with a group of young people, the way in is to build trust by listening, by being there, where they are. These two classes were complete and utter disasters, and I still blush when I think back on them. The hamburger group was so busy texting on their phones (in any language but English) and beating each other up and talking about how hungry they were that I had to let out early so they could run to McDonalds. I found out later that they’d been told they wouldn’t be given jobs with that company just the week before, so their motivation was below zero. What a missed opportunity! The other class just thought I was nuts, and didn’t really make the connection to the business skills they expected me to teach them. That class, I found out later, was mostly intererested in finding out more about living in the US. Instead, I dumped stuff on them, and didn’t even give them a chance.

Third time lucky. Give me another class to substitute in, please.

For a great summary of trust building read Sue Lyon Jones’ post on Ken Wilson’s blog right here.

Freewriting
This is an exercise in overcoming writers block and allows you to brainstorm. It’s also a great way to avoid translating or focussing too narrowly on issues of what makes “correct” English.
1. Set aside ten minutes. Switch off the phone. Concentrate completely on this task and don’t let anything interrupt you.
2. Write your topic at the top of the page.
3. Now write without stopping anything that comes to mind. Don’t stop writing! If you don’t know what to write next, write “I don’t know what to write next”. Don’t go back and change anything you have written. Just keep on writing.
4. When you’re done think about the experience.
5. If you like, go through and underline some of the things you wrote. Have a glass of water , take a break and then do the next exercise:

Building blocks
This is an exercise in collecting all of the aspects of a topic that are interesting to you and making them into building blocks for an essay. It will take at least an hour. You can do the exercise as a list or using individual post-its, whichever appeals most to you.

Part 1: Creating the building blocks
1. Write your topic at the top (list) or on a big post-it
2. Now brainstorm all of the aspects of the topic you find interesting. Give each idea a new line/ post-it
3. Don’t stop brainstorming until you feel all of the things you find interesting are “out of your system” and you start to “run dry”.

Part 2: Designing the building
4. Group the aspects. What belongs together? Does one aspect belong to several groups? Does it need another name in that other context?
5. Give each group a header.
6. Summarize each group in one sentence.

If you want to take a break, now is the time to do it.

Part 3: Building the building
7. Make your sentences the introductory sentences to the same number of paragraphs. Each paragraph will deal with that aspect of your topic.
8. Fill in the paragraph below your introductory sentence.
9. When you’re done with all of the paragraphs, read it. Do the sentences at the end of the paragraphs lead to the next one? If not, write them in.

Take another break.

Part 4: Putting in the finishing touches
10. Read it though. What do you like about the result? What don’t you like? If you were going to do it again, what would you change?

When you’ve done both exercises, think over what you liked/ didn’t like about them.

My experience with these exercises

When I’ve done these exercises with college students, they’ve typically given me the following feedback:

Freewriting was

• liberating. I was thinking in English and didn’t have time to look for words, or translate, or think about grammar.
• exhausting and exciting. I have a cramp in my hand.
• weird. A waste of time. I know what I want to write, I don’t need this.

Building blocks was

• good because it made sure everything I want in my essay actually goes in
• chaotic, doing things backwards. I usually have groups first, and then fill in the details
• helpful for writing a standard essay, the kind I need to be able to write for FCE etc.
• too constructed and unnaturally rigid. I don’t like the result.
• very hard. I’m blocked and confused now. I don’t know where one idea ends and the other begins.

I’ll be sending this particular student plenty of more exercises, like describing a picture, sequencing events, talking about something without naming it, talking about an event in the past as though it were happening at this very moment and all sorts of little creative writing exercises (great prompts here to get you started designing tasks) … but these two basic exercises are a way into talking about the writing process as such, looking through opposite ends of the telescope.

Do you do similar exercises? How do you vary them? Which ones do you find most effective? Which ones do your students like best?

PS: I learned the freewriting exercise from Paula Maier, in her manuscript written for the kommUNIkation teacher training curriculum at the LMU München.

• “Nice to meet you” when we meet someone for the first time, and “Nice meeting you” when we then say goodbye.
• “Nice meeting you” when we meet someone for the first time, and “Nice to meet you” when we then say goodbye.

˙noʎ ʇǝǝɯ oʇ ǝɔıu (s,ʇı) :ǝuoǝɯos ʇǝǝɯ
˙noʎ ƃuıʇǝǝɯ ǝɔıu (sɐʍ ʇı) :ǝʎqpooƃ ʎɐs

The difference is very subtle, and perhaps not everyone will agree with me, but it really sounds wrong to me when someone mixes up the two. I think it’s because we also say “(I’m) pleased to meet you” (which doesn’t work grammatically with the -ing) and “It was nice meeting you” (which seems to refer more to the whole event rather than just the act of meeting).

Socializing is my own main topic this week! I’m very honored to be a guest blogger on Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto’s blog, Teaching Village. She’s the co-author of a children’s English textbook series called Let’s Go, teaches children and adults in Japan, and you can “meet” her here in Darren Elliott’s video interview:

Barbara Hoskins-Sakamoto Interview from darren elliott on Vimeo.

Her blog subtitle says it all: “We’re better when we work together”. The blog has been gaining momentum as more and more people from our PLN (professional learning network) join as guest authors. Her latest venture is a series of quizzes on blogposts written by different members of the network, a great way to zone in on what these people are “all about”.

My contribution is on a socializing game I did recently and will repeat this coming week. It’s a variation on one I learned from Jo Westcombe, who is just full of great teaching ideas.

What has 4 wheels and flies?
Answer: ¡ʞɔnɹʇ ǝƃɐqɹɐƃ ɐ

What did the fish say when he hit the side of his glass bowl at 50 miles per hour?
Answer: “˙uɯɐp”

Think fast: There’s an electric train traveling south. The wind is from the north-west. In which direction would the smoke from the train be blowing?
Answer: ¡ǝʞoɯs ou sɐɥ uıɐɹʇ ɔıɹʇɔǝlǝ uɐ

Well, did you have fun hanging from the ceiling? A nice tool to fool with, that http://www.revfad.com/flip.html, ˙ʇuoɟ ʎɯ ɥʇıʍ ʞɹoʍ ʇ’usǝop ʇı ɥƃnoɥʇ

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

BTW: A group of us is going to see a great bearded man reading at Amerika Haus here in Munich on Sunday: Harry Rowohlt, quite possibly the greatest translator from English to German. He’s responsible for Winnie the Pooh, Shel Silverstein, Ernest Hemmingway,… and he’s been touring, reading the letters of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with Gregor Gysi. On Sunday he’ll be reading from his translations.

Superfluous Advice

By Dorothy Parker

Should they whisper false of you,
Never trouble to deny;
Should the words they say be true,
Weep and storm and swear they lie.

What were the six jobs you had before your current job that gave you your work/life skills?

So about me: I’ve always needed money, so there have been far more than six jobs. I’ll skip the IT company I worked at to earn money for college, and the other IT company I worked for when I was considering giving up teaching, and the bit jobs, to tell you about the ones most closely related to what I do today:

1. Perhaps I was most successful at being a babysitter. I got an early start at 11 and basically owned the neighborhood. My grandfather had carved beautiful wooden puppets that my mother had sewn clothes for, and I’d put on puppet shows with the children. Or we’d go down to the Smithsonian to see the bees. We’d romp and go swimming and play games. No TV on my watch, but we acted out every cartoon character in the book. I told them stories that they’d have to help me finish. So I never really stopped being a babysitter.
2. When I hit 16 and was able to move on to minimum wage jobs (to support my expensive record-buying habit), I went into catering. First an icecream parlor that served sundaes with a political theme, called The Ice Cream Lobby. Then a deli. I branched out and did weddings on my own. During college I waitressed, the most challenging place being a football clubhouse just south of the border in Switzerland. Excellent prep for teaching, keeping a cool head among fans speaking Swizzerdütsch!
3. As a teen, I volunteered in France for two summers restoring monuments and sites with ICOMOS/ REMPART. I tell anyone who still has their life ahead of them: You haven’t lived if you haven’t volunteered abroad. I learned how to really learn a language. Obvious connection to teaching English there.
4. At college I was a research assistant (political science). Very heady. I loved it, but in time became skeptical about the value of academic learning. That kept me from getting yet another degree when I parachuted into EFL. I keep toying with the idea, to open the door to a more established teaching position, but…
5. After my MA, I became a coordinator/curator of exhibitions and educational programs at various museums. At the German Museum of Hygiene in Dresden I was involved in exhibitions devoted to Odol (a mouthwash) and Darwin and Darwinism, travelling to the US to research history and artifacts connected to genetics, immigration, racism, the Scopes Trial… Later I ran an exhibition project on the experience of migration at an archaeological museum, with an after-school program for teenagers from migrant families, along with community events, from a panel discussion to a street festival. Or: In Konstanz I worked with artist Rune Mields to develop a tour of her paintings depicting the myths of how the world came into being. Marvellous, life-changing years. Being interested in such a wide range of ideas, and learning to use artifacts to relate them, was probably the most valuable source of inspiration for what I do today.
6. Being bilingual, I’ve worked as a translator and interpreter ever since I came to Germany in 1981. Once, in Berlin in the mid 80s when I was working for the Museum at Checkpoint Charlie, I translated a talk Johan Galtung was giving in English into German and got it all wrong when I paraphrased in English “What he means is…”

Over to you! Now, please, don’t be shy!