http://windmeupchuck.com/

Washington Post

So Khushi suggested something that I have in fact done: Students formed study groups, made name tags, and I took a photograph of each group holding up their tags. Looking through the pictures I now see myself walking around the room that day to where they were sitting that lesson. Finally, names are starting to stick.

Josua Foer summarizes the technique of the Memory Palace, arguably the best way to memorize individual, unconnected items in sequence by connecting and associating them with 3-D navigation through an imagined scene. He mentions that ancient orators used this topographical technique to learn their speeches by heart, and points to the connection between “topic” (and topic sentence) and “topos”, or place.

The entire art of memorizing is to make items meaningfully connected. But more still, as Foer says about the techniques of the Memory Palace, “They work because they make you work. They force a kind of depth of processing, a kind of mindfulness, that most of us don’t normally walk around exercising. There are no shortcuts.”

Finally, he points out the essential importance of memory,  namely that our lives are the sum of our memories. So we need to process deeply. We must remember to remember.

Martin Bradbeer (TH Wildau) and Nicola Fox (Oxford University Press) recently organized the first Berlin area conference for EAP, and this network is aimed at building good connections among those who met there and growing new ones, as well as preparing the follow-up event in Berlin for next year.

This network will probably need to become more formally established to allow for sponsorship and more organized administration. But that requires quite a bit of work. If it were to become an association, there’s the politics of having an independent or an IATEFL affiliated group. For the time being, I’m (just) the Ning moderator. Since I’m also the events coordinator at ELTABB and a member of the BESIG Online Team, I’m a bit worried about becoming active in yet a third association.

But I’m really happy that there are now open lines of communication in an area I want to become more at home in. So here’s wishing EULEAP a leaping start!

• Past: Past positive (nostalgic), or past negative (regretful)
• Present: hedonistic (seeking pleasure, knowledge), or fatalistic (”It doesn’t pay to plan”)
• Future: resist temptation for future benefit, or geared to reward after death (both build on trust or expectation)

Catholic nations are more present and past oriented, while Protestant nations are more future orientated.

He says we are going through a time revolution. Children are naturally and essentially hedonistic and present-oriented. What schools around the globe do is to give them a past or future orientation (depending on the predominant culture). Now computer games are increasingly keeping children in their present-hedonistic state, rewiring their brains, so they will be bored in the analogue classroom. Games are indeed addictive, and “all addictions are addictions of present hedonism.” School and education is all about delaying gratification, but present oriented kids will not relate the messages to themselves and their future. I hear echos of my father talking about “instant gratification” as a key element of hedonistic pop culture back when I was a teen in the 1970s.

Philip Zimbardo (2008): The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life. Free Press.

Sherry Turkle, professor of Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, writes that mobile devices are becoming the vehicle for intimate relationships, as robots take on responsibilities previously born by friends and family. The instantaneous, engineered response is in fact allowing us to flee from conversation, which takes effort in terms of time and patience, and hence requires us to build those essential skills.

“Most of all, we need to remember — in between texts and e-mails and Facebook posts — to listen to one another, even to the boring bits, because it is often in unedited moments, moments in which we hesitate and stutter and go silent, that we reveal ourselves to one another.”
Sherry Turkle: The Flight From Conversation, NYT April 21, 2012

Sherry Turkle (2011): Alone Together. Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books.

The album is now out on iTunes, and expectations are confirmed: “I’m Shakin’” quotes the master: “I’m Bo Diddley – You got me shakin’!” The album has the full Jack-White range of styles. Nice.

I’ve read that White is planning to go on tour with two bands, a female and a male one, and on the day of the concert he’ll decide which one to play with. Fun!

Jack White: Love Interruption

I want love
To roll me over slowly
stick a knife inside me,
and twist it all around.

I want love to
grab my fingers gently
slam them in a doorway
put my face into the ground.

I want love to
murder my own mother
and take her off to somewhere
like hell or up above.

I want love to
change my friends to enemies,
change my friends to enemies
and show me how it’s all my fault.

I won’t let love disrupt, corrupt or interrupt me x 2
Yeah I won’t let love disrupt, corrupt, or interrupt me anymore.

I want love to
walk right up and bite me
grab a hold of me and fight me
leave me dying on the ground.

And I want love to
split my mouth wide open and
cover up my ears,
and never let me hear a sound.

I want love to
forget that you offended me
or how you have defended me,
when everybody tore me down.

Yeah I want love to
change my friends to enemies,
change my friends to enemies
and show me how it’s all my fault.

Yeah I won’t let love disrupt, corrupt or interrupt me
I won’t let love disrupt, corrupt or interrupt me
I won’t let love disrupt, corrupt, or interrupt me anymore.

Wonderful portrait in “It Might Get Loud” (2009):

As always, I’m fascinated and somewhat bemused by the way an international musician uses English, reusing chunks of language and sometimes mixing up idioms. It sounds like soul, of course, but the song rhythm doesn’t always match the intonation a native speaker would use for “second hand shop”. At times I don’t quite get the meaning. That reminds me that most non-native speakers don’t really get the lyrics in pop music anyway. And: Do they care? Isn’t the answer obvious?

Lyrics to Fly Away:

Chorus 1:
Fly away in the back of a second-hand shop
Draw the curtains and wake up in 1968 or 9
Fly away on the wings of a getaway plane
Fly away on your own and let your mind bring forward
every little thing that you are

These shakes are prying me loose
Ain’t got time to wake up, so many people to get hold of

Verse 1:
I’m calling up this downbeat guy I’d like to be for an hour or two
Slick and curious in every sense of the word
Fits my style like a hand in a glove
And with just a flick of a well-hung wrist
I’m gonna move over and over again
Sometimes you just hijack somebody
Make ‘em into your own, make ‘em into your own

Chorus 2:
Fly away in the back of a second hand shop
Draw the curtains and wake up in 1978 or 9
Fly away on the wings of a getaway plane (yeah yeah)
Fly away on your own and let your mind bring forward
every little thing that you are

These shakes are shaking me up
Ain’t got no mind to stay, so many times I tried to control and let go

Verse 2:
Right wing politician, or a communist
Army fiend or a pacifist
Top notch broker, or a beggar man, thief,
There’s no end to the possibilities

You can steal for other caller (?), get fluffy in the face (?)
Wear chains on your wallet and live out your indie ways
Nothing stops you from being anyone you want
But the city’s gonna break ya if you don’t wake up from where you belong

Chorus 3:
Fly away in the back of a second hand shop
Draw the curtains and wake up in 1988 or 9
Fly away on the wings of a getaway plane
Fly away on your own and let your mind bring forward
every little thing that you are
every little thing that you are

Fly away…

(Chorus 4 – Studio Version:
Fly away in the back of a second hand shop
draw the curtains and wake up in 1998 or 9
Fly away on the wings of a getaway plane
Fly away on your own and let your mind bring forward
every little thing that you are
every little thing that you are)

It was clear to me that I would be teaching communication skills rather than English. I’ve skilled up academically in what constitutes English as a Lingua Franca, and how to focus on accent to improve intelligibility. But this term I learned that this is not enough: I need to be far more proactive in addressing differences in listening behavior (high-involvement vs. high-considerate) in multicultural groups, and also explicitly coach each student in impression management.

Dealing with large classes that will go their separate linguistic ways rather than moving collectively up to a common norm is a challenge. Here the key is to make explicit how we change registers and accommodate differently depending on whom we are addressing. I had the great good fortune to have Vicki Hollett, who is exceedingly knowledgeable in cross-cultural pragmatics, kindly point out to me what I was missing.

Still, intelligibility is key. At the end of term there was a critical incident, following the assessment, when I received an angry, wounded email from a Ghanian student. He was responding to my gving him a 3 on his presentation because I had felt he was practically unintelligible. He called me a racist for marking him down based on his accent, and used very emotional language. I had obviously failed to make clear enough to him  that the participants were not studying the dominant colonial idiom of International English, but were in fact working towards their personal ability to communicate with each other across cultures. I had sent him extensive formative feedback right after the presentation, but now recognize that he did not, and perhaps could not accept it at the time, and so didn’t take any action or respond. The fact that I, a white native speaker, was assessing him, made the assessment suspicious and dubious. So that makes it even more important for me as the teacher to be absolutely straight and clear. I should have approached him, quietly, and repeated my feedback to make sure he took it the right way.

I empathize with his distrust, insecurity and sense of being treated unfairly, based on wanting to assert his cultural identity. There is an role for culturally definitive accents. But in international communication we all need the intercultural skills to step away from that sense of identity into the role of being a partner in a dialogue, and say “I am secure enough in my cultural identity to adapt my accent, my words, my tone, my way of taking turns, even my body language, so that my interlocutor from another culture understands me.” Being able to bridge the divide between cultures,  to accommodate for diversity, does not mean that we must give up our variety of English when speaking to those from our own cultural circle. On the contrary, that will often be highly appropriate.

I’m very unhappy that I failed my student by not getting this across to him. It makes me think very hard about my course management in general that this only came to light through his protest against my final assessment. This has been a real wake-up call.

This was my response to his complaint:

I am so terribly sorry that you have taken my assessment as a criticism of your accent. Nothing could be further from my intentions. I thought it was clear that in our communication skills class we are exploring what happens between people from very different cultures and linguistic backgrounds using the language that has become our international lingua franca. Standards of English are practically irrelevant, and certainly any considerations of what might be “good” or “bad English” are completely beside the point. All that counts is that we are working and communicating well together as a group. For such communication to work, people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds need to be able to make themselves understood to each other. Next to understanding the different communication styles each culture prefers, the important thing is to be intelligible to each other. When I wrote your feedback right after the presentation, I told you that I had trouble understanding you, as did others who are not from Ghana. And this is simply a fact: If you are not easily understood by others, they will not listen closely enough to pick up the important things you say. I would not be a good teacher to you if I did not point this out. I would congratulate you on your good ideas and send you out and there you would encounter people who don’t listen. Adopting a more international pronunciation in an international setting is key, because it will give you the audience you deserve and need.
Therefore, the grade of “3″ is not a low grade, it is a reminder to you and an incentive to get down to work on this very important aspect of your professional development, and to take it seriously.

Teaching and giving critical feedback to students under pressure to earn excellent grades is a huge challenge. Teaching essay writing and presentations to relatively homogenous small classes means using more or less optimized content and methods, which makes for relatively risk-free teaching. Now I am faced with the real risk that someone will feel treated unfairly, and will launch an attack. This is certainly an incentive to do the best job I possibly can – as if I needed more motivation! -  but it also puts the psychological pressure on. So I need to reboot more frequently, to get a surge of positive energy from some essential source that gives me the strength to continue.

The crazy thing was that while I was teaching, I generally had a good feeling. It was only after the fact, thinking through how I had done things, that I started to recognize that things were off. I have therefore  learned this semester to be exceedingly reflective and to look at what I am doing under bright lights, to recognize issues more quickly and to address them right away, or they will come back to trouble me. Using a camera to log lessons is very helpful toward this end. I must also make sure that any critical formative feedback I give is actually registered by the learner in question. This means that I may very well need to adapt more to each learner’s expectations of how feedback is given (e.g. orally and face-to-face rather than writing via email, at least in some cases), so I may have to have real office hours, even where I am an external trainer. In addition, I need to push for improvement more, to avoid leaving willing learners frustrated and angry.