My Christmas tree and the apocalypse

End of the world

This year had another apocalypse that again didn't happen. I had heard some esoteric new age spiritual whatever descriptions of a certain transition that would have involved a shift from material to spiritual, the spread of  some energy among the ones who are open enough. On  21st  December. Obviously nothing happened.
But for me yes, although it's been quite gradual, nothing like a comet crashing the Earth, rather like an update for the operation system which downloads rather slowly.



Christmas tree then and now

When we (my cousins and me) were little kiddies the Christmas tree was a miracle. With so many details, shiny baubles, real candles and sparkle throwers. The mere act of its appearance was just stunning. (Our parents made sure we believed the story of little Jesus flying in the room through the window (?), bringing us the beautifully decorated tree and the presents.
Later of course we learned the truth  behind that, we also got a better insight into what was happening in the world in general, part of it was our family, which was not miraculous at all, sorry to say. 
Then  this Christmas tree business was rather a drag. My mum kept nagging my dad to buy a Christmas tree, he got one at the very last moment of course, then decorating it was not such a joy either. The tree changed into a part of the scene, an empty accessory, it assisted the family nightmare called Christmas. 
Later I was pretty much against having a Christmas tree at all, it just lost its significance plus I started to feel sorry for the trees cut down, dressed up as clowns and dumped. The biggest part of my close family died (my dad had a stroke at Christmas), the rest  I divorced :). So I thought just because everyone else has one we really didn't need a tree.

But now this year, hmm I don't know, maybe the the invisible quasi-apocalypse, or the fact that somehow I had a bit of time (had to cancel lessons due to a nasty cold and there is the winter break) and everywhere you read the summary of 2012... so a couple of days before Christmas I had this idea of making a Christmas tree ... out of the blue. Making I mean literally, I didn't want to buy a tree and  and put it by the bin  when it's dead. I made one using ivy, an old plant hanger or what, rubber gloves, fairy lights, dried chili peppers ... and paper slips. On these little paper slips I wrote the best things that happened  to me in 2012. 
Aaaand it made me quite as happy and excited as I used to be when I was a kid.  When you start writing down all the great things that have happened to you ... there is something funny happening. The great things just make you hope for further great things that are going to happen, giving you a sense of continuity! That's pretty shocking! After a bit of recent winter blue you just realize that life is miracle! The memories of my year suddenly brought about a shiny patch in the sky that has been expanding ever since. (Höhö, funny, it's bright and sunny at the moment.) Like a new life. Now all the pathetic things you hear about Christmas on the radio start to make sense. Hmmm, is it that recognizing and being grateful for what happened in the past  is a set of new Lego bricks to play with in the future? (Or it is that I am not used to having so much free time haha.)


Anyway, here is my weirdo Christmas tree:

And what did I write on the coloured paper slips?

• Lots of names ,mostly people who I met first online, then in 3D, all of them turned out to be fantastic people. I met new people offline too, don’t worry.
• Communities (friendships of new people who are like my family or very old friends, this must be kind of wizardry)
• Opportunities I have been given (although haven’t used all of them .... yet)
• New kinds of jobs where I have had the joy of learning new things. One is about young learners, one is with teen groups, and there is one that is really my passion, giving me the rare opportunity of working in a marvellous team, don't tell anyone but I would gladly do this job even for free.
• Some of the slips are occasions, events where I had the best moments
• Other  slips are seeds that I planted and hope they will blossom one day
• There are words from various people which were  said of written to me at the right time
• And there are moments. (When a certain 3-year-old girl hugged me in the middle of a classroom activity and whispered in my right ear: "I love you Barbi", or when a kindergartener (seeing that I take my phone out of my pocket) asked me: "Barbi, do you HAVE A PHONE?", thus signalling that he doesn't think I'm an adult, thus teaching me something precious and answering  a lot of my questions XD
• There are also the people who had been around me before the Internet, I see them building things, improving, successfully coping with not always fortunate circumstances.
• Some of the paper slips are the things I learned by reflecting on what was going on, by observing, hypothesizing, testing. I also learned how to get my energy back once they are gone.

Now my recommendation is the following:
collect the good things at least once a year (you will be surprised at the abundance there), combine Thanksgiving with Christmas as you like, sleep a lot, plunge and splash into the whole thing! This is an act of stepping back and actually seeing!



Now I guess I’d better go and disassemble the “tree” because chili peppers tend to fall from it ...

Happy new year!

The unplugged pencil

This is my very first sound blog. I tought it'd be faster. No. :)
The great thing about Soundcloud is that you can comment in the track, so please do so.

This is how this huge pencil I got from Alexandra Chistyakova inspired two one-to-one lessons, one with a young learner and one with an adult learner.

YL lesson

 

Here you can see her learning blog of that lesson.

Adult learner fluency pencil trick

The list of emergent phrases:
fell in love with you
is in love with ...

took a direct flight
no problem during the journey
pleasant flight
didn't take too much luggage
two handbags, two suitcases
in a hotel near Moscow in a small village
stay
cheaper solution
in this they went to Moscow every day
He was trying to find business partners.
a lot of / various / a bunch of / a number of
several sizes of factories
They met the owner of one of the factories.
fat elderly red-faced lady
She was happy with the meeting as she had a lot of red pencils which are cheap and of good quality.
Good value for the price.



Ideas and comments are very welcome!

4 things that make me think learning to surf is very much like teaching very young learners

SOL Devon Unplugged course August 2012, Sunday afternoon, hit the beach, learn to surf! (No secret, the chance to try surfing had played a huge part in my decision to take the course ...  it proved to be a good reason.)

ONE

I live in Balatonfüred, no real big waves around, surfing was very new to me at Baggy Point, Croyde. Before the lesson we signed a statement saying we understood and acknowledged that we were going to run a risky pursuit for the next 120 minutes and we may even die. Erm.... Well,  ... Ok, we all signed it. Then we jumped (?:)) into our wetsuits (looked like sausages) and grabbed the surfboards, two boards in pairs and walked to the beach barefoot! BAREFOOT!  You have no idea what an adventure it is to follow my brand new Serbian friend, Tamara, stuck together, between two surfboards like inside a sandwich! Through the slippery, sharp rocky terrain, shells ..., not even being able to Tamara's her complaints :)

Then short instructions on how to surf lying on the board, 10 minutes surfing flat, another short training on how to stand up. Rehearsal on the sand, off to the waves!

Did you get training how to teach young or very young learners when you trained in ELT? I didn't  really. Maybe there was an optional subject at college which I didn't opt for.
Of course we had a rigorosum in developmental/educational psychology, but who remembers that? I forgot it all in 24 hours within the exam as at that time I had no young learners.
However, my degree entitles me to teach English as a foreign language to any age group, so I thought young and very young learners won't be a problem. Go and hit on those kindergarteners and under 2s! Woah! It was just as tough as surfing appeared to be!

TWO

I have one crucial problem with waves: you can't switch them off, can't turn down the volume. When you are walking further in they just keep coming on you, no matter you don't want them right now.

Something like very young learners. One of them starts to cry for example. Then some others watch this first crier, think about it, get a taste for crying and join in. Just try to tell them stop crying! Hahaha... If they are moved, happy, sad, feeling insecure, their feelings will just flow all over. They can't control it all yet. 

Just like the ocean. Something in the middle of it starts a wave and by the time it reaches the shore it has such energy, all you can do is to jump on the surfboard as soon as possible, try to stand up and use this energy while trying to control your board.

 Same with young learners: you can't really prepare for it, you have to learn to feel it and surf. And you have to work really hard to get to know the behavior of those waves and similarly you can's really go without reading those books you heard about in your developmental psychology lectures, you simply need to try and understand how toddlers think and perceive the world but most important of all, ride, ride, ride, there and then.

THREE

Just see those surfers. What is stunning about this sport is the slidin. When they are up on the board, balancing on the top of the seemingly uncontrollable waves. Cool! But how do they get there?

During my two-hour-long surfer career I remember I had to walk in the water against huge waves, dragging my big surfboard along, it seemed I'd never get far enough from the shore. Then many times when I thought the perfect wave was coming I jumped on, ..... and what I managed to catch was just a tiny little wave that previously seemed huge, it was strong enough to push me back slowly towards the beach where I started my struggle with the waves again and again. But I didn't once think I'd give up. Because the ride on the board that took some seconds was so perfect that it was worth all the strenuous fight against the masses of water.

Just like it is when I'm with my beloved very young learners! I spend days, weeks, months, no real response. (In a monolingual environment where they know you understand their mother tongue they will not want to say a word in English. Many times it is just me who sings that song for the hundredth time.) Then suddenly of one of your learners' mum sends you a video in which that little guy is holding a huuuuuge guitar, singing that song perfectly to the camera!! Tell ya, worth the struggle! Or after years (!) of playing along with ponies and stuff in English that little girl starts to talk to her granny in English in the car?

FOUR

When surfing, after a time I simply felt no energy. I was lying on the surfboard, the wave was coming and I was just not able to stretch my arms to push myself up, let alone pull my knees between my arms. I thought I was too tired or something, feeling completely lost when Lyndon, the trainer came up to me and told me to move about five centimetres further back on the board so that my toes should be more in the water. Ok, I did so and ... abracadabra: I could push myself up easily, got on the board, stood up, I had a wonderful ride with a funny fall at the end, crashing into two other surfers but never mind :D

Do you know the feeling when you focus on something so hard that you just can't see that little adjustment you have to make. You can't make it, can't make it, start to blame yourself thus leaking your energies. Then let someone come in and ask them to look at what you are doing. Good if it's just a small change, isn't it? Don't be afraid and don't let yourself lose all that energy.

I wonder if surfing should be part of ELT training......

5 things a teacher can learn when being taught

Recently--to regain the balance of my brain hemispheres XD--I enrolled in one-to-one drawing lessons. (I'm an EFL teacher doing loads of one-to-one, so it is quite a flipped state for me.)

So .... there I was standing, situation reversed: normally I am the expert, my student the layman... Feeling excited and somewhat intimidated (:D) in the claws of  my drawing instructor, who is my student :)

She put up a sheet of paper on the easel, brought in a little stool with a teapot, a little pot and a tea towel ('drapery' the professional term).

In the following 90 minutes I learned far more than how to draw that still-life. I lived through what my (adult) students are exposed to when being taught a completely new language, plus a lot of  other things.

1

Give it up, it's tiring...............lucky there's commitment!

I got down to it with the promise of learning a new skill by putting myself into the caring hands of my instructor, I thought she would just take me by the hand, I'd close my eyes and let myself be dragged along the road to become a skillful hobby artist. Oh my, I hope my students don't expect anything like this! There is not one single conveyor-belt method of learning something. A teacher can indeed serve as a kind of scaffolding, also a witness of your commitment to learning, learning however happens within the learner.

Good to have a someone who is willing to come along and help or shares your commitment.

What helps YOU carry on doing something new?

2

I learned to see

Before the act of drawing the first line Moni, my instructor told me to have a look at the whole still life at least three times before I touch the paper. She said I was supposed to see the structure of it all, not just the surface. I was just watching and watching it but I still didn't know what she meant. ... I HAD to start drawing, I couldn't just stand there for 90 minutes! I sketched the vertical lines, then as I was watching the stool it just started to clear out somehow. This is like a listening comprehension task. First you have no clue, then you work on it and then there comes the meaning and you complete he puzzle from pieces you have in your head. Gestalt, nothing new, but striking. Many of my students either want only the logics behind the language (structure) and there are the ones who are willing to mime everything, it's not so much the structure that move them :). One cannot be without the other. It's good that you know the structure but not enough if you don't draw anything on your sheet. And if you just copy the parts you see not  caring about the structure ...mmmm ...that is a nice picture but it might look like falling apart, very difficult to carry on drawing.

Do YOU always see the the inside and the outside as well?

 

3

Fear of failure

It was mere luck that for a while I did OK. Then I started to be afraid that I'd  spoil it all with a bad line. Moni said I had nothing to worry about, just use the rubber any time. She was right, which didn't comfort me. I was  still scared and somewhat discouraged. Hey! I thought I'd learned the value of failure (plus I learned the communicative approach inside out:)))) I'd thought fear of failure never affected me. Mistake. 

Do you know the feeling when you rather don't do things just to avoid failure? I didn't remember, this lesson was a good reminder, maybe my students feel the same? U-huh! Of course I read about it, but feeling it ... Do YOU ever feel it?

4

Step back

I was just struggling with the picture when Moni told me to step back and see it from two steps behind. Wow! It was great!  Many times I hear learners asking me if they are improving at all. Tests are good (?) , but when you are in the middle of something you often can't see your progress. How to step back when learning English?Trying to understand authentic stuff, trying to use it sometimes may do. Any idea?  

5 

Go back to the start

When I stepped back I also saw that it had happened: I just ... drew the teapot much bigger than it was in reality. Faaiilluurree! (The feeling wasn't as bad as I'd expected, anyway.) 

Right. What to do now? There are two options. One is that I don't touch it, go on drawing, it will be a nice picture anyway,  we can always say that the original teapot was this big, no one will check it. The other option is, I get the rubber, draw that part again (ruining existing good lines and investing another portion of energy and time in it). Booohoooo. 

Finally I chose the latter one. I erased great lines, started again. What I won was a teapot more similar to the one on the stool. Also there were new lines not worse than the ones I cleared. I got some more practice on how to draw that teapot.

What happens when it turns out that something that YOU spent so much energy on just turns out to be ...hmmm... bad? Do you confess? Do you try to make it look nicer? When I was a beginner teacher I tended not to interfere with some of my students' strategies that I found ineffective or simply bad. I just didn't feel confident enough. Do I  "erase" anything now? Do YOU?

Go and learn something new if you can afford it :)