The Other Things Matter: 2013

Friday, December 27, 2013

(Not really a) Rebel

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress. I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in. Would love to hear from you.

Irish-American suffrage activist

Margaret Hinchey, Library of Congress print

Good friend of the blog Josette LeBlanc over at Throwing Back Tokens has a blog post up on linguistic rebellion. In it she writes, “Rebellion occurs because something deep inside requires us to look at the situation from a different perspective. This feeling demands that we find our own way, and maybe even try to convince others that we’re on to something.” In Japan, we have all kinds of linguistic rebells. Japanese isn’t a gendered language in the typical manner. For the most part, nouns do not have a masculine or feminine form. But there are some words which are predominately used by males and some used by females. For example we have two forms of the verb “to eat.” Most of the time we say “taberu”. But boys, especially when talking to their friends will sometimes say “kuu.” There’s something a little rough, a little animalistic about the word kuu. It’s as if you’re tearing meat off a bone. It’s not a word women use. And if a girl uses it, they’re likely to be scolded.

But you can’t have rules around language use without a certain amount of psychological chaffing. It’s a truism that every word has it’s own unique flavour. Near synonyms are merely near, not the same. And if a girl finds herself in a situation where what she did last nights was not ‘taberu’ (eat) but was in fact ‘kuu’, she probably will feel pressure to remain within the linguistic norms and pass over the right word for the word-others-consider-right.

When I came to Japan, I couldn’t speak any Japanese. I lived way out in the countryside and there wasn’t much chance that I was going to find an ex-pat community to hook up with. So if I wanted to find my way into the community, my only real chance was to learn the language. When learning Japanese, all of the books start off with “polite language.” It’s not exactly what you would hear people on the street using with each other. But it’s not so polite that it makes you sound like a complete jerk either. It’s not as if you are saying things like, “If I might be so bold as to suggest you open the window,” when you are feeling a bit hot and stuffy. It’s more like, “Would you mind opening the window?” Nothing wrong with that, although at times a simple, “Dude, open the window?” would be more fitting.

Similarly, when speaking in Japanese, there’s a dizzying array of first person personal pronouns to choose from. Each one conveys a different sense of projected/perceived self. There’s “watashi” which is formal when used by a man, but standard when used by a woman. Then there’s “boku,” standard for a young man or boy, but when used by a girl or young woman, expresses a sense of independence or a certain kind of toughness. You can also leave out the 1st person pronoun entirely, which is probably the most common construction of all. And then there’s “washi,” which is usually used only by older people. It’s not exactly formal, and it’s not exactly informal either. But it gives the sense of someone who has enough experience to start off each and every sentence with the word, “I.”

The more competent I became at Japanese, the more I enjoyed playing with personal pronouns and levels of politeness to see what kind of effect they would have on a listener. When talking to a group of people younger than me, I would pull out a “washi.” When they laughed and whispered, “washi” to each other, and then settled down to listen with serious expressions on their faces, I felt like I had hit some kind of linguistic jackpot. When I was drinking with friends and wanted someone to pass me the bottle of sake, I would use some seriously overly polite language, verbally grovelling for a cup of wine. Changing the surface of the language didn’t necessarily change anything fundamental about what I wanted to say. The picture I was drawing was still of a late night ramen run, or an image of going to the farmers’ market in Chicago, but I was doing a chalk drawing or a water-colour or using oils.

With my Japanese, I have made a conscious choice to play with the language so that the ‘I’ created through conversation, is an ‘I’ that somehow means ‘we,’ an identity that is created to play off of and play with other people’s expectations. Is this an act of rebellion? I’m not sure. Certainly it is a strange way to express oneself in Japanese. And perhaps it might make some of the people I talk with a bit uncomfortable. If discomfort is a hallmark of rebellion, than it is rebellious. But If I am going to be honest, I have to say that rebellion is mostly hollow if there is no penalty to pay. And for the most part, as a foreigner in Japan, my language play is almost entirely without consequence. Very different from the girls who claim the word 'boku' even if the people around them might frown at the impertinence. And different again from the middle age man who never slips into the lazy language of privilege when asking a favour of people younger than himself, even at the risk of losing face with his peers. These people who refuse to represent themselves as anything other than what they know themselves to be, are not the window breakers and rock throwers of linguistic rebellion. They are so much more than that. They are the understated revolutionaries who lead by example, reminding all of us that often the most radical thing we can do, is simply demand to be ourselves.

Saturday, December 21, 2013

11 things (a blog challenge)

Recently a blog challenge has been making the rounds of the ELT world (or the small part of it which I’m familiar with). Rachael Roberts from ELT-Resourceful tagged me so I am happily joining in and sharing 11 things about myself and answering her 11 questions. I also want to thank Sandy Millin and Malu Sciamarelli for also inviting me to join.

The blog challenge consists of:

Acknowledge the nominating blogger.
Share 11 random facts about yourself.
Answer the 11 questions the nominating blogger has created for you.
List 11 bloggers.
Post 11 questions for the bloggers you nominate to answer, and let all the bloggers know they have been nominated. Don’t nominate a blogger who has nominated you.

11 random facts about myself:

1. I can play the hand ocarina. This is sort of hard to explain so I made a little video:

2. I am a terrible driver. I have managed to cause 5 accidents in the limited amount of time I have been behind the wheel. On one occasion I managed to run over a tree in the private parking lot of a bank. A police officer just happened to be nearby and watched the whole thing. He walked up to my car, shook his head and said, “I’m not going to write you a ticket, because I don’t even know how to describe what I just saw.” He told me to buy a new tree, explain what I did to the bank manager, and replace the now dead (murdered) tree. Which I did and learned a very valuable lesson. Digging a hole for a tree is very hard work.

3. I like to snowboard. A lot. I also like to go off jumps when I snowboard. Sometimes I end up landing on my back. Sometimes on my head. I enjoy a poor jump almost as much as a good landing.

4. I can cook a mean meatloaf. It is delicious because I stuff the center with about a pound of cheese which pours out when the meatloaf is cut open. I find that putting huge amounts of cheese in or on anything I cook makes it tastes pretty good.

5. I once hitched a ride with my friend as he drove from Arizona to Detroit in a barely running red Ford Probe. To kill time as we drove through Texas (and if you’ve ever driven through Texas, you know that the only thing to do with time on such a journey is kill it) we made up long lists of random words. I can still remember 62 of the words from one particular list which included: lizard, hat, God, cloud, and whisky.

6. When I was a child I liked to eat paste. I don’t eat paste now. But sometimes I remember the starchy tang of it as being pretty delicious.

7. I have never truly gotten over the fact that leg warmers were at the height of fashion when I was 13 years old. When 80s style clothing came back into style a few years ago, I was very happy and thought people looked utterly fantastic.

8. I love to dance. I especially love to dance to Chicago house music. A friend of mine once said that I danced like Michael Jackson. This was perhaps the greatest compliment I had ever received. Unfortunately my wife was there and after a few moments of stunned silence, her laughter rolled through the room loud and long. She will still occasionally say, “And you dance like Michael Jackson,” which is her code for, “you are getting a little full of yourself.”

9. I would very much like to learn to be a better listener. At the age of 42, I still unfortunately feel like being there for a friend or family or student means helping them solve their problems. So I have a hard time shutting up and just listening.

10. I eat breakfast each and every morning. I have done so for the past 7 years. I usually eat a piece of toast, a cup of coffee, and some stir fried vegetables. But I will happily make and eat risotto, rice balls, and even a re-heat a cold piece of pizza if I have one.

11. I love to go to the 100 yen store, buy this and that, go home and put it all together, and see how it changes a room. Sometimes it makes things better. Sometimes not so much. But since it only costs about 4 or 5 dollars, I don’t really mind the mistakes.

My 11 questions from Rachael:

1. Why did you start blogging and how has it differed from your expectations?

I started blogging because I enjoyed reading blogs. Not ELT blogs, but economic blogs. Economists, policy makers, graduate students, and regular old folk shared ideas (and sometimes snark), and hashed out the direction that economics was going to take in the near future. I wanted to get in on something similar. I started a blog about my experiences as a language teacher and then started hunting out other ELT blogs. It turned out that ELT blogs were mostly missing snark, but were long on the sense of a community trying to finger out where it was going.

2. What’s your earliest childhood memory?

I was watching a parade march by. I remember the Shriners zipping around in their little cars. It was awesome.

3. Tell us about someone you admire, and say why.

The principle of my school, Dr. Matsu Takasuke. He is a world renowned chemist who helped discover the quantum tunnelling effect. But when a student comes and asks him a question, any question, he takes the time to really think about what the student is trying to find out, and then he helps the student go about the process of learning. Last year one of the students came and said, “I really want to study alchemy.” About an hour later, the student walked away knowing that alchemy was the foundation of chemistry and how early alchemy experiments led to a greater understanding of the physical world. It was an amazing thing to watch.

4 .What was the last book you read and what did you think of it?

I just finished Big Deal: One Year as a Professional Poker Player, by Anthony Holden. If you think playing poker (or gambling in general) is stupid, I cannot recommend this book. But if you have ever played poker and wondered what it would be like to play much more poker and win (or lose) much more money, I highly recommend this book.

5. Do you prefer walking or running? Why?

Walking over running. I’m a strolling kind of guy, I guess. But if it’s all downhill, I like to run. But it’s rarely all downhill.

6. What was your first paid job?

I worked at a potato stand in a food court and my job was to wash the potatoes. So for a few hours every day, I opened box after box of potatoes. Then I grabbed a brush, turned on the cold water tap, and started scrubbing.

7. What five famous people would you invite to a dinner party, and why?

I would love to have Stan Lee, the guy who invented Spider Man, the Fantastic Four, and Iron Man. I would love to have Alice Munro, my favourite writer. I guess I could go on and make a list of my favourite architect and musician, etc. But when I really think about it, instead of someone I already know and like, I would rather just have a collection of 5 people who are amazing at what they do, whatever it might be, all sitting around the table. I would probably really enjoy hearing something entirely knew from a world authority on shark mating or someone who was finding novel ways to boost the world’s fresh water supply.

8. What’s the first website you check/go on each day? Why?

I usually jump on Facebook, to check out what my friends and family are up to. But sometimes, if there’s something news-y happening, I hit Huffington Post first.

9. What can you remember about the first class you ever taught?

Not much. I was working at a vocational high school in the countryside of Japan. Almost none of the students we're planning to go on to university. And of the 80% of students who were moving right into the work force, none were planning to use English in their jobs. So I remember feeling frustrated, trying to keep things fun, and using a lot of comic books and other materials I thought would catch the students’s interest from the get go.

10. Flowers or chocolates?

Flowers, especially broken tulips.

Flowers fill a room with a special kind of warmth. Plus, everyone in my family are salty snack lovers. We’ve had chocolate sitting on our kitchen shelf for months without being eaten.

11. How do you feel about reality TV shows?

I don’t. I guess as a concept, I have no problem with them. We are all voyeurs at heart. It’s part of being a social animal and learning how to not only adhere to the norms of a community, but to feel comfortable with the particular ways you might enjoy breaking those norms (strange concept huh, surreptitiously watching people to figure out how to mis-behave). But I would much rather watch a drama. I’m amazed by just how good TV has gotten in the past few years.

Many of the bloggers in my immediate circle have already been tagged. Which gives me a chance to not only learn more about members of my PLN, but also to give a shout out and say thank you to some bloggers who have no idea how much I enjoy what they do (and sorry if you’ve already been tagged):

Gemma Lunn

Anna Loseva

And here are 11 questions:

What is the strangest thing to inspire one of your lessons?
What is your comfort food?
Ocean or mountains?
Three phrases you think people need to know in any language?
Where is the one place you’ve been to that you feel like you must get back to again?
What internet site is the best for wasting time, if you have any time to waste?
Happiness = x + y; where x=? and y=?
What game did you like to play as a child? Why?
What flavours do you associate with at least three languages?
What is something in your home which, while of little practical value, you absolutely wouldn’t want to live without?
All or nothing?

Friday, December 13, 2013

T-DAD

Teacher Dereliction Anxiety Dissorder

(a follow up to my first extensive reading post here)

T-DAD is not found in the
DSM-5 and is not likely to be
found in the DSM-6 or DSM-7

Extensive Reading, or carving out class time so students can read what they want for pleasure and hence spend reading time practicing reading, is a large part of my program here in Osaka. Students read for three 30-minute periods a week. There are no rules about what they can read, how long they have to continue reading one book, and no follow up exams. Students just read.

Now, if you don’t have an extensive reading component in your English program, you might have a few questions about how to set up an ER program for your school, in which case I highly recommend you check out the Extensive Reading Foundation’s Guide to Extensive Reading as well as Bamford and Day’s “Top Ten Principles for Teaching Extensive Reading.” And if you are looking for some evidence to back up that idea that this whole ER thing actually works, I recommend this, this and this which read together point to the fact that extensive reading improves reading speed, spelling, writing, vocabulary and attitudes towards reading itself.

But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about T-DAD and the fact that teachers are teachers and often have the very bad habit of wanting to actively teach something. Even more so, teachers ~~too often~~ sometimes want to measure if students learn what the teacher has taken pains to actively teach. In general, a pure ER program, one in which students are just reading for pleasure, doesn’t really allow a teacher to do either of these things. And this can lead to some serious anxiety. Are the students really reading the books? Are they learning anything? Are they improving? I also suffered from these flashes of panic. I too was diagnosed with T-DAD. So I want to give 3 or 4 ideas of things a teacher can do to decrease the anxiety around extensive reading.

Have students keep track of the number of pages they have read. They keep a running tally of the total number of pages they have read in their notebook. It’s amazing how quickly the pages add up. Don’t worry about the level of the books. Don’t worry about the rate of reading. Just have students keep track of this raw number. In my class, many of the students are reading starter-level books. Usually they are about 17 to 20 pages long. Most of them will complete one book in a 30-minute period. This means that at the end of a week, they get to add about 60 pages to their page tally. At the end of a month they usually get to tack on over 200 pages. At the end of a semester, a big number like 500 pages of English read really helps the students feel like they’ve accomplished something. And it also gives you, the teacher, something tangible to hang on to. What did your students really accomplish with all that class time dedicated to reading? THEY READ 500 PAGES OF ENGLISH! That’s what they did. Relax.

Add a 1 minute speed reading sprint to the end of the lesson. Tell the students to read for one minute, time them, then have them count up the total number of words they read. Instead of just writing the number, have them plot it on graph paper. Students in my class have seen steady reading speed improvement over the past two years. Those steadily climbing line-graphs give the students a lot of confidence in their own reading abilities, and helps reduce my anxiety that ER is worthwhile. I just took my last reading speed rates for this semester and each and every student in my class is now reading at over 150 words per minute. Most of them over 200 words per minute. And most of them started with a reading rate at right around or under 100 words per minute. Sometimes their line graph will show a sudden extended dip, and this is almost always do to the fact that they have jumped up a level in regards to the reading material they are selecting. When this happens they get to enjoy watching the rates crawl steadily back up from 120 to 200 again.

3 sentence book reviews on the inside back cover of the book. Just what it says. Students only have to write three sentences about the book. They can write whatever they want. The book reviews are not graded, but they are signed. You can go back at the end of a few weeks and notice how the language the students use in these reviews changes and develops. And the best part, students think they are doing it to help their friends and fellow students read interesting books and avoid boring ones. They have no idea that actually, producing these short reviews is all about making the teacher feel good about the fact that students are picking up new vocabulary and improving their grammatical accuracy.

As you might have noticed, all of the activities above are low pressure and don’t require a lot of time and clearly show improvement in some way or another. This is key as the whole point of extensive reading is that students enjoy the act of reading. If ER comes attached with all kinds of difficult tasks and assessment components, than they joy of reading is likely to become infected with the taint of “school work.” Which is why I’m a little hesitant to share my fourth (and last) ER extension activity. But when it comes to easing the symptoms of T-DAD, this is the absolute best activity I’ve ever used. And I still use it in my classes.

・Read/Think/Write: This is an old activity recommended by Michael West, the guy who gave us the General Service List. It’s also something that my friend and mentor John Fanselow recommends highly and mentions in this article. But I don’t recommend it because it comes attached to big names, but rather because I have seen how well it has worked in my classes. The activity lasts 7 minutes. Students turn to the front page of the book they read during an extensive reading period. They read as much as they can easily hold in their working memory (as much as they can easily remember), turn the book over, count to 3, and write down what they thought that had just read. Then they draw a slash. Then they pick up the book and read from the last word they wrote down. Once again they read as much as they think they can easily remember, turn the book over, count to 3, and write down what they can remember, ending with a slash. It looks something like this:

They do this for seven minutes. They do not correct anything. They do not go over what they have just read. They just keep plowing ahead. And ahead. Right until 7 minutes is up. Then they count the total number of words they wrote and the number of slashes. If you divided the number of words by the number of slashes, you get a rough idea of how many words a student can hold in their working memory. Even better, if students are putting slashes in the middle of syntactic groups (those groups of words that hang together naturally in a sentence), you have a pretty good indication that something odd is happening with how they are reading the text. Reviewing their read/think/write notebooks can highlight students who are reading at an inappropriate level, are having trouble with spelling and sound relationships, and a host of other factors. Here’s a sample of two Read/Think/Write exercises from the same student, one at the beginning of May:

and one from October:

You can see that the average number of word per slash increased from 4 to 8, a pretty good sign that the student is starting to work with larger and larger chunks of language.

The final step in the read/think/write activity is to have the students compare what they wrote with the text and circle any differences between the two. Some of those difference will be perfectly acceptable, such as a student who wrote down “the very pretty girl was loved by her father,” instead of “the most beautiful girl was loved by her father.” Going over these differences with the students and showing them how some changes are OK while some are not, can help them to develop good summary skills and also helps you, the teacher, to see at what level students are comprehending the texts.

It usually takes a while for the students to get used to the read/think/write process; I've found that things go smoothly after about a month of regular practice. But just giving the students a chance to clearly see that they are working with larger and larger chunks of language makes the time and effort worthwhile. As an added bonus, read/think/write is an activity that students can use outside of class and with any text. So not only are they improving their English, students are also adding another activity to their autonomous learner's toolkit.

So that’s my list of 1 relatively long (~12 minutes in total) and 3 very short extension activities you can do to reduce your T-DAD around ER. But these activities also reduce your students’ anxiety as well by giving them concrete evidence that they are improving. And that’s important, because as much anxiety as you as a teacher might have around extensive reading, I find it often pales in comparison to the anxiety students are feeling. For a majority of our students, learning English has been a story of struggle. They’ve been forced to read texts in which they have minimal interest, littered with language they cannot understand; even worse, once the text is read, it is usually only reviewed for the purpose of preparing for the test which looms at the end of the semester. So for many of our students, reading classes are by nature joyless and stressful. A well-structured extensive reading program combined with unobtrusive extension activities can convince students (slowly but surely) that this doesn’t have to be the case. And that’s a pretty good thing, seeing as how a classroom free of T-DAD and S(tudent)-DAD, is classroom where everyone can settle into a good book, secure in the knowledge that the joy of reading is very much the joy of learning.

In case anyone is wondering, at the end of the semester, we take the raw data from students’ ER extension activities and give each student a reading report. Here’s the report for one of my second year students from the second semester of this year:

If you’re interested in getting the Excel file (which includes all of the equations and graphs), just let me know in a comment or send me an email.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Plums, a podcast, and Hemingway (in no particular order)

Red-Plums by Evan-Amos
is licensed under CC BY 2.0

A few months ago, Philip Keegan, materials writer, CELTA/DELTA trainer, and English teacher, got in touch with me. He had been doing a regular Podcast dealing with all things ELT. He had already touched on learning styles, tech, and motivation in language learning. He wondered if I might be up for talking about literature in the language classroom. So we got together via Skype and had a chat for about an hour. The conversation ranged from plums (as in the fruit) to Hemingway (as in the dude) and much in-between.

Soon after we talked, Phil moved to a new school in Turkey and wrote that the podcast would be on hold until he settled down. And now he has settled. And while settling, he also managed to take an hour of my ramblings, find a cohesive thread, and sew it all together into a podcast which makes me sound surprisingly thoughtful. So first and for most I want to say thank you to Phil. I also want to say that any errors, omissions, or other nonsense I spouted should in no way reflect on Phil and his podcast. Errors such as:

Accidentally calling Project Gutenberg the ‘Guggenheim Project’ at the beginning of the podcast. (Which seems to be a not uncommon mistake as Google’s first hit for ‘The Guggenheim Project’ happens to be, “Project Gutenberg.’ Not that I’m trying to make excuses or anything…you know.)

Kind of forgetting to give concrete examples of how I actually use literature in the classroom, which I think had been the point of our conversation, and which I forgot about soon after I started talking.

Claiming something along the lines of Project Gutenberg having electronic versions of almost every public domain book. Which is obviously just a bunch of techno-bug-eyed-craziness. They house 42,000 free ebooks and with their partner organisations make over 100,000 texts available. That’s a lot. But it isn’t all of them or even most. But maybe someday.

I am sure that there’s a few other moments of silliness to be found. But like I said, the lapses are mine and mine alone. And I am hoping they won’t get in the way of you enjoying a podcast I’m really honoured to have taken part in. So if you have a few minutes to kick back and listen to:

ELT Podcast Episode 2: Literature in the Language Classroom

I also though this might be a good chance to link to some of the writing I’ve done over the past year or so on using literature in the language classroom. That way maybe I can make up for having left so much of what I was supposed to be talking about out of the podcast:

“For Sale: Baby Shoes…” from the Music, Stories and Magic issue of the iTDi blog.

“Make all the mistakes you want” a post on how to use 6 word memoirs in classroom activities.

“Because we all love a good story” an overview on how and why to use short fiction in the language classroom on Teaching Village.

and a series of 2 posts on how to use a writers’ workshop method within the reading classroom:

Writers' Workshop in the Reading Classroom Part 1

Writers' Workshop in the Reading Classroom (pseudo-)Part 2

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Joining My First Movement (#FlashMobELT, go go go)

Good friends of the blog Anna Loseva (AKA A-Chan) and Michael Griffin have started a movement. I have often wanted to be part of a movement, but always seem to be ready to sign up just as things are winding down. Luckily, #FlashMobELT has just kicked off, so I figure this is my big chance. The idea is brilliant really. There's a #FlashMobELT Lino board here. Teachers with a good class activity jot it down on a Lino post-it and leave it on the board. Teachers who leave an idea also pick up an idea. When they have time in their classes, they use the idea, and then write up how things went, further publicising the whole #FlashMobELT movement, getting more good ideas up on the Lino, and creating a virtuous cycle.

Here's the activity I plucked from the wall:

I went into my Monday morning class needing to revisit "A Name for All Things," a short story we had used on Thursday of last week and this seemed like a pretty good activity for reviewing a text. I would like to say that it went down like a storm. But my students had sprinkled themselves with forget-everything-juice over the weekend and so the whole verbal-only thing was a little bit beyond them. Instead, we adjusted the activity a little. Students read a sentence from the story to themselves, picked one word, and then read the sentence out loud while mumbling the chosen word. The other students wrote the sentence down and tried to guess the missing word from context. The student who had read the sentence could provide hints such as part of speech, tense, meaning, etc. After that, the activity proceeded pretty much according to the above directions. All in all, it turned out just fine. All the conversation about language (the meta-stuff) was unfortunately in Japanese, but it was the first class of the morning.

As the lesson progressed and I introduced a new text and did a bunch of reading exercises, I still had this post-it note, a little slice of lemon stuck to the back of my consciousness. At the very end of the lesson, just as the students were about to reconstruct a jigsaw puzzle of the text, I realised that here was my chance. Instead of having the students just put the slips of paper in order, I told them each to pick up 3 slips (each slip had one sentence of the text written on it). Then I told the students to black out 2 words in each sentence. But I warned them that before they blacked out a word, they had better make sure that they memorised it. Then, before a student was allowed to add one of their sentences into the reconstructed text, the other students had to supply the missing words. And this did go down like a storm.

So color me a lemon post-it note believer. Not only does the #FlashMobELT movement provide us with 6 (and counting) fantastic activities for our classrooms, it is a springboard for creating something new. So won't you join us? Won't you become a member of the #FlashMobELT movement? If you don't, the whole thing will probably morph into something entirely different. Maybe a graffiti crochet circle. But that would be pretty cool. I've always wanted to learn how to crochet.

Saturday, November 2, 2013

A Whisper of Gratitude (JALT 2013)

I. April

Eight months ago I was in a bar, one of those narrow smokey stand-up bars where older men gather to pour each other beers. I was having a few drinks after work with Scott B and Scotty J. Scott B was, as usual, talking to anyone and everyone in the place. And as usual, people were talking back. Scotty J was waiting for me to finish my offer. I had just suggested we put together a presentation for JALT 2013. We had been taking short video clips of our class, writing up transcripts, and using them as material for reflective practices for about a year now. It seemed like something we might want to share at a conference. Scotty J thought for a moment and said he was in. Scott B, who even now I’m not sure had actually been listening or not, said sure. It was the beginning of April. Classes starting in a few days. What does a conference in November really mean when the breath and promise of spring can find its way even into a smoky stand-up bar in Osaka? That’s how this story starts.

II. November 1

People who have been through an experience which leaves them feeling changed at the level of their core personality, regardless of the type of experience which resulted in the change, show remarkable similarities in language use. They often produce “I” statements at a much higher rate than found in the general population. Their conversations show a markedly consistent level of positive affectivity, most often expressed through adjectives, and perhaps not surprisingly, exclamations. In addition, when referring to the CLE (critical life event) their language becomes vague and they often struggle to find a way to express what it is that happened to them. They reach for words the way a child hesitantly stretches out a hand towards a dragonfly, as if in catching it, something else might be lost.

III. October 25, evening

At the welcome party, Scotty J, Scott B and I are talking with Tara. We all have glasses of wine. I’m feeling really grown-up as I explain our presentation. I say something like, “We limit ourselves to analytic observations which allow for the generation of multiple perspective and the…” Tara let’s me talk and when I finish, she says, “It’s like a mirrorball of observation and feedback." Scotty J laughs and says, “Yes, that’s exactly what it’s like.”

IV. October 26, morning

Penny Ur is on stage. She has simple slides, just black text on a white background. She isn’t using notes. She tells us the story of a former student who came back to visit and said, “I don’t really remember you. But I remember what you taught. I remember what we learned in class.” Penny tells us that she doesn’t mind if her students forget her. As long as the students hold on to what they learned in class, then she has done her job as a teacher. In Japanese, the word for plain is, “地味” (jimi). The Chinese characters literally mean flavour of the earth. Like English, the word has largely negative connotations. And yet, there is something inherently beautiful in the combination of those two characters. Flavour of the earth. Stability. Support. Nurturing. When my students look back on the time we spent together in class, what do they remember? How large do I loom? There are so many ways to get better at this thing we call teaching. So many ways I want to get better. And now I have one more, to learn to take up less and less room, until I become the ground upon which my students stand.

V. October 27, morning/

October 28, afternoon

Nina Septina is at the front of the room. I known her from iTDi and have followed her for a while on Facebook. She looks so small standing up there. Tim Murphey, her co-presenter, is standing at the edge of the room. He is smiling and waiting. It is her time. And then Nina begins to speak. It is a soft voice that seems to float up high above my head and then miraculously drifts down, as if she is whispering something important right into my ear. And she is. She is telling us about how she took video clips of her students using English in her classes. And then she is showing us the clips. Boys and girls, seven or eight years old, with the round faces of childhood. Some are missing a tooth or two. All of them look at the camera as they speak. They explain the plight of endangered animals, the story of pandas. They tell us about dinosaurs, saying names that stretch on and on, and they speak without hesitation. And then Nina says that the videos are put on a memory stick and sent home so that they can be watched by the students. Their classroom language becomes the material the students use to hear and watch and improve outside of class. But it is not just the students. They are encouraged to watch the videos with their families. Mothers and grandfathers and fathers and uncles gathered around a computer screen, watching their child speak this language which has become tangled up with the future, with hope. They watch and maybe they feel as if they are all part of it, this moment as we tip into something new.

When I get back to school on Monday afternoon, I have a practice session with one of my students for a national standardised English interview test. The third time through, he is nearly perfect.
“Give me your cell phone,” I say.
He reaches into his pocket. But he doesn’t hand over his phone. “Why,” he asks.
“Because I want to record this moment of excellence. I want you to use it to study,” I say.
He smile and hands over the phone. And after I record his answers, I ask him to share it with his mom. He smiles and says sure. I don’t know if he will show his mother or not. But I hope he does. I know, as a father, what a gift it would be.

VI. November, 2

JALT 2013: Learning is a lifelong voyage. I love this word, voyage. A slow moving from place to place. Stories are how we turn our voyage from a collection of moments into a detailed map of experience that can be brought out and shared with others.

VII. October 26, evening

I am running down the hall to see Barb and Marco and Malu present on how to teach children. I don’t teach children anymore. But over the past two days of the conference I have come to realise something. It isn’t the topic that matters. It’s the presenter, and the type of teachers who will find their way into the room. And so I am running because I want to be the type of teacher who will be in just that room, at the exact moment it all starts. Barb, as she has done all conference long, as so many of the teachers I admire the most have done, keeps her introduction short, becomes the earth we stand on while Marco almost leaps to the front of the room. He has a handful of shoelaces gripped in the middle. They dangle down from each side of his fist. He asks for volunteers and six teachers jog up to the front of the room. “Now each of you grab one side of the string.” And the teachers reach out, grab an end of a shoelace. Marco counts down, “3, 2, 1,” and let’s go. The shoelaces tumble down. The volunteers look across at the teacher who they are now connected to. “Now,” Marco says, “you have a partner.” And the room bursts into applause. As if Marco has just pulled off a nearly impossible magic trick. Which he has. He has made pairing up students fun. When it is Malu’s time to present, she asks a bunch of volunteers to walk around and try to find the language she uses. She speaks slowly, clearly, using full sentences. She says, “I brush my teeth every night.” A teacher finds a large card leaning against the wall, picks it up and shows it to the rest of us. It is a boy and girl riding a bicycle. Malu says the sentence again. And again. And again until the right card is found. The audience claps, I clap. And I wonder why I haven’t done something like this before in my classroom, turning full sentences into listening activities connected up to images and movement. And the richness of the language Malu is using, what she asks of her students, there is nothing childish about it. Learning is born out of a teacher's respect for the learner.

VII. October 26, late

It’s late and we are waiting on the train platform to head back into downtown Kobe. A bunch of us are trying to close an umbrella which is stuck open. Suddenly Tim Murphey is urging us to raise our arms up. And most of us do. Although at half-mast, as if we are afraid of unexpected winds. But Tim just says, “Higher, higher, higher.” And so we raise our hands higher, as high as we can. And then Tim smiles as if he has tricked the world into doing just what it needs to do. “OK, now say, ‘I’m in love!’” And we do, we shout it out. We shout it out, and in the shouting the truth of it becomes clear. I am in love. With teaching. With these friends. With this moment. Indeed. I am in love with so, so many things. How is it that I sometimes forget such a simple truth? I’m in love.

VIII. October 26, late afternoon

Our presentation is almost over. I have already said my part and sat down. But Scotty J and Scott B and I haven’t ever really talked about how to wrap things up. We have said everything we had to say, but the silence in the room is tinged with a hint of expectation. People are still leaning forward as if there is more to hear. Scotty J steps back to the front of the room and says, “The other night we were talking to a teacher about how we use videos and transcripts in our program. She said it was like a mirrorball.” And here Scotty J stops. It is just the way we would end things in our classroom. Let the students fill in the blank. A few seconds pass and the audience starts to laugh. We start to laugh. We are not in class. We don’t have to keep words to ourselves to make space. We can share our ideas in full and watch as those ideas are picked up, turned this way and that and reflected by the brilliance of teachers who know how to make things their own. And so Scotty J clears his throat and starts, “when we look at one moment of a classroom from multiple points of view…”

IX. October 27, very early

In four hours Mike and Anna and I will be presenting on student feedback. But now Anna is at the front of the room, alone. She is here to tell us about Students Connected, a FaceBook group for 17-23 year olds. Without any fuss, she describes a safe space where students can use English to become a member of, and help build, a community of language learners. And the whole time she is speaking, Anna manages to take herself out of it all, as if the way the members share their photos of their towns, the way they experiment with verbal play, they way they open themselves up to each other, has nothing to do with her. But it does. It has everything to do with her and the other teachers watching over the space. Without the right spaces, there can be no words, there can be no lingering echo of a conversation, there can be no shared experience. In four hours, Anna and Mike and I will be presenting on student feedback. But now it is Anna at the front of the room, alone. Mike leans over to me and whispers, “I have an idea. Tonight’s presentation, less me and you,” and then he looks at the front of the room, “more Anna.” And I couldn’t agree more.

X. Now

When I was growing up, my parents used the phrase, “get religion” pretty often. They used it in the general sense of someone who has become slightly obsessed about something after a profound or moving experience. And when my parents talked about someone who had “got religion,” it was rarely, if ever, a compliment. As I got older, I met people who I thought had “got religion.” The friend who suddenly started jogging, quit smoking and drinking, and only talked about what it meant to be healthy. The neighbour who decided America needed saving, and spent all of his free time in the Ross Perot for president offices or telling us why we needed to spend our free time in the Ross Perot for president offices. The way these people talked with such passion about this one small thing eventually left me feeling lost. It was as if in the middle of the conversation, they began to speak a different language. All of the words made sense, but I could no longer understand what they were really saying. And now I wonder if I have “got religion.” As I write about JALT 2013, am I merely stringing together a collection of moments, making a necklace of private artefacts that has value for me and me alone? Does it matter?

During a presentation on how iTDi is trying to bring opportunities for professional development to all teachers, Scott Thornbury said, “We learn to learn by telling stories about learning. We learn to teach by telling stories about teaching.” If this is true, I think it is equally true that we learn who we are by telling the stories of ourselves. Last weekend, I was lucky enough to spend time with a group of people who made me feel as if sharing those stories was the most important thing I could possibly do. And as we told our stories, we created new ones. Stories that have left me changed, as a teacher and a person. And I need to share these new stories. They are the light that let's me see where I came from. They are my whisper of gratitude. They are the points on a compass which I can only hope will eventually lead me back to the place where we will all gather together again.

(this post is dedicated to John Fanselow, for the many many hours of support and guidance he provided as we prepared for our first JALT presentation as a program)

The Other Things Matter

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