the lives of teachers

“Oh, it must be wonderful to be educated. What does it feel like?”

“It’s like having an operation,”  said Treece. “You don’t know you’ve had it until long after it’s over”

(Eating People is Wrong – Malcom Bradbury)

Isn’t that true? Aren’t the best learning experiences the ones which you have time to absorb, reflect upon, digest? Perhaps the ones which click into place a year later, ten years later? What worries me is that we no longer have time to reflect. If an afternoon with a good book is a long look in a full-length mirror, is the internet a glimpse caught in a shop window on a pell-mell dash through a shopping mall? Maybe I strangled that metaphor…..

But it seems to be something of a ‘meme’ in the twitterverse / blogosphere at the moment. I’ve been thinking about this post for a while, but noticed others pop up with the same message over the last week or two. Maybe a lot of people are reaching the same point at the same time. There’s a very nice little graphic (and post) from Jeff Utecht which shows the stages of Personal Learning Network adoption.

Cresting that wave now, I think.

Alex Case asked me a couple of questions in his recent interview which I think are pertinent. The first was (a tongue in cheek) query as to whether I wanted to become the next Scott Thornbury. Well, the reason someone like Scott Thornbury becomes an ELT superstar (stop sniggering at the back) is through quality work over many years. His online presence is another outlet for that. Alex then asked “Do you think it is still worth getting published on paper?” The phrasing itself gives away his feeling, perhaps. But I absolutely think it is… and I worry that the amount of time I spend online is detracting from “real” research, “real” reading and “real” writing.

Bear in mind that I am blogging this, and I will tweet my new blog post, and I understand the irony in that. I have commented on several other blogs today, and got a great deal out of reading them. But I’ll just finish with this second quote from a book I am reading and enjoying at the moment…

“Well, that’s the lot of people like us. We abstract ourselves from the sphere of national effectiveness. We’re too busy taking notes to do anything… and the fault lies precisely in the things we value most”

So, are we all wasting our time? Deposit kickings in the comments box below and regular, classroom based discussion will resume soon.

I wrote this for my first year university students, who are taking their final classes with me this week. But it struck me that it fits very well with the reflective / anticipatory turn-of-the-decade feeling in the ELT blogosphere at the moment, so I thought I’d post it. There are some exercises at the end, and if you would like to answer the questions for us, or share your message to your future self, I might do the same….

1. Spring, 2. Summer, 3. Autumn, 4. Winter

What happens in one year?

In one year, the earth will make one revolution of the sun. It is long enough to create and gestate a human being. There are three hundred and sixty five days in a year, in which time you will blink about eight million times. They say that you eat eight spiders in your sleep in the course of a year, but I think that’s just an urban myth. However, I also heard that about 230,000 tons of natto are eaten in Japan in one year, and I do believe that.

The average Japanese employee will work one thousand eight hundred and twenty eight hours between now and next January. Shockingly, nearly one million people in this country are killed or injured in road accidents every year – something to think about if your cellphone rings while you are driving or riding a bike.

Of course Japan, like many other countries, will go through four seasons. The icy chill of winter, the life-giving spring rains, the sweltering heat of the summer and the crunch of dry leaves in autumn. Depending on where you are, you will receive between one and two thousand millimetres of rainfall in a year. You will also experience about one and a half thousand earthquakes, although you won’t notice most of them.

What I am trying to express is that a lot of things happen in a year. When you were a child,  a year was an unimaginable period of time. Some years may be uneventful, some may be thrilling, some tragic. But they will all, in real terms, be about the same length. You are just finishing your first year at university. What kind of year has it been?

What were the best and worst years in your life so far? Which was the most eventful year?

Which day in the last year stands out for you?

How did you feel in January last year? What were you doing?

What are your predictions, hopes  and goals for the coming year?

Write an email to your future self. Maybe you want to explain your feelings now, offer some encouragement, scold yourself, or just say ‘Hi!’. Then go to this website  and send the email,  to be delivered one year from today.

An Interview with Scott Thornbury from darren elliott on Vimeo.

Scott was giving a plenary at the Japan Association of Language Teachers national conference in Shizuoka this weekend, as well as a couple of presentations, but was kind enough to spare me half an hour or so for a chat. We talked a grammar, Vygotsky and socio-linguistics (inspired by James Lantolf, who was also speaking at the conference), technology, textbooks, testing and, of course, dogme. Like his fellow Kiwi Paul Nation, he is a thoroughly nice chap. If you want to pick up some of Scott’s books (and I really recommend that you do – he has a great talent for bringing complex concepts to life)  you can get them through my store and contribute a few pennies towards the running of this site at the same time….

LINKS

Window-dressing vs. Cross-dressing in the EFL Sub-culture. (The article I referred to in the interview… revived by the magic of twitter)

The New School- Online MA programme which Scott Thornbury (amongst others) is teaching on.

Scott’s own website, where you can see his edited plenary slides and plenty more.

Apologies, as usual, for the racket in the background and the occasional cropping of vital body parts.

I have a confession to make. My Japanese is pretty crappy. There, I’ve said it.

I mean, I can read a menu. I can figure out what’s going on when I watch a movie or join a conversation about everyday topics. I can go shopping and get around. And in my defence, Japanese has three writing systems, one of which contains thousands of ideograms. Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking how great it would be to be able to read a whole newspaper….

I can think of several reasons why a language teacher should also be a language student.

1. It makes one more empathetic towards the students.
2. It helps understanding of WHY students make certain mistakes with English
3. It enables the teacher to use L1 in the classroom
4. It sets a good example for the students

A serious question of priorities. Ideally, I would study Japanese, teach, do classroom research, publish and present, spend time with my friends and family, watch the football, keep up my photography, and go to the gym. Some of you self-disciplined scoundrels manage it all, I know. But if you are native speaker of the language you teach, do you think it is more important to study another language, or to engage in professional development activities? Which, ultimately, makes you a better language teacher?

(I can read most of these signs…)

I didn’t set out to rip off Lindsay Clandfield’s excellent blog gimmick, but it turned out that the number of free online journals I like is six!

First up is elearn magazine, collecting papers on learning with technology (mainly) for educators in tertiary education. The journal has been going for a few years now, and still has a fairly strong focus on multi-media online programmes (what might be called Virtual Learning Environments) rather than individual applications or websites. It also looks at the deeper impact of changing technology on the ways that we learn and teach. Stephen Downes’ article, Elearning 2.0, from 2005, is quite a good place to start.

The National University of Singapore has been publishing the Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching for the last five years, covering language instruction across Asia in a number of different languages. I particularly recommend Nikitina and Furuoka’s article “A Language Teacher is Like…”: Examining Malaysian Students’ Perceptions of Language Teachers through Metaphor Analysis, being a big fan of metaphor in the exploration of beliefs and attitudes.

The Centre for Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick produces an annual, peer-reviewed journal entitled “English Language Teacher Education and Development” which does what you would expect, very well. This article, written by the editors in the latest edition, gives an excellent overview of the project, its beginnings and where it stands now. I also enjoyed Elham Sadat Mousavi’s article about teacher stress in native and non-native teachers of English. The NNEST / NEST thing is one of those ongoing issues that never loses steam…..

 If you are at all interested in reading, then “Reading in a Foreign Language” should have something for you. It’s co-edited by Richard Day at the University of Hawai’i, a man who knows a thing or two about extensive reading. I like İsmail Hakkı Erten and Salim Razı’s fascinating study into “The effects of cultural familiarity on reading comprehension“, which looks at the impact on fluency of using “nativised” texts – the question is whether we are using texts purely for building skills, or for teaching culture and content. Either way, the study has definite implications for the selection and creation of extensive reading materials.

TESL-EJ covers a broad range of language teaching issues in a quarterly journal, usually with one or two feature articles and a lot of great book reviews. Reinders and Lazaro’s article “Current Approaches to Assessment in Self-Access Language Learning” struck a chord with me; the space at my university has been very successful, but one is always walking the tightrope in trying to encourage students to exercise their autonomy. The minute it becomes a requirement, it dies, right?

Finally, a relative newcomer to serve the growing needs of International Foundation Programme Teachers produced by the University of Reading, InForm. It is not specifically aimed at language teachers, but most international foundations are studying content in a second language (CLIL?). You should go straight to issue four and read the article about learner / teacher development through reflection by a young man with a bright future called Darren Elliott…..

Please comment on any recommended links you have, and I’d also like to know what you think of the articles I have recommended.

(Update – 26/4/2010: Comments disabled due to huge spammage! Please email darrenrelliott@gmail.com if you have any recommendations)

Barbara Hoskins-Sakamoto Interview from darren elliott on Vimeo.

Barbara is an EFL materials writer, teacher and teacher trainer working mainly with children in Japan. This interview was conducted for the lives of teachers website at http://www.livesofteachers.com/

If you have ever taught children, you may well have come across the ‘Let’s Go!‘ series, now on the third edition and a multimedia behemoth! I met with Barbara, one of the authors, today at the ETJ Chubu Expo, and she was kind enough to give this interview. As you can see, she is delightful company and I wish I’d left the camera running because we talked for as long again after I turned it off. She has a lot to say about teaching children and professional development in particular, but we also touched on a few other topics. If you haven’t already, you should check out Barbara’s blog and have a look for her on twitter. Thanks Barbara, I hope to see you again soon!

I’m not sure where I sit in the whole digital native / digital immigrant scheme of things.  I am old enough to remember my parents having a serious discussion about betamax and VHS video. And when the VHS arrived (my father would point to his prescience) it was linked to a ‘remote’ control by an eight foot lead.  I also grew up with a 48k ZX spectrum, later upgraded to the 128k with built in cassette deck (!), and spent many happy hours listening to the high-pitched screech and whine of ‘Jet Set Willy’ loading up.

Does this make me a digital native, or an immigrant? Am I of a strange generation which could go either way? What worries me is not that future generations will be different (it was ever thus), but that I myself am changing. I’m sure I used to be able to concentrate for longer, I used to get more done….

I’ve spent the afternoon re-joining twitter and beggering about with it to get it synched up to various other blogs, feeds and whatever else. Why? I’m not exactly sure. I have a feeling I’m missing out on something but the constant drip-drip-drip of information might not be what I need. So I thought I might jot down a few ideas about unplugging…

Turn off your wireless connection.
I used to type my essays with an electric typewriter. If I hadn’t been such a lousy typist and hadn’t spent so long waiting for tippex to dry, I would have stuck with it. The temptation to play urban dead when I turn on my computer is almost overwhelming. But whelm it I must….

Listen to records.
I didn’t even have to dust off the record player – it’s never been out of service. CD’s started the problem of the twitchy finger, mp3′s made it worse… now I struggle to listen to a whole song. But put on an LP and sit in a comfy chair and listen to the entire album, getting up once to turn it over and you will have time to absorb some of the things you’ve been cramming into your head.

Read books.
The ones made of paper.

Leave your phone behind.
Sometimes it happens by accident, and for the first half an hour it’s terrifying. But then, nothing much. I even know people without a phone, but that’s taking it a bit far.

Get a clockwork alarm clock with brass clappers.
Because using your phone as an alarm clock leads to all kinds of midnight mischief. You wake up in the night and take a quick peek to see what time it is and before you know it you are checking the football results.

Drink more tea.
I know it’s full of caffeine, but it still seems more civilised than coffee. Especially if you sit down and drink it whilst looking out of the window, reading the paper or doing a crossword.

There is more to know now than at any point in history. Tomorrow, there will be even more. Don’t even think about next week. Do we really need to know all of it? I’m sure I’ll be playing with my phone on the train to work tomorrow, checking tweets. I might even learn something useful. But I’m not putting away my record player just yet.

Are all the debates about the best way to teach driven by the needs of individual teachers? For example, if a particular teacher can’t get out of bed in the morning, thinks youtube is an emergency plumbing service, and is fluent in the learners’ L1, what are the odds that the class instructions will be given in Spanish and taught with pencil, paper and whatever the teacher can find in his pockets? For the sake of balance, I should point out that his colleague down the hall can’t speak a word of the local lingo and stayed up till three last night playing “Xylagore IIX – Revenge of the Gigamarths” online, and that’s what his students will be focusing on today (and woe betide anyone who utters a word in “the foreign”).

Both teachers can find research by the bucket load which shows they are pedagogically sound. But perhaps they (and I mean we) ought to admit that they are working backwards. That is, they teach how they LIKE to teach and then select the information that supports them.

But here is the big question*. So what? Doesn’t a happy and enthusiastic teacher beat one who is fighting to teach against type, against her inner beliefs? Is it more important to be comfortable, than “sound”? Do the debates over the use or non-use of certain techniques, methods or tools actually matter?

*I know, there are four questions. But basically it is one question written four times for dramatic effect.

It seems somewhat solipsistic to write my first post about other blogs I’ve kept, but I suppose to some extent all blogs are exercises in solopsism, so here goes nothing….

My first blog was an attempt to set up an online teacher development group. I tried far too hard with all the wrong things (using particular applications, stipulating rules for participation) and not hard enough with the really important things (writing quality content, and often). I’m probably a little hard on myself there, it was a noble endeavour… and anyone interested can read more about it here. We did gather a truly diverse group of people, from all over the world, who then proceeded not to talk to each other.

What I did learn from that experience is that there are existing networks for that kind of thing. That groups form organically out of the discussion, rather than discussion forming out of artificially created groups.

My second blog is ongoing, and has been much more successful. At least, I judge it to be more successful by rather arbitrary means. This one is the blog I manage for my students, and through this blog I have learnt to relinquish control. The blog was set up originally to deliver media and content to university students, English majors, and to give them a collaboration space. Of course, it evolved pretty quickly once it became apparent that the students weren’t watching the videos, reading all the articles or listening to all the music I’d tracked down for them (at least, not as much or as many as I’d hoped). Although I’d never seen myself as a controlling teacher, I realised that it wouldn’t work unless it was the students’ own space. The long summer vacation was the ideal opportunity to test this out, and I set them the task of posting one item a week and commenting on two others over the break. The links flooded in, and the interaction in the comments was great to see.

There are a couple of niggling doubts, though.

Firstly, if the students are required to do something, how autonomous is it? I allowed total freedom of posting (which meant a lot of cute cat videos, cute boy band videos, and people falling over). But I still asked them to do it. I suppose we can differentiate between the autonomy of philosophy, and the autonomy of educational institutions. Theoretically, the learner can make an autonomous decision to refuse the teacher’s ideas or methods, but this may mean failure (to pass the course and/or to improve their English). For this reason, I didn’t make the blog a requirement, but if one doesn’t require students to attend self access centres or use VLE’s, how do you justify the expense and effort of creating and maintaining them? How to balance the the dream of autonomy with the reality of institutional education?

The other problem I don’t actually see as a problem, but some people might. That is, how much language do they learn? Probably very little, but I’d argue that not everything has to directly input, practice or test new language.

Again, you can read more of my thoughts on the student blogging here.

First post, I hope future posts will be a bit more focused!