4th of July July 5, 2008

In the last six years or so, I believe I’ve been in the US only once for the 4th of July. There were fireworks once in Budapest, and I celebrated with my CELTA coursemates, and the following year I got an invitation to the party of the US embassy in Sarajevo (which I did not attend - I only received the invitation because I had followed the overcautious recommendations to register with the embassy and they had my email).

This year I seriously considered attending some festivities, because I’m back and also because I’m living in the country’s capitol. In the end I decided to avoid the crowds and the lengthy commute home at midnight…but I did actually still do something patriotic.

I know what you are thinking: “Katie, patriotic? I don’t think so.” Well, I watched several episodes of the second season of West Wing, and I do notice that when I watch that show, I grow more fond of the US government. I also like the characters and the music.

I am not, however, fond of the excessive displays of the flag that are becoming more and more common in the US. It is one thing to be proud of the principles on which a country is built, but in my opinion the flag symbolizes a lot more than some nice semi-historic principles, and it is a different story to display it everywhere and anywhere more or less blindly when the US government is doing some pretty bad things in the world. Watching West Wing and even Boston Legal does remind me though that the US is more than just the sum of current events.

A Hard-To-Get-Over Cultural Difference June 15, 2008

One of my boss’ strategic advisers visited the other day. It has happened in the past and it happened then - he wanted me to hang out in his office while the meeting went on.

I’m not really an English teacher there. I do have a regular “job” there, and some of it could loosely fall into the category of English teaching, but mainly I do whatever happens to come up. People have been very nice and my boss especially makes an effort to make me feel part of the team … but without going into too much detail, you don’t just become “one of the team” by working there.

I have recently been making an effort to ask him directly: do you [really] want me in the room while you talk to that person? And he does. He regularly has other people there too. But since I am kind of the black sheep, it just seems different for me. This last meeting, I actually slipped out on two occasions because I just so strongly felt they must all want me to go. I think an American boss in a similar position would never want me in the room - they wouldn’t even ask me to leave, they would just expect me to know that I should.

For that reason, it can be very interesting to stay and in theory, I don’t mind. I suppose I feel like I am invading their privacy, even though my boss isn’t looking at it that way. I also have a sense that if the guest is American, they are wondering why I am there or why I don’t leave. Lastly, if he’s in a rush or not really into pursuing the cultural insights of his semi-English teacher, raising the topic with him will just make the situation weirder.

What would you do? Raise the topic explicitly or just sit in the meetings after it’s clear that that is what he wants?

It’s really surprising to me how hard it is to get over this. I guess I am more American than I thought.

Why My Dad Is Cool June 15, 2008

It’s Father’s Day in the US. I sent my dad a Homer Simpson card and signed him up for Netflix.

• He buys a McDonald’s sandwich once a week for a homeless guy he sees near work.
• For Christmas - or some holiday - he gave me a Starbucks card, the balance on which he monitors and refills when it gets low (I like coffee but I don’t abuse this!).
• He has mastered the skill of talking me through a number of different problems that come up. I’m not sure how well readers may have a sense of my personality from all my posts on the previous blog, but I can actually be pretty high maintenance. He also did some teaching himself, connected to the field he works in, and was good at giving me teaching pep talks while I was teaching.
• I also got him started blogging and he has kept it up. Eventually there will be a link here to my dad’s blog.

That’s all for now … so happy Father’s Day to my dad and to any dads who are readers.

A Learner-Centered Spinning Class June 2, 2008

I never imagined I’d participate in a spinning class. Prior to a few months ago, I didn’t even know what spinning was: a group class at a gym, on stationary bikes. There’s music and the instructor tells you, “you’re going up a hill” or “sprint for 30 seconds” or “stand up”, and you can turn the resistance up and down. You can obviously adjust how much resistance you add, and hence the difficulty of the whole workout, but I’ve found it a good challenge to keep up with it for 45-60 minutes.

I go at different times and have different instructors, and I was particularly stumped by one. I don’t think she sat on her own bike once … instead, she walked around the room, monitoring! Then, we had to work in small groups to develop a “routine” for ten minutes. She told us at two, four, six and eight minutes, and our team did what we’d agreed on.

Granted, I spent about half the time feeling like I didn’t know what we were doing, and that was in the class as a whole, not just the small group work part. At the end though I realized it was the first time I’d talked to people in the class other than saying hello. I also got some tips from the instructor (”don’t sway so much - try to keep your shoulders still”) that I remembered and tried to apply in other classes.

I almost approached her at the end to ask if by any chance she was an ESL teacher too. I realize how nerdy it is not only to notice that a spinning class is learner-centered, but to blog about it when I know real teachers may even read it. But there could be a lot of interesting applications of this learner-centered stuff which I personally first came across in EFL.

Thriftiness, and my first iPod product May 25, 2008

Yesterday I caved in and bought my first iPod product ever: an iPod shuffle. I bought my first mp3 player a year ago, a $40 thingy in Sarajevo which also had a voice recorder. I like music but don’t go out and seek new stuff all the time, so it was okay that I could not download anything from iTunes for it, and had to rely on the handful of songs the ex-boyfriend had downloaded illegally a couple years prior and once in a while another non-iTunes site. It’s always possible, of course, to buy music from iTunes, but as far as I can tell it will only go on my computer, and not another brand of mp3 player.

Maybe ironically, one of the songs I was seeking out and which party caused my need for the iPod was none other than Yael Naim’s “New Soul”, which you may recognize from an Apple commercial:

The New York Times also had a feature on twentysomethings getting by in New York. I’m nearly done with my twenties, and I’m not in New York, but it reminded me of some of my own thriftiness. There is also a fellow non-iPod-owner included.

Drilling For Lower Levels May 17, 2008

I’m not currently teaching classes of beginner- or elementary-level learners, but I did attend a training for a job I decided not to take where we practiced this.

When you teach lower level classes, do you use a lot of group drilling and repetition? If you’re of the CELTA/DELTA mindset, how do you think drilling fits into that?

I have taught only a few groups of beginners and a handful of elementary level classes myself. Many of the students I’ve taught just would not have gone for drilling. Going through this training I just did, I do think it can be useful, especially for pronunciation and especially if students aren’t totally adverse to it.

I have been in a few situations where someone told me I should do more drilling with higher levels, and felt awkward with this. On the one hand, I was (and I would say still am) at a teaching point where if the director tells me to do something a certain way, while I might not love it, I would try to do it. I guess my concern with drilling at higher levels is that, say, when the target language is a set of phrasal verbs … memorizing how to say them is not what will ultimately help the students, and in fact that may be the easiest part of phrasal verbs.

Chicago TEFL Villains May 16, 2008

Some time ago, I learned that Guy Courchesne was having some problems with a certain TELF villain in Chicago. In fact, the villain in question maintained an office less than a block away from an apartment I had once lived in.

At one point I actually offered to do some “investigative reporting” for Guy by visiting the villain myself. He - probably quite wisely - very nicely declined.

A few weeks ago, Guy emailed to let me know that a story would be coming in the Chicago Tribune about this character. While I will do my utmost to avoid attracting the attention of said villain to this blog, which is of course my personal blog, I am curious to hear what is going on. If it would be useful, I’d certainly share my thoughts on the topic in a separate blog made specifically for that purpose, and link to it from this one, as I did with Alex Case’s case here.

My Turkish Media Appearance May 16, 2008

I was recently on the news in Turkey. A high profile former US government guy came to address the Turkish organization I’m working for, and Turkish state TV was there to cover it. I thought I might have been on television last week for another event, but no. I’m just sitting there, writing, but I’m pretty happy that it made the news.

I was fortunate to see the two-minute news story as it played on my boss’ computer screen and another director filmed that with a hand-held video camera. Ha.

A few more reasons I like this job:

- They asked me to attend a conference for them last week which they believed they could not get into because of their affiliation. I would of course not mislead anyone about who I work for, but if no one asks, I’m not lying by not saying.
- When there were some bank issues with the check they gave me, they apologized (!) and immediately paid me in cash.
- They don’t always even have work for me to do, but they still ask me to come in, sometimes early. In the back of my mind (well, sometimes even the front of my mind), I worry that one day they may just say, sorry Katie, we can’t pay you anymore, stop coming. But I am hoping that would only happen if they really start to dislike me.
- Finally, my boss says “abisi” a lot. Not to me, but to pretty much everyone he talks to in Turkish. I asked some other people what it meant, and they laughed, because he says it a lot - enough for me to notice it even though I speak less than 10 words of Turkish. I guess “abi” means “big brother”, and you can attach it to the end of someone’s name. They told me “abisi” is a way of showing sincerity, something like “my dear friend”. I think it’s nice that he says that, even though he is the big boss.

I may have to learn Turkish now.

Mandarin Lessons May 8, 2008

Earlier tonight I was in a situation where one guy (a native English speaker) was teaching our small group five words and then a phrase in Mandarin.

I loved it. It was a lot of repetition, and one of the words I just couldn’t say - partly because it was long but partly because I just couldn’t distinguish the sounds fast enough. But it was fun because I just like learning languages.

There was a girl in the group whose parents had been born in China. She didn’t speak the language but was familiar with the sounds because it was her parents’ first language of course.

Part of the exercise was just drilling, as a group and then individually. A lot of us - probably nearly all of us - were laughing when we or others made mistakes. Most of the time, this girl wouldn’t say anything when the teacher wanted her to repeat.

At the end, she just apologized … she said she didn’t speak the language but knew the sounds, and just quickly said something like “people used to make fun of us that way.” She wasn’t trying to criticize anyone, just to explain why she hadn’t participated at all.

I felt terrible for her. People, kids, but adult people too, do that. They just say something that sounds like an Asian language to them to make fun of people or to make fun of the language, and they laugh. Their only attempt at the language ever is to try to imitate it to make fun of someone.

The teacher was not a real teacher of Mandarin, but had studied it for four years. He definitely wasn’t trying to make fun of the language. I certainly don’t think any of us in the class were deliberately trying to make fun of Mandarin…but would we have laughed so hard had we been trying to pronounce Spanish words? Who knows. I just felt (and still feel) terrible for this situation a) because this girl sat there feeling bad, recalling people who had made fun of her because of what we were doing, and b) it made me aware that kind of meanness does happen - not by us here but by people in general.

There is nothing to do about it. I don’t think raising the topic when I see this girl again would make her feel better - probably she’d just feel obligated to say “Don’t worry, it’s not a big deal.”

From Stewardess To Political Activist April 29, 2008

I love this story about a former stewardess from Serbia who is now taking a stand against the extreme nationalist forces in her country.

She was the sole survivor of a crash in 1985 - thought to be a terrorist attack by the nationalist Croatian Ustas(h)a - and is also in the Guinness Book of World Records for “highest fall survived without a parachute.” And now she’s speaking out against politicians in Serbia who align themselves with Milosevic’s views.

There is obviously a very serious side to this and I hope she will be successful in this. But I also just find the story bizarre. And I like that.