How to be a Genius (with a cabbage)

Some nice kind people “liked” my concept fan picture in my last post. This post is about making one, and how to be a genius as well. According to someone or other, if you can think of more than 8 things you can do with a cabbage in 2 minutes, besides cooking and eating it, you’re a genius.

So. Are you? A genius, I mean, not a cabbage. Take up the challenge. You’re allowed some latitude (i.e. wackiness), but the question stands: What can you do with a cabbage (besides cooking and eating it)?

Errr. Ooooh. Hmmmm.

Play football with it.

Good. Another?

Hit someone over the head with it.

Exactly!

Errr. Ooooh. Hmmmm. Eight seems a long way away, doesn’t it!

So let’s use a concept fan.

You said play football with it. Why?

Because it’s round. Round, so it could be a bowling ball if you carve out a few finger holes. Volleyball? Nope, too heavy. Play catch with it. Attach a message to it and roll it down a hill to your friend waiting at the bottom. (There’s no signal, in case you ask).

We said it was heavy, which is why you could hit someone with it. Break a window with it (if you want to burgle a house). Drop it on a rat. Stand on it to reach something at the back of the cupboard.

Heavy. A paperweight. A doorstop, keep a window open with it, one of those elegant sash windows. Drop it in a puddle to splash someone.

It’s green. Mash it up to make face camouflage (when you’re burgling the house). Paint a wall green. Dye your clothes green. Dye your ex’s clothes green.

What about stripping off the leaves? Use one as a fan (not a concept fan). That’s a good idea. But why? Why can a leaf be a fan? What properties does it have that make it a good fan? It’s large and flappy, it catches the wind. OK, so it could be a sail for a toy boat, or a handkerchief. It’s curved, so it could be a hat, or protection from the sun. Curved we said? A spoon for soup. Pick up a spider with it. A pooper-scooper for your dog.

How we doing?

24!! We’ve hardly started! What’s the one above genius-level? Surely they’ll have to invent a new category for us. A scatter-gun approach to generating ideas, the way we often think creative minds work, shooting off all over the place, you’ve either got it or you haven’t. Not at all. Far more effective is to be systematically, logically, predictably creative.

Try it with your students! I’m sure they can beat this paltry figure. You could even use the Genius Generator.

Ten Thousand Words

A picture speaks a thousand words. There are ten pictures here, taken from my notebooks over the last year or two, each representing an important insight for me, mostly in a business context. See if you can match the pictures with the ten definitions below…

Think global, act local. ”Glocal”, the word is, working with lots of people in different countries, making resources with them that suit local needs, and selling through local teachers and business owners.

If you say three things, you say nothing. What’s your core message? You can’t have two priorities.

Some people take up new ideas. They get it, and take the lead. The vast majority of people on the bell-curve look to what others are doing, and follow the crowd. The gulf between these two mentalities is wide. Take note of the feedback from the early adopters, and act on it to make it accessible to the rest.

A book, the Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya sisterhood became a word-of-mouth sensation because the book spoke to the (mainly) female readers, who spoke to each other. People build relationships with each other, a network of support and love. Design a business that allows and encourages this.

Key Performance Indicators. Business terminology really, but for all of us, information is king.

When the goal is fuzzy and a long way away, and the external environment can change, you need to be flexible, have a strategy where you continually strengthen your position. Like in chess.

On the journey, when you make things, products or services maybe, to you these may be just important milestones, things you note as you pass by, keeping your head down. But hang on. To the outside world, these can be worthwhile products in their own right.

That’s a good idea! But don’t stop there. Think. Is it the best? This idea is a way of doing what? What are you trying to achieve? Looking rather like a mind map, you can make a concept fan, where you continually jump back and forth between ideas and concepts.

Do one thing well. Don’t try and do everything. You’ll end up being a jack of all trades, master of none. Take what you’ve got, and make it brilliant. Don’t smother the good idea in blanket of excess. Maximum magic, that’s what you’re after.

The environment always changes. The only constant is constant change. Successful animals, and businesses, are those that evolve to suit the new landscape.

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Do you have any wise words you’d like to share? Or pictures that represent them?

A Fresh Ride

“I may not have gone where I intended to go,
but I think I have ended up where I wanted to be.”
Douglas Adams
“A Hitchhikers’ guide to the galaxy”

When I worked in the Alps as a waiter in a 4-star hotel, a guise solely enabling me to go snowboarding at every opportunity, ah snowboarding, what a ride, skimming across the soft fresh glistening powder, weaving in and out of trees and rocks, landing head-first in chest-deep snow and gulping down the mountain air for hardly-existing oxygen as you struggle to dig yourself out, where was I? oh yes, mornings in the hotel were spent clearing the tables after breakfast and setting them for the evening meal. It’s where I learned to fold napkins into swans and fans and the like, seven designs, one for each day of the week.

How annoying, then, when they’d saunter in after a day on the slopes and whip my artwork into their laps without the slightest hint of acknowledgement, let alone admiration.

Hotels would run perfectly if it weren’t for damned guests.

A few years later, having swapped Alpine snow for Atlantic surf, ah surfing, sun, sea and sand, paddle paddle, the wave picks you up and you slide down an ever-shifting slope seeking stability, what a ride, where was I? oh yes, I had also, in my eyes, moved up a rung on the career ladder by working for the British Council in Portugal.

Here, I encountered a teacher with the most extreme and opposite views to mine I had ever heard. I can’t remember which coursebook we were all supposed to be using, but he wanted every level in every centre, twelve or so dotted around the country, to all be doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same lesson at exactly the same time. Order. Precision. Perfection.

Syllabuses would flow perfectly if it weren’t for damned students.

Because people, life, lessons, can’t be planned to the letter. You’re always going to end up somewhere else, somewhere you hadn’t envisaged. It’s not wrong, coz there was never any right, only a pitiful attempt to impose order and feel safe.

Luke said recently:

“Conversation-rich and materials-light (and the implications of pursuing these in the classroom) are not new – but I believe that focusing on emergent language is new, or at least represents a challenge to ELT orthodoxy – and is the most interesting and challenging of the three.”

I agree. Dogme can be a gentle breeze blowing the dust off the coursebook’s pages or a hurricane tearing it from everyone’s clutches entirely. Dogmers describe how exhilarating this ride is. But anyone who laughs at the well-intentioned but ill-informed idiocy of trying to map out a country’s language lessons for a whole year in an afternoon has the spirit of Dogme in them. Because if you do sympathise with such a prescriptive view, then just for starters you’d be missing out on the wonderful drama classes that Luke was part of in Nick Bilbrough’s cosy retreat in Devon.

And so this is where I find myself, making and selling interactive language plants, but with this spirit in me that has been brought into much clearer focus over the last few years, thanks to Teaching Unplugged and the blogs it has spawned.

Especially this third principle, dealing with emergent language.

Because too many teachers and pupils, those who have never heard of Dogme, have said to me: “Can we make our own language plants? Can we add our own words to the ones you’ve made? Can we make our own activities?”.

Reading between the lines, this is what I hear teachers saying:

“We love language plants. The interactive activities have brought a breath of fresh air. We also love creating an environment where learners are encouraged to contribute their own language and their own ideas and can grow and learn in unpredicted and unanticipated ways. Can you marry the two?”

This is the ride I now find myself on.

“You can’t stop the waves,
but you can learn to surf.”
Jon Kabat-Zinn

Beautiful People

“Where there is no struggle,
there is no progress.”
Frederick Douglass,
former slave, and social reformer

It’s funny to hear of old men from thousands of years ago, Ancient Greece or wherever, in uproar at the state of the youth of their time. Their quotes are as fresh today as they were then. I must admit though, I did chortle when some wrong answers were read out on the radio recently that 18-year-old students had written in their exam papers.

One was from the poem “Daffodils”, where the poet, William Wordsworth rejoices at the daffodils dancing in the breeze. The first line is particularly well-known in Britain, and what caused such outrage was a student’s answer to this gapfill:

“I wandered lonely as a ….”

Do you know what it is? Who or what could be lonely? More importantly, what does Wordsworth imagine as being lonely? It’s a good collocation activity.

“Sheep”, wrote one ignoramus.

Oh, woe! What is the world coming to?

Actually, it’s “a cloud, that floated on high o’er hill and dale”. A fluffy little white cloud, all alone in the deep summer sky, minding its own business. I can picture it now.

Cristina, who wonders, is looking for teachers to read to her little bunnies on Friday afternoons via Skype. Willy’s done one. I’ve signed up, they’d love you to, too, I’m sure.

I found the poem she tweeted a few months back, one of her favourites, very moving. I’ve made it a gapfill. Can you come up with suggestions for the gaps? (Hint: there are no sheep).

The answers are hidden in the language plant, but they’re given underneath in case you’re struggling. If you do struggle, well, you’re obviously progressing

Could this activity be something you’d use in class? Your suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

“The most beautiful …… we have known
are those who have known defeat,
known ………, known struggle, known ….,
and have ….. their way out of the …….

These persons have an …………,
a sensitivity, and an …………. of life
that ….. them with compassion, ……….,
and a deep …… concern.
Beautiful people do not just happen.”

Elizabeth Kubler Ross

people, suffering, loss, found, depths,
appreciation, understanding, fills, gentleness, loving.

Happy New Year!

Happy new year to my friends
and happy new year to my family.
Happy new year to those I am close to
and happy new year to those I am not close to.
Happy new year to those who I will meet this year
and happy new year to those who I will never meet.
In fact, happy new year to everyone,
and of course, happy new year to you!

Coffee and Chechen

“Turn left” in Chechen.

Who devised the Cyrillic alphabet?

Why, Saint Cyril, of course!

Our winter holiday is booked, we’re off to Galicia, to Alan Tait, my one-time hero. Here was someone who could speak fluent Italian, and revelled in the Coffee Break Method, giving his business students a task while he nipped out for a well-earned rest. “They’re the ones who have to do the work, not me”, his reasoning went. Gosh! What a teacher! What a man!

Adam Beale posted, in Five against One, what I believe is a common question many have about dogme: How much time should you spend actually looking at language, being a teacher as it were, and how much should you be “drinking coffee?”.

Willy, too, asks on what criteria teachers’ pay scales should be based.

For personal and professional reasons, I’ve been looking at online Chechen language materials recently. A few letters look and sound the same as their Latin counterparts, some look the same but sound different, many sound similar but look different. So it’s a bit difficult when you’re presented with a string of these symbols to remember and learn, especially as all they do is just keep giving you more words, mainly words, sometimes a phrase like this, the next one in the sequence, meaning “turn right”:

Now maybe it’s just me, but I had to search pretty hard to work out the difference between “turn left” and “turn right”. I’m code-breaking, except, as Teaching Unplugged says, language lessons should be social and happy events, with coffee and cakes, for everyone, not just the teacher. This wasn’t. This was a struggle.

So for Adam’s and Willy’s questions, my belief is, if they’re happy for you to always drink coffee, go for decaf. But if they want linguistic awareness, then it’s not how long you spend doing it, but how well you do it.

Look at this simple little language plant. Notice the difference? Your learners will too.

I want to make a difference!

A Shock to the System

“Every man can transform the world
from one of monotony and drabness
to one of excitement and adventure.”
Irvine Wallace

Transform your world now!

The gas man came to call this morning. The water heater kept cutting out, the radiators would be nice and hot for a while, then you’d start thinking it’s a bit cold in here, touch the radiator and find it stone cold.

He tested this, fiddled with that, sucked his teeth and informed me what a botch job the cowboy before had made. Through a deliberate set of procedures though, he determined the cause and replaced the right part. My gloveless hands are testament to his success.

If only learning were that easy. We’re not machines, things go in one ear and out the other, and we have to do things again and again. We learn to add s to make plurals, only to start putting ‘s when we learn about possessives.

And on Monday, on a trip up to Halifax in the lovely Pennine Hills in the north of England, where I spent a fabulous day teaching and demonstrating, at one point I had to pull over to let an ambulance pass. The bright blue lights flashing in my mirror and the cacophony of wails and whoops and screeches are designed to catch attention. The good old days of nee nah nee nah are long gone. The trouble is, monotony is boring. We don’t even notice it after a while. We need a greater shock to the system.

End the monotony here!

This is one of the reasons that the ESOL learners at Calderdale College loved the activities we did with Language Garden so much. Seeing words bend and branch before their eyes, the text takes on a personality of its own almost. They didn’t know what was going to happen next, what was suddenly going to sprout out from the blank white screen, the visual equivalent of an ambulance siren.

NLP says you learn by watching experts. See if it’s true!

And when I invited them to put the words back in in Puzzle, they were up out of their seats like they were burning their backsides on a scorching radiator. Like, I’m pleased to say, I can now do.

“The true art of memory
is the art of attention.”
Samuel Johnson

Draw Ravid

Inundated by requests to hear Alan Tait on the guitar, mainly, it should be stated, from Alan himself, and with a respectful nod to Vicky Loras’s challenge of recounting our personal histories, I offer you the story of Draw Ravid, the Wild West’s first and only cowboy hailing from India, anagram of David Warr that Alan came up with, my alter ego, at least for one night in Milan before the internet was around to distract EFL teachers from fulfilling their more artistic calling by telling the world what they got up to earlier that day.

Let’s hear it now!

(He was Natalia T, by the way, another character with a dark side. We both tried out the activity in class the next day, getting learners to make up anagrams and stories of their classmates. It’s good fun.)

Also continuing with the theme of the last post, this is another figure referred to in hushed tones by one name only. Draw, the fastest gunslinger in the west. You know, when you draw a gun on someone. This is what he did. Admittedly, no-one like him much, but everybody wanna see him draw.

He arrived in the good ol’ US of A by rather unusual means, illegally, and immediately set off to the prairie, taking any job he could find. He was a natural cowboy.

His tastes were, shall we say, distinct. Evidence found in one toilet was surprising to say the least. As I said, no-one likes him much, but everybody wanna see him draw.

Yee hah!

You’d never catch him on the dance floor, or the mountain slopes. The front door of any low-life rundown establishment he occasioned to be in was strictly off-limits. He chose other routes.

Surprisingly perhaps, he maintained his religion, or aspects thereof. Bilingual, on occasion. Not into sport, but gardening, yes, in a modest capacity.

All of this is mere backdrop though. It was his skill with a pistol that attracted the blood-lust crowds, as long as they weren’t the one in his sights. Those who faced him met their maker. He joked, though none ever laughed, you better use a pencil and a rubber if you want to draw against me.

In saloons, the toe-tapping guitar strumming quickly rose to cult status. Dug out and dusted down from the archives, it is for the first time presented to a wider audience. Everybody like him, but no-one wanna see him draw.

Yeah, boy, play that tune!

Honouring the rich and famous

“Tigers die and leave their skins;
People die and leave their names.”
Japanese proverb

John, Paul, George and Ringo.

Gandhi, Shakespeare.

Pele, Ali.

Galileo, Leonardo.

Tom, Jerry.

One name will suffice for the great and the good.

So without further ado, here is a sample of my favourite blogs. Don’t make me nominate for the Edublog Awards. I can’t do it. I won’t do it. I won’t do it coz I can’t do it.

Alan. You should hear him play the guitar. Actually, you can! Would you like to?

Anthony. He teaches teachers. But who teaches teacher teachers?

Brad. His posts about etymology are awesome, dude.

Candy. She’s sweet, and laugh-out-loud funny.

Cat. She’s cool. All cats are.

Chiew. He has language plants growing out of his ears.

Cristina. I love her wisdom. Her children love her.

Dave. He’s up to his eyeballs in projects, or so he says.

Greta. I keep a box of tissues handy for all her heart-warming stories.

Johanna. Brilliant spelling blog. She and Brad together, that would be good.

Naini. The stuff she does with her primary children in Kenya and India. Incredible.

Oli. He’s a dogmeist, and a language gardener. Such wisdom for one so young.

I feel guilty. There are many I’ve missed, and if you feel you should be one of them, I agree entirely. I  can offer you a hug and these consolatory words:

“Wealth is like sea-water;
the more we drink,
the thirstier we become;
and the same is true of fame.”
Arthur Schopenhauer

ELTBites Challenge

“ELT BITES is an English language teacher resource dedicated to sharing minimal resource activities that can complement and extend lessons at any level in any teaching context.”

Richard has suggested a challenge:

You are in class and all you have is a board pen/chalk, perhaps a coursebook, and the learners of course: NO photocopier and NO digital technologies. Describe an activity in 200 words.

Some have beaten me to it:
I’m learning English
B’s life in English
Teacher Training Unplugged
Thoughts and Ramblings

Concluding with his hearty belly laugh that always made me warm to him, my first ever DoS, an Italian bon vivant fluent in half a dozen languages, recounted how many moons ago a teacher colleague of his, an Irish guy with the gift of the gab, fed up to the back teeth with the highly structured drills which were the norm in the days before Halliday gave the world a more enlightened view of language, slightly modified the “this is a pen” drill the course book was dictating his students should be doing on his last ever lesson before fleeing the country with no forwarding address.

It was all set up, and worked perfectly, so that when their DoS, not like my friendly one, but a stern, authoritarian strode into the classroom in the following lesson and promptly held up a pen as a cue to his question “what is this?”, he was greeted by the compliant but unwitting students with the chorus:

“IT’S A BLOODY PEN!”

The activity:

Take a piece of student language – a word, chunk, sentence, right or wrong, but something that is at the forefront of their knowledge.

“The teacher’s primary function … is to optimise language affordances, by, for example, directing attention to features of emergent language”, as Scott and Luke write in Teaching Unplugged.

You’re going to work with it, improve it, make your learners aware of it, by highlighting words you can add to make it better, longer, more advanced.

It requires you to think on your feet, fly by the seat of your pants, as Candy describes dogme teaching.

And how can you record it?

That’s the good bit! Imagine breaking free from the linear straight-jacket, of mind and of hand you’ve been subjected to all your life. It’s as liberating as unshackling the chains of the linear progression of your course book.

On the board, make a language plant. (148)