Category: Topics

It is hard to stand up because I get so stiff when I sit down.

by John F. Fanselow

Every time I find it painful to stand up after a meal either at home or a restaurant, I remember the title of this blog, which is a comment one of my aunts used to make every time she moved from a sitting to a standing position.

About 25 years ago, while I was living in New York I began to feel a lot of back pain after I sat a long time or walked a lot. I mentioned this to a friend who was a professional piano player.  She said that she had begun to experience a lot of back pain a few years earlier both during her practice and when she was performing. A fellow musician suggested she visit a practitioner of The Alexander Technique.

I am now living in Japan so when I remembered how my back pain decreased when I worked to change the habits of how I stood, sat and walked in New York, The Alexander Technique did not come immediately to mind as a way to alleviate my pain. But out of the blue one of my wife’s graduate students who is a nurse mentioned in a conversation that her sister was an Alexander Technique practitioner!

We called her immediately and I have now had two sessions with her. Though it has been 25 years since I last had a session, after both sessions I felt as if I was re-living the sessions 25 years ago in New York.

I will not tax your mind with loads of a lot of details about what the Alexander Technique is about, just a few details. Frederick Alexander was an actor who was born in Australia in 1869. As a young man he was frustrated because though he could speak with no problems with friends, when he stood on a stage to recite Shakespeare he lost his voice. He decided to compare his posture when he spoke with friends and when he was on stage to recite Shakespeare. He noticed great differences between how he stood and moved in both settings.

Over time, he was able to overcome his loss of voice by standing on stage the same way he stood when he was chatting with friends.

You can find many more details about his life and his technique on the Internet. I just want to point out one lesson that I have been reminded of and learned in the two sessions I have just experienced in Japan.

In Japan, the chairs I sit in at our dining room table are about 4 inches/12 centimeters lower than the ones I sit on in New York. This means that when I sit in a chair in Japan my legs between my knees and my pelvis are pointing up rather than parallel with the floor. This puts a great deal of strain on my legs and back.

I have now put a 4-inch/12 centimeter pad on the chair I sit in when I eat. I can now sit down and stand up without putting my hands on the arms of the chair to ease me into either a sitting or standing position.

I had lunch with a person 25 years younger than I am last week in our apartment—American like me. He is the same height as I am. When he sat down I noticed that he braced himself on the arms of one of our dining room chairs. And when he stood up he propped himself up putting his hands on the arms of the chairs.  His habits were the same as mine and just as detrimental to the long-term negative effects on our bodies.

I am excited by the Alexander Technique not only because I have found it beneficial to the way I sit, walk, stand and lie down but also because I think that Alexander has lessons for teachers that are in line with what I have been advocating for many years. I am not promoting the Alexander Technique for you to deal with your back pain, though I think it will alleviate it. Rather I am promoting Alexander’s ideas because they are in tune with what I have been advocating for decades to better understand our teaching.

1. Most of what we do is out of consciousness—I call this following rules and Alexander calls it following habits.

2. To change how we teach or sit or stand, we need to observe in minute detail a minute or two of our behaviors. Then we have to change one of our behaviors slightly. If we sit on a chair that is too low for us so that our legs between our knees and pelvis are pointing upward rather than parallel with the floor, we need to put something on the chair seat so our legs are parallel with the floor.

If students use erasers during dictations so that you cannot see what words they wrote incorrectly you have to ask them to put their erasers in their pencil cases so that you can see what they wrote and how it is similar and different from what you said.

Small changes and no judgments! Alexander used the word “habits” because he had no interest in judging people about having bad posture or bad habits of sitting or walking. He just wanted people to learn awareness of how if they sat or stood or walked one way or another there would be different consequence. Ditto my long-term call to be descriptive and analytical rather than judgmental. The rules or habits we follow are inculcated in us through years. To make even small changes — something both Alexander and I advocate — requires that we are non-judgmental.　- John F. Fanselow

Connect with John and other iTDi Associates, Mentors, and Faculty by joining iTDi Community. Sign Up For A Free iTDi Account to create your profile and get immediate access to our social forums and trial lessons from our English For Teachers and Teacher Development Courses.

 

 

 

Instant groove lesson recipe

By Erika Osváth

If someone asked me to jump in and teach a stand-by lesson to a group of children, teenagers or adults, a group of any age, I’d just walk in now with no pen, no paper, no book nor laptop and be somewhat sure we could come up with something fun and useful together. Something that I would certainly enjoy and hope they would like too. A lesson full of vocabulary practice, functional language, pronunciation, lots of speaking and listening and possibly some reading and writing too, age of the students and time permitting. And I’m sure some of you know already that one of my instant lesson ideas is to make a rap song together with the group.

I love rapping with my classes and this activity always seems to work, even in my teacher training sessions. So one day I got really curious to find out why this was and ended up looking into some uses of rhyme and rhythm over the history of the humankind in education. In my quest I stumbled upon Alexander de Villedieu, a French teacher and poet in the 12th century whose Doctrinale Puerorum, the book of Latin grammar put into rhyming and rhythmic verses, made it possible for literacy to become widespread well before the age of the printing press of Johannes Gutenberg two and a half centuries later. It was the power of the rhymes and rhythms that was so catching and appealing to everybody that they memorised the rules in no time, then were able to use these rules to work out and understand Latin text. Simply amazing!

After all the history and theory I felt I needed to stop with my search and started to notice that everything around me takes its own rhythm: from the tweeting of the birds in the spring to the silence that surrounds me, from the shape of the sunbeams in the morning sunrise to the colour of my daughters’ eyes.

Everything has its own rhythm and all we can and should do is to notice it and let it come out. “If you can walk you can dance, if you can talk you can sing” says a lovely proverb from Zimbabwe.

So here’s why I think rhymes and the rhythm of a rap song are such powerful teaching tools, even in the EFL classroom. Make sure you do the task I’m asking you at the end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AH06lmV-vDE&list=UUbxUWEsv94uwmkqaniQyiTw&index=7

Did you write down the key words? If you managed to spot them, you have half of the recipe of making a rap song ready.

So here’s the universal rap recipe:

1. Step into the room and notice how everything and everybody are: the weather, how many of your students are looking out the window or gossiping, the quality of the light, everything that is part of that moment. This would help you tune in with your students and together find the topic that interests them the most in that very minute. So let’s say our topic of this moment is: spring or summer? (lower level)

2. Elicit a few words, expressions, or collocations around the topic of their interest, reformulate, upgrade and write the language on the board. Say in this case: windy, hot, rainy, etc. With the new ones you can play some games to reinforce meaning and use. This would also include work on stressed syllables, for example through humming a word/expression to them and asking students to guess it, followed by the same activity done in pairs.

3. The above would be a good way to sensitise students to the rhythm of these key words and then to get them ready to stand up and add the rhythm with their bodies, too. So at this stage choose three to four words to make a vocabulary chant or rap with them with movement. The easiest rhythm pattern you can use for this purpose is a four-beat rhythm, which then you can vary as you wish depending on whether you use three or four key words. For three words, you could use the following pattern:

1, 2, 3, X (clap) windy, hot, rainy, clap
1. 2. 3, X (clap) windy, hot, rainy, clap
1, 2, 1, 2 windy, hot, windy, hot
1. 2. 3, X (clap) windy, hot, rainy, clap

4. Then put together put some language around the vocabulary, some chunks that would occur naturally when talking about this topic, eg., to create authentic speech. For example:

Is it really summer? Where has spring gone?
It’s rainy and windy, and terribly hot.
I wonder why this is, and I’m listening to the birds.
They just keep tweeting and like it a lot.
(I just made this up based on my moment)

5. Finally, read it out to them with the four-beat pattern and ask them to mark the stressed words/syllables – see above. Then get them to stand up, chant it together, dance along and enjoy the rhythm. If you have a tune to play it makes it even more fun. Here’s a collection I found suitable for my classes.

Enjoy the groove! – Erika Osváth

Connect with Erika and other iTDi Associates, Mentors, and Faculty by joining iTDi Community. Sign Up For A Free iTDI Account to create your profile and get immediate access to our social forums and trial lessons from our English For Teachers and Teacher Development Courses.

For Sale: baby shoes, never worn

By Kevin Stein

Every story we read is an act of creation. The words on the page only tell us so much; it is our own hopes, our own fears, and our own memories of summer afternoons that illuminate the spaces which the stories leave dark. It is the nature of stories to be incomplete. And it is this incompleteness that can make stories so difficult for our students to enjoy.

At the end of last year, one of my students came to me with a list of phrases that she was having trouble understanding. They all came from the O. Henry story “A Ramble in Aphasia.” Like most O. Henry short stories, “A Ramble in Aphasia” has a knife twist of an ending. As I helped my student tease out the meaning of the phrases, she suddenly stopped and said, “He never lost his memory!” She grew silent, looked down at the book in front of her, and then looked up at me and said, “He is a real jerk!”

When we give our students a story, we are asking them to not only read, but to create. As they struggle to grasp the words on the page, it’s not surprising that sometimes they might confuse moments of not-understanding-what-is-written with moments of not-knowing-because-something-is-specifically-being-left-out.  When I use short stories in my language classes, it’s my job to help students tell the difference and see those moments of not knowing for what they are, a chance to create meaning by working with the text.

I find that dramatic readings can help students recognize when they are being asked to bring something personal to a particular part of a story.  Dramatic readings aren’t full-fledged plays, but are more kinesthetic than just reading out loud.  In a dramatic reading activity, a story is split up and parceled out, each member of the group given responsibility for a different section of the text.  Sometimes students break the text up by characters and than assign one or more students to play the role of narrator.  Sometimes they simply divvy the text up by paragraphs.  The students remain in their chairs and read the story out loud.  As they practice reading the text three or four times, they begin to fill the words with the hues of emotion, just as they begin to fill the air around them with hand gestures small and large.  They also begin to invest themselves into the parts of the story which had, perhaps only a little earlier, seemed empty of meaning.

The title of this post, “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn,” is often attributed to Earnest Hemingway and has been called the shortest novel in the English language. It’s a fine example of how plot — the points of a story a writer chooses to explicitly reveal to a reader — and story — everything that a reader and a text need to bring together to make meaning — can be very different things. The activity of time-lining a story can help students get more comfortable with the story/plot gap. First have students read a story. Then have them identify all the main events in the story and write them down on a blank time line. That is just the first step of the exercise. The real work comes in helping students include those parts of the story which have been left out. A time line of the plot points only of “baby shoes” would look something like this:

But how would your time-line of the full story look? What events would you chose to make explicit that are only hinted at in those six words. There’s a lot of space in this haiku of a novel. I doubt two people would fill it up in exactly the same way. For our students to enjoy reading a story, they might, at first, need help identifying just where those spaces exist. But once they do know, they can start to share how they fill in those spaces, and doing that is one of the great joys of talking about literature.

I believe that teaching my students how to ask for directions, answer a phone, write a resume, or draft a simple business letter are all important parts of my job. These skills will help my students survive day-to-day when they go to study abroad or find themselves in a situation where they need to use English on a regular basis. So I can understand why some teachers might be hesitant to use stories, especially difficult literary stories, in a language classroom. We only have a limited amount of classroom time and learning how to set a date for a business meeting probably seems more important that discussing why Edgar Allen Poe’s “Tell Tale Heart” is so creepy. But I would argue that this focus on the practical surface can obscure the underlying linguistic needs of our students.

All communicative interactions require us to deal with ambiguity. All texts, whether a business letter or a conversation with a friend, require us, at times, to read between the lines. And working with stories gives our students a chance to do exactly that.  Great stories are filled with moments of silence. They are like the real world, rife with spaces waiting to be filled. When our students work with great stories, they are practicing one of the most important second language skills of all, how to take responsibility for not only understanding, but the act of meaning making when using the receptive skills. And without the awareness and courage build your own meaning in the dark corners of a text, no story, whether it be the simple recounting of a day or the laying out of an intricate five-year business plan, is ever truly complete.

A complete list of free O. Henry texts from Project Gutenburg is available here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/634?sort_order=title

Connect with Kevin and other iTDi Associates, Mentors, and Faculty by joining iTDi Community. Sign Up For A Free iTDI Account to create your profile and get immediate access to our social forums and trial lessons from our English For Teachers and Teacher Development Courses.

Music, Stories and Magic  

by Malu Sciamarelli

“Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents.”

(Ludwig van Beethoven)

A long time ago, my father taught me a powerful kind of magic: watch and listen to all the images and sounds of the world. This magic gave me the ability to make stories come to life and bring them to my classes, share with my students so that they too can come alive, blossom and create their own stories, express their own music and make their own magic their own way.

Why are stories and music so important in the classroom? I believe they are a nurturing way to remind students of all ages and levels that words are powerful, that listening is important and that communication between people is an art.

As a learning tool, music and stories can encourage students to explore their unique expressiveness and can intensify a student’s ability to communicate thoughts and feelings in a coherent and clear manner. They can encourage students to use their imagination. Developing imagination can empower students to consider new and inventive ideas; contribute to self-confidence and personal motivation as students envision themselves competent and able to accomplish their hopes and dreams. These benefits transcend the art experience to support daily life skills.

The use of stories and music in the classroom can also set the scene and create a learning atmosphere to enhance our teaching and learning activities. Besides, they make the process more fun and interesting! They also affect our feelings and energy levels – to create moods that we desire, to make us happy, to energize, to bring back powerful memories, to help us relax, focus, express our creativity – sometimes in the form of a drawing or painting – and to share it with the world around us.

I have been using music and stories with very young, teen and adult students, and I can clearly see an increase in lesson effectiveness and in my students’ joy of learning. I integrate music and stories in my classes in different ways and with different purposes:

• To learn information

Music increases interest and activates the information mentally, physically or emotionally, helping create learning states which enhance understanding. I play music with an association to the topic of a specific lesson, before starting it or sometimes during parts of that lesson or while reading a story and it has helped my students remember information. Playing music during parts of the lesson also helps students stay more alert while reading or working on projects.

Teaching through songs, chants, poems and stories improves memory of content facts and details. My students learn vocabulary and construct personal values, for example, by using music and stories that are presented to them, and many times they are encouraged to write their own music and stories.

• To create a welcoming atmosphere and develop a sense of community and cooperation

Music and stories have a great effect upon students’ attitude and motivation to learn. By creating a positive learning atmosphere they welcome students to participate in the learning experience. I usually play background music, or read a story as my students enter the classroom or as they leave and it totally changes the atmosphere: lagging attention levels are energized or students are soothed and calmed when necessary, depending on the music and story that is used. Music and stories also help to develop a sense of community and cooperation. I use music and stories to create group activities or to develop classroom rituals and it help us experience ways to build lasting and memorable community experiences within my groups.

• To enhance creativity and reflection

I love using background music in my classes and I can see that it stimulates creativity and encourages personal reflection. I once tried an activity with two groups of the same level where at the end of the process, students had to write a story. The group in which I used background music related to the theme of the writing was much more creative and wrote much more than the group in which music was not used. I could also see that with music, I could hold students’ attention for longer periods of time.

Having shared all the reasons I believe music and stories should be used in the classroom and having given some practical uses of them, where can the magic be found in all these processes?

Music and stories are the doorways to inner realms in which we can express ourselves in writing, art and all kinds of projects. The magic happens when students believe they can do it, when they believe in themselves. By believing, they can make anything happen…yes, even by magic!

http://www.redhongyi.com/gerald

If you want to know where my stories come to life, you can read it here: http://www.teachingvillage.org/2013/02/12/where-do-your-stories-come-to-life-by-malu-sciamarelli/

and if you want to read the first of the series “Stories from the Garden”, here’s the link: http://www.teachingvillage.org/2013/05/09/the-little-girl-and-the-magic-words-malu-sciamarelli/

More about the artist Red/Yong Yi can be found here: http://www.redhongyi.com and singer/songwriter Yuna: http://www.yunamusic.com

 

Connect with Malu and other iTDi Associates, Mentors, and Faculty by joining iTDi Community. Sign Up For A Free iTDI Account to create your profile and get immediate access to our social forums and trial lessons from our English For Teachers and Teacher Development Courses.