Category: Berlin

TEFL Tips #3: Copy Eno’s Oblique Strategies

For me, lateral thinking has always been a term I half understood. Something to do with solving riddles right? It tended to crop up after the fact: Someone who had already determined a solution would implore you to ‘come on, do some lateral thinking’ until you thought what he or she thought. Hmmm. File with ‘thinking outside the box’ and do some proper work.

But a reappraisal is necessary, and in my case it was triggered by trying to work out how to teach English for Academic Purposes. With EAP more than any other specific purpose language teaching I’ve done, a learner’s capability to grasp the discourse of academic enquiry is utterly dependent on his/her ability to actually think in empirical terms. You just can’t bolt it on afterwards, because if you try to, you get bizarre paragraphs in which students dutifully avoid personal pronouns and deploy passives while being fundamentally unscientific in the way they develop and link ideas. OK, I suppose in an ideal world only students with a solid grasp of academic methodology would be grappling with EAP. Pffffft, as the steam escaping from a stoppered flask above a bunsen burner might say.

But it is in tackling this problem that I have come to enjoy a fascinating rediscovery of scientific method and discourse, always the dark side of the moon for a post-GCSE humanities graduate. Big Google sessions on formulating hypotheses, reasoning inductively and deductively and applying logic have provided great lesson material. And my students seem to be appreciating the knock-on effects of this back-to-basics approach on their other modules.

I should point out here that I teach students of international business. They are not scientists, but they do have to conduct an extended piece of academic research to get their Bachelor’s degree (they’d call it a dissertation in the UK). And clearly the German university system expects them to have somehow acquired the requisite skills to achieve this, despite the fact that these are simply not embedded in a curriculum explicitly geared towards the applied skills of accounting, business law, business maths and statistics.

So there’s a painful shortfall to be dealt with here, and it is cruelly exposed in our EAP lessons.

To come to the point and the title of this post: one Google session led me to lateral thinking and Edward de Bono, and that triggered a memory of an interview I’d read with Brian Eno about some sort of cards he used which displayed abstract messages designed to spur creativity in the various era-defining artists he’s worked with (and Coldplay). The details are all here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies and a quick read will instantly highlight for you the potential of creating your own set of cards for your learners. Just to get the gist, here are mine:

Is that it?
Where are the hidden gems?
Is this the start or the end?
Can you feel it?
Why so blurred?
Heart or head?
Better safe? Or better sorry?
Who’s not being honest?
Where is the love?
Is it a man thing?
What’s the point?
What aren’t we seeing?
Who is (really) in control?
Is this a con?
What would the parents think?
Why so serious?
Where’s the catch?
Where did it all go wrong?
What if it’s a trap?
Bit boring?
Should we just start again?
What’s taking so long?
Is this the time?
Why did we stop believing?
Smoke or fire?
Are there walls?
Who has the key?
Do words matter?
Would you touch it?
A dime or a dollar?
Whose round is it?
Why are the gates locked?

Now, I’m guessing this isn’t for everyone, but maybe it is sparking off ideas with some teachers. I printed off a few sets of cards, put one deck on each table, and just asked students to turn over a card whenever they felt they were getting stuck. At the very least, that moment of disassociation as your brain tries to make the question fit snaps the group out of a discursive dead end. In some cases the cards opened up whole new aspects which hadn’t been considered. And the cards are reusable and pretty flexible for use in stimulating discussions or analysis on a range of topics. They also seem to have a positive differentiating effect built in: More capable students will think farther in order to find meaning in the questions and this offers useful and in my experience relatively unforced modelling of abstract thinking patterns to students who may not be quite there yet. So, if you dig it then go create some cards, or feel free to use and amend mine.

Now, if only I had an oblique strategy for bringing these TEFL tips in at under 800 words …

Rockin’ and Rollin’

I’m one of those awful teachers that play in a band. I make no apologies for this fact, for unlike ALL the other teachers’ bands in the world, my band is extremely brilliant. Check out our Myspace site for undeniable objective proof of this fact (please note: depending on your taste, you made find us incredibly rubbish).

As we all know, the music industry has experienced a few changes of late. As an unsigned indie-rock outfit, we have no allusions as to what the future holds – and it doesn’t involve six album deals with major recording labels, that’s for sure.

What it does involve is getting to the stage where we are selling thousands of records as downloads via itunes and other digital providers, and selling out venues in our local town i.e. Berlin. And doing this alone, without proper management, studios, producers or promotion. Or any money. The cool thing is, this is actually nowadays very possible.

The recordings we have online were produced by us alone, and they sound pretty good. Deals can be made which get well recorded music onto itunes without huge amounts of money changing hands. Email lists, Facebook events and a fair bit of word-of-mouth can usually mobilise 100 – 200 people to get down to the gigs, and if you’re playing a decent venue at the weekend then twice as many will come along anyway to see what’s going on (we had 130 in last night, but that was a Tuesday, so fair play). Forget the sixties, the punk revolution, Madchester – there has never been a better time to be in a band than right now.

Where’s the logic?

Why is this a fact of life on every Mayday in Berlin Kreuzberg? Standing on Mariannenplatz, the noise level suddenly dropped as a solid block of black-clad people advanced down the street, taking up its entire width. Walking behind a banner emblazoned with ‘Kapitalismus zerstören’, the first 400 or so protesters wore hoodies, shades and had their faces covered with black bandanas. To my right, a bystander must have made a provocative comment: one protester peeled off and stood nose-to-nose with the man before being pulled back into the mass by some of the others. As they progressed, an amplified voice boomed out: ‘Lässt euch nicht auseinander treiben!’ (‘Don’t let yourselves be split up!’). No-one was remotely trying to split them up – most bystanders were studiously ignoring the whole lot, or deliberately avoiding eye contact. Several children were crying. After the initial packed mass of black, the rest of the protest march began to look more like I imagine a protest march would look: people weren’t masked, they were smiling and carrying banners and giving out leaflets. A noticeable sense of relief passed through the square.

That was at 19.30. By 20.30 police were being bottled. By midnight, some of those black-clad protesters had actually managed to rip up paving stones as weapons, burnt several cars and tens of bins, thrown Molotov cocktails, been tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed and truncheoned. Over two hundred were arrested, probably many more injured. Both policemen and protesters were seen with what one news channel referred to as ‘gaping head wounds‘. The Kottbusser Tor underground station was closed; substantial portions of the streets in Berlin’s second poorest district were wrecked. Many of the shops and flats around ‘Kotti’ were smashed up – most belong to second and third generation Turkish-Germans so often the target of Neo-Nazi violence. Ironic then, that the forums of Anti-facist organisations that understandably proliferate in Germany were key in the organisation of this ‘protest’. All the banks in the area had boarded up their windows, and Kreuzberg is in any case hardly a gleaming commercial district. With no legitimate targets, protesters smashed, broke and burnt whatever was around. They somehow managed to tear down a traffic light. Reports state that police worked in groups, charging into the mass of rioters to break them apart and arrest individuals. This was apparently not a case of containment: the police obviously reckoned that a passive approach would result in more damage and injury. The protesters branded this ‘provocation’.

The 1st of May is a great day in Kreuzberg – the streets are lined with stages, DJs and bands play all day, cocktails (not the molotov kind) are available for 3 euros, there is much dancing, families bring their kids. The police have an extremely low-visibility approach – until the evening, the only ones I saw were four genial and rather elderly coppers who were designated the ‘Anti-Conflict Unit’. Of course, the 6000 police in operation were around – they were sat in vans in the side streets a distance away from the festivities. In Britain, they would have been watching events on CCTV. However, Germany has nowhere near as many cameras in public spaces: essentially none, which according to common consensus is how people want it. Groups of black-bandanas moved unmonitored though the crowd carrying the distinctive red/white/black flag of either anti-fascist/anti-capitlist/radical left wing groups. The demo was official and registered, beginning at 18.00 at Kotti. But anyone who may have desired to walk at the front, but didn’t have the requisite gear, didn’t have a chance. As I observed round the corner at Mariannenplatz – this wasn’t a demo. It was a military operation designed to intimidate: a black bloc.

Some context is required here. Talk to someone of 30 up in the UK about ‘radical leftwingers’ and they will probably have in mind figures such as Arthur Scargill or Tony Benn, chief movers behind the ‘loony-left’ policies which drove Britain round the bend to the extent that even Margaret Thatcher was a better option. All of which seems extremely quaint and endearing when one considers what ‘radical left’ means in Germany right now. Often described using the term ‘Autonomen’ (i.e. followers of the Autonomism political philosophy), theirs is a brand of radicalism warped into a bizarre combination of ad-hoc anti-everything sermonising on one day and all-out gang warfare with Neo-Nazis – or more likely the police protecting them – the next. Germany history being what is is, anything remotely associated with enforced discipline or the perceived infringement of free speech triggers an entirely understandable repulsion. Hence the police defending Neo-Nazis’ right to demonstrate, and the ensuing conflict with the Autonomen, who hate the skinheads (which you can pretty much understand), but hate the police more for protecting them (which you can’t: apparently the left-wingers and anarchists want a society without rules, apart from the rule that you can’t disagree with them about anything). This then leads to German police adopting increasingly military protective gear and things just get worse. There are of course various justifications for violence in the name of political protest: propagande par le fait, and the more extreme reading of the direct action approach. But come on people: you live in a country so intent on letting people express their opinion that they protect Nazi marches, and you think you need to burn cars to make your point? Martin Lurther King and Mahatma Ghandi advocated direct action, neither had this in mind.

Whatever they believe, the Autonomen have left Kreuzberg in tatters. And watching the shopkeepers sweeping the glass of their broken windows away, I find it very, very hard to believe that the Autonomen want anything but the excitement that danger and wanton destruction bring. I hope they’re happy.