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TEFL Tips #5: Proactively sequence group presentations

New semester; renewed insights; fresh panic. I teach a first-semester module called ‘English for International Management’ and I like to hit the ground running with a punchy first lesson culminating in student groups pitching improvement measures to a sceptical company boss. Bit chaotic but good energy by the end. TEFL Tip to be gleaned from this: lock down the sequencing and timing of group presentations at the earliest opportunity. Why? Because if you don’t, you’ll not only suffer the agonising ‘OK folks, who’s going to go first?’ situation, but every transition will be hampered by reluctance and task avoidance by each group waiting to take their turn. My preferred method is to write 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc on folded pieces of paper and have groups pick one while the task is being foregrounded. Once you’re about to begin, a quick moment to unwrap and reveal the order is enough to set up expectations and acclimatise groups with what is going to happen; you can nail this down even more tightly by writing down precise timings on the board if necessary. The important part: once it is time for groups to start presenting, the order is there. No need for negotiations or energy-sapping nagging on your part. Win.

TEFL Tips #4: The accuracy/fluency dilemma

“You can’t let errors like that go uncorrected!”

“You can’t destroy students’ confidence by constantly interrupting them!”

I’ve got either one of these distressed voices bleating in my head at any given point during any given lesson. It’s a quandary.

One approach worth a look is creating a accuracy/fluency scale somewhere in the room, then positioning an arrow somewhere on that scale according to the task being attempted. A pendulum works, as does an approximation of a car speedo or even a straightforward slider drawn on a whiteboard. 

Quickly, groups will learn to look over at the slider before they attempt a communicative task; actively deciding where to put that arrow will become part of their thinking. Group discussions on how to balance accuracy/fluency for different scenarios are a fascinating gateway for intercultural communication topics. And there’s nothing stopping you explaining your dilemma as a teacher, and putting the power to determine the right balance of fluency and accuracy in the hands of your learners.

Try it.

Understanding levels of abstraction

Happy new year … it’s not too late is it?

I want to take PeriodOne back to it’s didactic roots for a moment and write down a concept which just occurred to me on the way to my class today. I have spent the last two days performing oral exams for my course in English for Academic Purposes and now – rather too late it must be said – I’ve realised what is so often lacking in situations where students are required to explain complex ideas: an awareness and control of levels of abstraction. The more I think about it, the more clear it is to me that this should form the backbone of any course purporting to teach academic writing or discussion. Don’t get me wrong – we have talked about this in my lessons, but it’s never had a name as such, and that means that it’s never really been anchored in students’ minds in the same way that – say – connective phrases or use of the passive voice are.

If it is to be easily and accurately understood, every complex idea must be explained progressively through its different levels of abstraction. Many students are able to name and describe theories; many others can think up enlightening examples of such theories applied. Few can confidently move between one form of explanation and the other. And even fewer can actively organise their thoughts into levels of abstraction and then consciously deploy these in the order and manner which best explicates their point: moving from theory to example, from abstract to concrete, may be the most conventional way of getting an idea across, but it is not the only one.

David Mitchell and male grooming

David Mitchell’s regular video podcasts are often quite funny, even if you frequently finish up wanting to give the man a tequila, or at least a good shake. This week’s agonies focus on the unbearable difficulty of paying females compliments – and appropriately, the podcasts are sponsored by a company manufacturing male grooming products. Obviously I’m in no position to speculate on David Mitchell’s use of hygiene items, but I think it’s safe to say he’s not exactly a gleaming example of perfectly-groomed metrosexuality. And the people – like me – that enjoy his podcasts are probably overwhelmingly similar. Maybe market saturation has forced male grooming companies to search for lucrative new niches among the achingly awkward and self-conscious (the mumblesexuals?), but I fear they may be out of luck on this one.

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.

Afganistan and the nature of responsibility

Germany will have 4,400 troops serving in Afganistan this summer. This is why. Although they were markedly smaller this year, last Easter a reported 7,000 people took place in protests in Berlin against the Bundeswehr’s activities in the country, and the logistical support Germany gives the USA in Iraq. Spiegel, a German news magazine, reports that NGOs have claimed their work is more easily carried out in times of peace. It’s an intriguing argument, but falls slightly flat when one considers that last year aid agencies united to request that the UN provide them protection after three female workers were murdered by the Taleban.

I find it difficult to accept the view that there is NEVER a role for military intervention in the world, although this is a view the is often expressed where I live. Similarly, I think that those people who want troops out of Afghanistan ought to explain how they plan to prevent the Taleban regaining control over the country. And if they don’t have a plausible plan, then they should be prepared to take responsibility for the consequences such a development would entail.

Peace isn’t the default state of the world. In fact, humankind has only managed to achieve it for any length of time in the last 60 years or so. So the idea that if we do nothing, countries like Afganistan will revert automatically to a state of peace is nonsense. Somalia has been a living hell since the US and UN pulled out in the 90’s. The unnecessary loss of human life in DR Congo over the last two decades may well eclipse the worst atrocities of the Shoah. And it’s not getting any better.

Aggressive, unilateral military action is one thing. A unified, long-term strategic operation under the auspices of NATO is something quite different. To criticise what the German armed forces are doing in Afghanistan is to advocate a relativistic world view based on the idea that the Western world bears no responsibility for the well-being of the rest. It’s not right, and more people round these parts ought to speak out and say so.

“You can’t be too careful!” II

Google’s currently showing 14,900 hits for the above phrase (explained below). A minor internet phenomenon. Most of these seem to be on blogs, picked up AFTER PeriodOne’s audacious scoop. No hat tips though. I seriously need to get some more readership going, especially as the British press has been dominated over the Easter weekend by a mega sleaze scandal in which bloggers of various political hues were involved, chiefly this Guy. 10,000 hits a day are not to be sniffed at. But PeriodOne seems to be very much a blog of the old-school (‘old’ being in this case a relative term). Whimsical and gently meandering. Or, to paraphrase the author of Catchgraph: ‘longwinded’. I’m not sure whether there’s room for such low-impact writing on the relentlessly high-impact internet. Ah well. I suppose it won’t surprise readers to learn that my world has today been rocked by the fact that my windowbox lettuces have germinated. I was going to post a video, but the resultant media frenzy would have been simply too much …

It just goes to show you can’t be too careful!

I’m feeling better. And one of the serendipitous side-effects of being bed-bound and in possession of a laptop and wifi is the possibility of stumbling across breaking internet phenomena at source, rather than finding out about them only to be told by, say, your Mum that she is already on Twitter / has an avatar / has been Rickrolled etc. Of course, the downside is that a genuinely fresh trend will in all likelihood fail to blossom to glorious ubiquity, but that’s the risk the avid internet pioneer faces.

David Mitchell, a British comedian and writer of wholly unparalleled genius (I wish he was my friend, but he has inexplicably yet to get in contact), has built a substantial broadcasting career on an uncanny ability to explicate the irritations and frustrations of being alive. He isn’t the first and won’t be the last to entertain in this fashion, but, at the moment, he’s certainly the best.

In a recent column for the Observer, Mitchell discusses the nature of posted comments on the ‘net, a favourite grindstone with which Mitchell fans will be intimately acquainted. Therefore, the gist is fairly obvious: Web 2.0’s capacity to give voice to the opinions of all and sundry, whilst being ‘democratising’, simultaneously offers a far-too-public platform for the deranged, frustrated and enthusiastically impolite. A wonderful, lovingly compiled collection of these kinds of comments (the majority of which, tragically enough, come from my erudite countrymen and women in the UK) can be found at ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com. This brilliant, brilliant blog collects its material exclusively from the BBC’s Have Your Say user comments section, and browsing for longer than a couple of minutes leaves one in that curious position of crying with both laughter and despair at the nature of humankind. Try doing THAT with a tummy bug.

Anyway, aware as I am that this very entry is beginning to take on the unstructured nature of many of the comments I am so roundly criticising, I’ll come to the point. Refusing to give in to the moronic onslaught, yet aware that posting intelligent, considered comments as a counter-balance is inefficient as it by its nature involves a degree of time and thought, Mitchell suggests a different strategy: we should stem the tide of idiocy by posting the most gentle, innocuous and universally applicable phrase wherever the opportunity presents itself (the comments section below is naturally a good place to start). And the phrase he advocates: ‘It just goes to show you can’t be too careful!’.

Several hundred people have posted this sentence at the bottom of the Mitchell’s column, and I was initially alerted to its significance when it kept cropping up on YouTube clips featuring the chap himself. However, this is still all very, very new: the article was only published a couple of days ago, hence my excitement that my debilitated condition had led to find something that is yet to ‘break’. But will it? A swift google of “It just goes to show you can’t be too careful!” suggests that so far only Metafilter has spotted the trend. But lots of people read that, and at least five people read this, so who knows? Maybe this is the start of something big …

Oh, by the way, one last thing (if you write properly, stop reading now). Please, please forgive my unforgivably teacherly tone here – but it is very important to get the sentence right … there’s an apostrophe in the word ‘can’t’ and the letter ‘o’ is required twice in ‘too’. I know that the majority equate a preference for elegant punctuation and correct spelling with a crime against humanity, but in this case it’s pretty important in order to avoid undermining the whole enterprise. You can’t be too careful …