The other pilgrim – my season finale

At the end of each stay in a retreat centre they ask you to think what you’ll be taking back home with you. Pilgrims is a kind of retreat as well, only you don’t get to think about your own personal/spiritual life as much as you are made to think about  your teaching.  That’s right – made to – as there’s no way escaping it – even if you really tried :) That’s just how Pilgrims works – that’s what Pilgrims is. And even more so, when it’s one’s last visit to Canterbury training centre, as I think it’s for me – time to explore some new grounds.

But, not to get carried away, here’s my final thoughts:

- CHUNKS  – they seem to be the answer I was kind of groping for the whole  last year. A little word, which covers the essence of teaching English at every level. I realized chunks are what English  and fluency in English are about, mainly.

Sometimes obvious things are the hardest ones to notice. And superficial awareness – “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of it” is hardly enough. Knowing does not equal really NOTICING.

- SPOKEN GRAMMAR – a very useful tool of ARC: Authentification/Restricted use/Clarification Hania showed us. Making the students aware of the context, register, patterns in spoken grammar, which do exist and are quite fun to discover in real life :)

- AUTHENTIC MATERIALS / CLIL – obvious fact that truth is always more interesting than the artificial world. And more demanding – that’s for the teachers.

I know, it might not seem all that  impressive nor innovative to you, and yet it’s all about how you understand it, how you combine it, what exactly you do with it and how you do it.  Again, it’s all very simple – just as life is :) What is hard, is finding the right way for you in this Amazon jungle of ours, that’s all :)

The other pilgrim

The other pilgrim – key words for now

www.wordle.net

The other pilgrim

The other pilgrim – Day 4

- Learning doesn’t need to be fun – it needs to be challenging.

- When the teacher stops teachning, the learners can start to think and learn.

As simple as they are, I found the two above Sheelagh Deller’s thoughts inspiring. Thank you, Sheelagh :)

For those interested, Hania Kryszewska took us on a CLIL and blended learning  journey today – the BBC GCSE Bitesize (http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/) website proved to be incredibly helpful – how have I not found it before?

In half an hour – an evening class on teachning dyslectic students – an issue that’s been on my mind for three years now.

I’m happy today – the best day at Pilgrims so far. We’ll see how tomorrow goes.

The other pilgrim

The other pilgrim

GV on pilgrimage – that’s what I think our summer theme this year is – different kinds of pilgrimages – solitary journeys, spiritual experience, seemingly little but nonetheless still major our own inner pilgrimages.

There’s also being a more obvious pilgrim in Canterbury – becoming one of the Pilgrim Family for the two weeks of training. However, now that I’m here for the second time already, I find myself perceiving a similar reality much differently than before – as if I’d become another person – another pilgrim -  in those three years since my last visit  here. Maybe I had ….

Things that moved me the last time – the elements of  humanised creative lesson planning etc. – now seem to reveal their face of well prepared and somewhat disguised, however still – (just?) teaching tricks. Is that all that we – as teachers – can do?  Change the lesson order, mix the exercises, which will still remain the same thing they used to be – the ever-applied  and widely-accepted class organization schemes  of pre-teach/teach/post-teach etc? These frames are slowly beginning to constitute the limits of not even so much teaching possibilities, but much more the learning process itself, and isn’t it what our whole work and effort is or should be about? Learning, not teaching? Is it possible that CLIL and Task Based Teaching are the only solutions EFL has to offer advanced students besides the dull and mind-numbing course-book patterns? I refuse to believe that – I need to and want to find a different path – even if it were to be only mine….

We’ll see what comes out of it…

The other pilgrim

Tricky, from other perspective

So I went to his concert. I wasn’t a great fan, knew only a few songs, but my friend was rather a psycho-fan. That’s how we landed 2 meters away from the scene, occupying the metal barriers, waiting for the concert to begin for 40 minutes. ‘HE BETTER MAKES THAT CONCERT GOOD,’ I was thinking back then.  My biggest dream wasn’t exactly missing other concerts just to see some guy singing one song which I happen to like. ‘HE BETTER PLAYS THAT SONG’, again, I thought.

And, may I quote, ‘the king of trip-hop came’. I never understood the title or ethymology of the genre, but during the concert I found out that  it is possible to hop after a trip.  I must say that the 1,5 hour was, for me and probably for the whole audience,  a psychodelic experience. Like everyone had taken the same drug that put them in a special kind of trance. I guess the drug must have been the music, because after one song I was hypnotized. ‘I really am watching a king’, a short thought slipped through my mind to soon be gone.

Again, may I quote, ‘he can make good use of musicians’. I found that completely true, but I would rather say he can make good use of people. He was a king in the other sense of the world – when he spoke, there was no way of refusing. He left the stage to come into the audience and suddenly dozens of hands were there to catch the littlest touch of his body. He rose a hand – no sound was made. He said ‘Get on the stage’, and (to the bodyguard’s grief) 50 fans showed up on the stage and started an anarchy controlled by their only tricky master.

All in all.  He played the long-awaited by me (and also my psycho-fanish friend) Black Steel in the middle, which kept me excited for the rest of the show (curious fact – actually, I heard this song for the first time in gv). No, Tricky cannot sing. But the concert was good. I only can help but wonder what a person – which he undeniably is in the first place, before being a star – can think, seeing a crowd of thousands of people worshipping you. Because, in the so-called ‘Tent stage’, separated from the outside world, the audience wasn’t doing anything else but worshipping him.