Why Five Weeks?

The short answer: it was arbitrary.

The medium answer:  I was looking for a happy medium between a long-term self-education project I would never stick with and a project so brief that I would have no chance of significantly expanding my knowledge.  Five weeks seemed good.

Squared Stack by pbo31 on Flickr

The long answer:  The short and medium answers are true.  But there’s another dimension that’s harder for me to explain.  Before you get too frustrated with me, know that I do have educational psychology on my list of future 5WCs.

I notoriously have trouble with categories.  Especially categories like “relevant” and “not relevant.”  I’m an interweaving thinker.  With some people, it seems like the more they understand something, the more they’re able to divide it up into perfectly cubic little boxes arranged in a line.  For me, the more I understand something, the more I say “oh wow, that’s similar to this and this, and this indirectly but significantly affects that, and category A is both a parent category and a subcategory of B depending how you look at it,” and I definitely don’t end up with a neat row of cubes.  Knowledge is like a web of many long threads in my mind, and it feels unnatural to divide it into sections; doing so feels like cutting a square out of the middle of a knit sweater.

Seriously, it’s a thing for me.  Look how many categories I list my five-week project posts in on this blog.  Even after I designated a category specifically for five-week projects.

Lace Knitting by Amanda Woodward on Flickr

What I’m saying is that I have no trouble arguing that idea A is related to idea N even though they’re 13 steps apart.  This was nice back when I was on the debate team, but it’s not particularly helpful when it comes to defining a manageable self-education project.  I thought that a time limit would help me determine that while Topic X is indeed relevant to Topic A, it is not relevant enough right now.

It seems to be working for me so far.  My category issues are quieted by the possibility of future five-week courses.  Excluding a line of inquiry doesn’t feel like taking scissors to lace when I know the exclusion is temporary.  So the number five was indeed arbitrary, but the time limitation was quite intentional.

Starting My Source List

Katie left a comment asking:

Also, how did you go about generating the list of reading materials for the course?

It’s been an ongoing process.

Books by Svenwerk on Flickr

I started by searching my local library’s catalog for “teaching adults.”  I reserved several books that looked interesting and relevant and put them on the syllabus.  This way, even if they’re not The Books on the subject, I had somewhere to start after only 10 minutes of pursuit.

Actually, speaking of easily accessible, the library had several electronic resources that I emailed to myself and forgot about till I wrote that last paragraph.  There, I just popped them onto the syllabus.  Writing really does help me think.

From there, I looked at the resources referenced in the books, particularly in Renner’s The Art of Teaching Adults.  Renner wrote a great first chapter outlining what cannon of work informed his book and what it had to say – it’s basically a readable and engaging annotated bibliography.

One of my volunteers also just happened to mention an article he’d been reading about teaching adults basic reading skills, and when he offered to give me a copy I gladly accepted and added it to the syllabus.

Craning For A Book by *Your Guide on Flickr

I also realized that my learning center has a bunch of books, some of them teacher references, so I grabbed one I’ve been curious about (thoughts on “English from A to Z” here) and can definitely grab more.  This brought to mind how I’d love to LibraryThing my center’s books so that my volunteers, students, coworkers and I could know exactly what’s there and sort through it all in meaningful ways.  Right now I’m pretty much the only one who knows what we have, and that’s a waste of a pretty handy collection!

It’s kind of fascinating how even one or two sources lead to a huge number of sources.  Identifying them was definitely not the hard part.  All I had to do was start!

Other material-finding resources I considered but haven’t really tapped yet:

• syllabi from Adult Education courses at leading colleges and universities
• recommendations from experienced teachers (I haven’t really talked to any yet)
• Wikipedia, used specifically for a list of other (reputable) resources

The beauty of the 5-week project is that another can start quite soon.  The sources I don’t get to can always go to a future project.

English A-Z: Tenses and Sentence Structure

I’m diving right in before I get distracted.

Tenses

I studied Russian in college, and I remember being frustrated by their obsession with “complete” vs. “not complete” verbs.  It’s called “aspect” if you’d like to read about it.  I found it to be unreasonably picky.

When I thought this, I did not understand that English is also obsessed with the complete / incomplete divide.  We just do it with tenses.  And I didn’t notice because I never learned about English grammar.  Present-perfect, past-perfect, and future-perfect exist only to specify that an action was completed.  It seems to me a small point to create an entire tense around it.  The perfect continuous tenses also seem needlessly specific.  They’re about when the completion of an ongoing action happens?  Come on.  The Russian language is vindicated in my eyes.

Also, all of the present tenses are weird.  Simple present (i.e. I eat) doesn’t actually describe the present moment – present continuous does (i.e. I am eating).  Simple present just describes habits you have in general, including now.  And present perfect (i.e. I have eaten) has a lot of nerve calling itself “present” – it’s referring to a past action!  But as of the present time, it’s completed.  Ah, yes, completion rears its bizarrely important head.

Maybe I would have been a more successful student of Russian if I’d been more than dimly aware of the mechanics of my own language.

This is a lot of grammar. Here's a Lolcat.

Sentence Structure

I take back what I just said.  I would not understand subjects, predicates, direct objects, indirect objects, etc. without associating them with Russian words and cases.  These concepts are extremely abstract to me in English – it’s like trying to build on air.  I have to work through her examples in Russian for them to make sense.

I also take back what I said about not being taught any English grammar.  I did in fact learn about some of it explicitly, particularly punctuation.  As a result, I have a thing about semi-colons: wrong ones leap off the page at me.  I’m not claiming to use them perfectly every time.  But I judge.  And since I also brushed up on sentence structure, I can point out that her example is wrong because the clause before the semicolon lacks a subject:

After cleaning the house; we went shopping and bought some clothes, shoes and groceries.

A quick Google search sent me to a grammar website from Perdue University that pretty clearly states that a semicolon joins two independent clauses, and that an independent clause has a subject and a verb.  Akinyi’s explanation was “This is used to divide or separate a long independent sentence.”  Not quite.  I’m not sure where her editor was on that one.

Overall Impressions

• My knowledge of sentence structure and tenses was pretty detailed in some areas, and extremely lacking in others.  It felt good to start bridging that gap.
• Wow, do I need to examine every book my students use to make sure there are no errors?
• Why are errors in a book so very astounding to me?
• Teachers really need to know their stuff.  It takes preparation to find mistakes before you’re up in front of the class and confidence to refute the book once you’re up there.

Sizing Up ‘English from A-Z’

"English from A-Z" by C. Akinyi, from Amazon

The first thing about this book: it looks for all the world like a reference book, and I assumed that it was a reference book for teaching English.

Turns out I would have named it “Learning English from A to Z” because it’s for students.  It has a reference-y feel to it and also has many exercises and an audio CD.

I know, I know, don’t judge a book by its cover.  Let’s move on.

I decided to skim through the book even though it’s not like the other books I’m looking at.  I’m trying to decide what the intended usage niche for this book is.  There’s not enough explanation through words or through pictures for it to be a primary text.  There are nice dialogues, lists of examples (i.e. list of synonyms, antonyms, etc.) that would make great references, and exercises for practice.  I guess it’s extra, self-directed learning for people who already have some English.  My immediate questions:

1. do students use this?
2. do schools use this?
3. how can my learning center and my students use this?
4. I should see if the library carries this, and suggest it if they don’t.

The idioms and slang section is particularly interesting to me.  The workbooks we use at my learning center avoid slang like “funky,” “nasty,” “screw up,” “homey,” and “crap.”  They’re usually skipped because they can get uncomfortable, but I think students do need to learn them at some point.  This book also lists “to pass wind” as an idiom, which I don’t think I’ve seen before.  Makes me think we should just have an entire unit on bodily functions euphemisms.  We Americans love our euphemisms.

Glancing through the grammar pages, which include Sentence Structure and Tenses, I think I should read them this evening.  They’re simple, so it’ll be a quick read to make sure I know the most basic metalanguage cold.  I mean, I know it, but whenever it comes up in class a part of me is nervous that I’m getting something subtly wrong.

In the Study Tips section, the phrase “miss pelt words” appears.  I hope on a deep level that this was intentional.

I wouldn’t have put this book on my syllabus if I’d realized that it was geared toward students and not toward teachers.  Still, I’m glad I paged through it.  Now I know what kind of a resource it is for students, and I can at least get some basic English grammar review out of it for myself for the purpose of being a better teacher.

(I’m also thinking that I might like to dig more carefully through my learning center’s books.  Maybe learning about our book collection could be another 5-week course.  I could assess more of our books the way I assessed this one, plus maybe add a summary section listing strengths, weaknesses, pictures, niche, audience, and so on.  I might have to make a page of additional 5-week courses that come to mind – my mental list is already quite long.)

The Learning. It’s Mine.

It's Mine by Gabbcan on Flickr

One of the reasons my 5-week course project appeals to me is because I cannot get away with being passive.  I own the entire process.  If I’m not deeply involved, it’s not going to happen at all.  It’s mine.

A couple of days after the start of my pilot project, I was reading around The Bamboo Project blog by Michele Martin.  In one post, she said:

I think that one of the reasons people are so passive about learning is because everything in society conspires to make us believe that learning is someone else’s responsibility.

It really has felt like my education was everyone’s responsibility but my own.  Don’t get me wrong – I think my education has been a good one, and I’m sure the professional guidance was even more effective than I realize.  But I had to put my own curiosity on hold to make room for all that education.  It’s taken me several homework-free years to internalize the fact that when there’s something I want to learn about, I can just go learn about it.

Speaking of which, there’s some reading I’d like to do!

On Doing Things “Well”

An ironic title for a 1AM post – I doubt this will be an exemplary piece of writing.

Yesterday I wrote about doing “good” things. The other side of my blog is doing good things “well.”

I’ll just say it: I’m a pretty smart person, pretty quick to learn and pretty quick to improvise. In my opinion, I do things pretty well.

But I think I could do better.

Moreover, I think I could make a ton of headway with just a bit of effort, so why not do it?  Seems like it’d be a great time investment.

The Project

5 by svenwerk on Flickr

I’ve decided take five weeks to focus on a given topic: reading, writing, and talking about it with the basic purpose of knowing more about it than when I started. Week 1 will be devoted to making a syllabus for the remaining four weeks.

The idea is that I would do several of these “courses.”  Five weeks will allow me to do some pretty decent reading but won’t leave me married to a topic I have only cursory interest in.

Leaving the Shoulds At the Door

I have no intention of pursuing courses I “should” pursue; this is for topics I’m actually interested in.  I’m also not interested in hearing (even from myself) that I “should” pursue a longer course.  I do better with short-term projects.  Why set myself up for failure, especially to start out?

I also have no intention of doing more than one course if the first one drives me nuts.  The point is to give myself some structure to foster learning and growing, not to make it an unbearable chore.  If this format doesn’t work for me, I’ll drop this project and think of something else.

But maybe it’ll resonate for someone reading about it?

The Pilot

My pilot 5-week course is based on my goal to become a better teacher. Not ‘The 5-Week Miracle.’  Just better.   Let’s define “better” as more effective and more aware of what other good teachers do than I am now.

The start of my syllabus is here.  Feel free to take a look at it.   I’m extremely open to suggestions, but please don’t be offended if I have to put them on hold for a different 5-week unit.

What would your 5-week courses be about?

On Doing “Good” Things

Girl in Feathered Hat by George Eastman House on Flickr

I would like to state for the record that doing what I think is right is not about my soapbox or my ego or some kind of beautiful self-sacrifice.  It is about my own self-interest.

Allow me to explain:

1. I believe that my own security is jeopardized when others are in a state of desperation.
2. I want to be part of a world wider than my own socioeconomic status.
3. I would rather be defined as a person than as a worker; better to be a citizen than a consumer.
4. Life is too short to spend your days working against what you really want.

So I can’t stand it when people who hear I work for a nonprofit call me noble.  I’m in it for myself too.

The Zone (and strategy) Paid Off

I have to say, I think today’s presentation went well.  I didn’t see anyone fall asleep even in the dim lighting, I got a few questions at the end, a couple offers for help, and people laughed.

"Important Statistic"

I’m particularly proud of one of my images, a graph.  It was my one and only statistic.  I didn’t mention it yesterday because I wasn’t positive it would go over well.  My audience was appreciative, for which I was grateful.  Yay.  (Also, in case you were wondering, it is a real graph of the first 8 numbers in the Fibonacci sequence.)

The Jeopardy! rip-off game was really fun too.  It always surprises me how much fun that game can be.  We decided to have the teams wave a scarf in the air to buzz in with answers, and it actually worked really well.   Notable team names were “Bad Reflexes” and “The Table.”  The most popular category was “Two Truths and a Lie: Staff Edition,” in which teams had to pick the one lie out of three statements about me and my officemate.  The ESL and GED categories were fine too though.

Based on comments I got after the presentation, my chosen strategy of using pictures, a conversational approach, and an interactive (and not too difficult) quiz game was well-received.  I seem to have hit upon a lot of information that people were actually interested in by using this model.  I also had a “wish list” slide to talk about our big dreams, and a couple of coworkers came up to me to say we should schedule a time to talk about how their programs could fulfill some of my site’s wishes.  Sweet!

So I guess I’d call it a success.  Now for a nap.

The Zone

I’ve officially stayed up later than I should have preparing to present about my site at tomorrow’s staff meeting. I could have been done a couple hours ago, but I can’t seem to stop. And now here I am jotting down a blog entry! Poor judgment, but enjoyable.  Can’t waste The Zone.

I’m loving Google Docs because I can collaborate with the other presenter. We would have stayed late to work on it together, but our building Closes (yes, that was a Capital C) at 9:00PM. Google Docs is the next-best thing.

I wish I could share the presentation, but I’m not even half-confident enough about my photo release situation to set it free on the Internet. Something to think about for the future.

I really enjoy giving presentations like this one, and I think it has potential to be fun for my audience as well (as opposed to Evil). (Thanks to Beth Kanter for that link.)

My strategy for respecting my audience was to use no statistics, a huge number of pictures, and basically to give a “day in the life” talk instead of a preview of our annual report submission.  Also, it should be relatively short, and we also have a Jeopardy! game planned with both pithy and frivilous categories to get people involved, or at least competing.  Will report on any resounding successes for sure.

On Teaching Advanced

I’ve taken over the Tuesday evening Advanced ESL class, and I have to say, I’m really enjoying teaching on a regular, planned basis (as opposed to frequently being an emergency sub).

Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman (from Amazon.com)

We’re taking three weeks of classes to read Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman. It’s a story about the different people in a community garden in wrong-side-of-the-tracks Cleveland, and so far it’s well-written and compelling. It comes with audio (very well-acted, each character with a different accent) so we’ve been doing a lot of much-needed listening. One of our volunteers (who also happens to be an experienced and certified ESL teacher) wrote a pronunciation curriculum to go with the book, so all in all classes are feeling structured, interesting, and useful.

Notes to self: I need to write on the board more. And I need to be more intentional about getting everyone in the class to talk – the students who need conversation practice the most are the least likely to participate.

Hurray for good books, great curriculum, and fun lessons!