Music in the ELT classroom: harmony or discord?

At the end of a presentation I offered someone commented on the fact I managed to include music in just about all my sessions. I was happy because I think (I think) it was a compliment – until I realised, a few seconds later, that for some people always being subjected to music might be as irritating to them as it was pleasing to my interlocutor! Even now (if you are reading this) you may be groaning: not music again. But/and the thing is I DO try and get music into almost everything because, well I like music in everything! (I even managed to persuade Philip Prowse to let me contribute 3 music-themed readers to his Cambridge Readers series).

I was reminded of all this today when they played the Gil Shaham recording of the violin concerto by Korngold on the radio. And (as always when I hear it) I was taken back to an experience I had of genuine spiritual ecstasy (or so it seemed at the time). I was walking from the terminal building at Bonaire aiport, back over the hot tarmac to where the clapped out (but refuelled) KLM DC10 was waiting to take us on to Lima. Playing on my mini-disc player (remember them?) and invading the headphones, was the Gil Shahan recording I heard again this morning. It was a completely incongruous moment, but there was that feeling of sublime divinity (you know what I mean, though it may not be music that does it for you) which – even though it was some years ago – I have never forgotten.

(The music? Well Erich Korngold was a Viennese wunderkind who ended up writing amazing film scores for great films of the thirties and forties like The Sea Hawk – you can see the original trailer of the film – with Korngold’s music – here). His violin concerto uses extracts from these Hollywood scores to fashion a dreamy (soupy?) score and here is Hilary Hahn performing the 1st movement (the music that got to me on that day).

All of this leads me to wonder about he following questions:

1 Do you love, like, feel indifferent to or hate this music?

2 Do you love, like, feel indifferent to or hate music in general? Do you/can you work to it or do you need silence?

3 When/if you teach do you play music in the classroom? Why? Why not?

4 What do you think of this scenario: a teacher in an English lesson organises students into groups and then puts on some background music while they work. When he or she judges the activity is over, the music is switched off, whatever is playing?

5 What is your best music-based activity ever?

Small questions. Big answers?

How digital are you? And why?!

I found myself in Bulgaria last week  (and very beautiful it was too). I was giving a new talk (as requested) about the impact of the digital world in language teaching.  I started by showing the following photo (taken in 2007 and used in a recent book of mine) and asking the audience to reflect on what technology  they could see. Hell,  you can imagine all those teacher training sessions 2000 years ago on ‘the impact of chalk in language teaching’.

The first time I did the presentation I then showed the following video clip about the Plan Ceibal (the one-laptop-per-child project in Uruguay). It takes a full 5 minutes, but it’s well worth watching.

And various questions are posed by these two ‘extremes’ – and suddenly became immediately relevant in the context of ITC access in Bulgaria. And that’s what this blog is all about. Here goes:

1 If you can ‘teach with a stick in the desert’ why do you need fancy technology?

2 If you were able to get the money to equip a whole country with free broadband and one-laptop-per-child, would you do it? And if so what would you do with it? How suspicious are you when (as in a country – not Uruguay – recently) governments hand out tablets or IWBs as a mark of progress?

3 How relevant is discussion of the digital age when, as in Bulgaria, very very few schools have access to the kind of technology. Would I have been better off talking about desert & stick techniques?

4 And just because kids are completely familiar with (and use) digital technology, does that mean we need to (or that they want us to)?

5 And (a question I posed at the IATEFL conference in Glasgow) does being a good teacher automatically include (in 2012) being IT-competent?

(for the record, in the talk last week I referenced Vicky Saumell’s digital storytelling blog, talked about Bruno Andrade’s use of Skype (and talked about how @TEFLpet uses it too), pinched a lovely idea from @feedtheteacher and then referred teachers to Eduardo Santos’ lovely use of QR codes, took them through one of Jamie Keddie’s Youtube ideas, showed mini video interviews with various teachers (incl @little_miss-glo), told them about the work of Languagelab in Second Life, showed theme videos from Essential Teacher Knowledge  etc etc etc)

Not another post-IATEFL blog! Well yes, as it happens……

There has been some energetic blogging going on since the 46th IATEFL conference drew to an end last Friday. For sheer stamina no one can match Chia Suan Chong‘s long diary entries (she’s only got to day 2 and she’s already posted 6 times!), but she’s not the only one. There are lots more….addd them in the comments if you want or let me know and I’ll include more here.

Those are Scott Thornbury’s cherries, by the way, courtesy of ELT pics. I used them in my Pecha Kucha introduction because they look luscious.

Anyway, I’m not going to go on and on about the wonderful things I heard, or the events I went to or anything like that. I just thought I would pass on 4 things I think I learnt/worried about in Glasgow:

1 Over-officious health and safety people stopped many of us attending talks in the ways we normally do (standing at the back, sitting on the floor etc). It was irritating and inconsistent (some of the conference centre officials let us through). It ruined one whole day for me. On the other hand health and safety rules are there for people’s safety. Were they right to be so doctrinaire?

2 I will never be critical of Twitter again. People like @jemjemgardner, @chiasuan, @sandymillin, @jimscriv immeasurably improved my conference experience by tweeting intelligently and coherently from talks I couldn’t  or didn’t go to. I got to be plugged into a whole conference thread (questioning assumptions) that I would otherwise have missed. It was (is) a great way to be a fully involved conference attender. You can be in one talk and simultaneously follow what’s happening in others. Great. Isn’t it?

3 Presenting with no technology at all (except a clip-on mike) is incredibly liberating. It feels comfortable, and strangely ‘honest’. I’m not quite sure what I mean by that (and I love my Keynote and power points etc etc), but it is ‘teacherly’. Would you do it?

4 What we say isn’t necessarily what people hear. For example, at the end of my talk I was attacked big time by two men who assured me that I had been stereotyping Germans and accusing them of being humourless etc. They were very cross. Indeed. Hmm. I did say something about a mismatch in learning culture between touchy-feely ice-breaking Brits and Swiss German students who wanted to get on with lessons rather than have warmers thrown at them at every lesson beginning. But that was more about British teacher insensitiveness than anything else – and not a single German was involved in my comment. In fact the only German I mentioned….hell, what’s the point? I absolutely know I said nothing stereotypical about any nationality; only questioned some assumptions. So I guess those guys heard something from their own heads triggered, I suppose, by something I said. I wonder…..is that the same with students? How do we know they hear what we say and not something else entirely? Is it anything we can control?

Any thoughts?

Being naked – is presentation technology really necessary?

The collapse of not one, but TWO computers 3 days ago was a bit of a shock, as you can imagine, but it got me thinking. Nothing concentrates the professional (well, and social) life quite like it. As i write, sitting on a Turkish Airlines flight, the big question in my mind is will the guy I left my main computer with over the weekend have been able to restore my corrupted hard disk – or at least get all the data from it? Actually, that’s not the big question really. The big question is whether I would be able to continue doing presentations without my computer – or at least without an iPad – the device that allowed me to present at Izmir Özel Türk Koleji yesterday. Perhaps it would be better not to use any technology at all

[Picture & links to follow, but see, I am posting on the iPad and I'm not so good at it with this device!]

Wow, that thought scares me! I have got used to accompanying words with pretty pictures, slide transitions, video clips, music – all that kind of stuff. ‘Nice transition’ somebody said to me recently (which was kind of exciting!) because I had used Keynote. But others have said the opposite – namely that too much visual ‘noise’ detracts from what you are trying to say, and can be very irritating. I have quite pronounced views about using Powerpoint and Keynote, which I have blogged about before. They can be used awesomely well, or appallingly badly!

As an aside: recently I saw an experienced presenter having to call for technical help because they didn’t know how to play a movie from their laptop. This was in front of 500 people, most of whom were younger and more tech savvy than this man or woman. I thought it looked a little bit silly: being technically competent is surely part of the presenter’s art (I mean competent at the level you have decided to operate at). But a presenter colleague who was there with us disagreed. He thought the technician-needing person on the stage had made a virtue of his or her technical inability and that the audience was largely sympathetic.

 

But I digress. The point is this: how would you feel if you suddenly had to present ‘naked’ (I mean, of course, with no technical backup)? Could you do a ‘Crystal’? – that is David Crystal standing there and wowing his audience with nothing more technological than a microphone? Or (from the other side) do you LIKE watching presentations which eschew technology, that are, in the jargon of the times, ‘unplugged’? I only ask because it has suddenly become clear to me (partly because of my computer problems, and partly because the hectic travel schedule I am locked into provides almost no time for the complex business of putting together an AV show) that I am going to have to present unplugged (how ironic!) at the most important conference of the year. And it scares the **** out of me!

 

Would you be scared (like me)? Or would you, if you happened to find yourself in my (or anyone else’s) presentation with no technical backup, be relieved and happy to see someone speak – just speak?

“Inevitable contact”? – and matters of conscience

Protect your history! A sign in Jaffa

I had always thought that if I got an invitation to go to Israel to work with teachers and students there I would refuse. Israel, the big bully of the Middle East, building, by force, settlements on Palestinian land they are not entitled to; carving a great big wall through territory they have no right to; using maximum force in densely populated areas where civilians are, of course, slaughtered in their hundreds; boarding peace convoys in international waters so ineptly that people died.

But I know, too, that Israel is the target for rocket attacks, and that not all the Gaza flotilla personnel were peace-loving saints; I know that Israelis – innocent Israelis – have been killed by rockets, in restaurants and in buses. That all Israelis have a well-founded fear for their safety.

But still. They way the Israeli military behaves, with its daily humiliations of Palestinians and murderous retaliations for any wrong done to it strike most people I know as unacceptable in every way.

As a boy I thrilled to Leon Uris’ great saga of Zionism, Exodus, which told of the founding of modern state of Israel. Only later with populist books such as O Jerusalem! by Larry Collins and Dominc Lapierre did I begin to understand at what price this state had been born and about the ineptitude and culpability of the British for the great mess of the Middle East. It takes time to see things clearly.

Two of the most moving and meaningful books/plays I encountered in the 1990s were Inherit the Truth by Anita Laski Walfisch (about the cellist’s amazing survival, with her sister, in the horrors of Auschwitz – where she played in the camp orchestra – and Belsen) and My Name is Rachel Corrie (a play based on the writings of the 23-year-old American who was murdered by an Israeli bulldozer driver as she tried to stop a Palestinian family’s home from being obliterated in yet another rapacious piece of land-grabbing). It’s complicated, see. And anyway, perhaps, “History should never be regarded as a zero sum game…the past is mostly far more nuanced than a simple battle between good and evil” (Harmer 2011:255).

At the time of the Gaza Peace Flotilla fiasco conversation erupted on Twitter and in Mark Andrews’ blog provoked by the visit of IATEFL patron David Crystal to speak at the ETAI conference. Some people thought that, given his ‘official’ status in our organisation it was not right for him to speak at an Israeli teachers’ conference. David Crystal himself argued passionately (in conversation), that ‘if I refused to go to places where I disapproved of that country’s governments I would never go anywhere’, and that it is always better to engage in conversation than not to. I found him (as so often) persuasive.

In the end, my invitation to Israel came not because I am a teacher trainer/writer, but because I perform shows with my colleague Steve Bingham, and the British Council in Israel wanted us to perform our show about Charles Dickens there. And though my inclination was to say no (see above), I found that such a position would be (a) too self indulgent, (b) hypocritical for someone who, like David Crystal, has been to countries where I really really disapprove of what the government does there, and (c) a wasted opportunity to understand more – you really DO need to ‘see for yourself’ sometimes. Governments are not the same as people. Teachers and students all over the world are – teachers and students. Two other factors combined to help me make the decision to say yes: I really like doing shows – that’s the selfish one – but/and The British Council has offices in Ramallah too, and maybe, if we did the Israel gig we would get invited there. And so off we went.

And did the shows. They seemed to go really well, especially at the Arab Academic College in Haifa, where (do we flatter ourselves too much here?) two groups of Arab Israeli schoolkids, who joined the teachers and students in the audience,  were really bowled over by hearing original Dickens accompanied by Steve Bingham’s wonderful musical artistry. It might have made a difference.

You forget, sometimes, that Israel is 75% Jewish, but that other ethnicities and religions inhabit the compressed region within its (sic) borders. As one taxi driver told us, ‘I am Israeli, I am an Arab, This is my country. The Jews came and took it, but they are nice people I like them’. Another Arab Israeli teacher was less accommodating, saying that by the time they (the Israeli government) had finished annexing all of Jerusalem there would be no chance of a final solution (she used the term unironically).

Guess what! I met some incredibly intelligent, kind, socially conscious and engaging people in Israel. Mostly (but not exclusively) teachers, they were  just like other incredibly intelligent, kind, socially conscious and engaging educators I spend my professional life with. Like many other visitors to Tel Aviv, I thought what a great place it would be to live – if you could forget at what price it had been made, and what lengths the country goes to (has to go to?) keep it happy. I met all shades of opinion in Israel: the lunatic rightwing American who told me that the God of Abraham and Isaac was out to get me after I refused to sign a petition to say that Jerusalem should be 100% and only Jewish; the settlement defenders; people steeped in the ‘either them or us’ mentality; but people too, many people, who deplored the wrongs done to Palestinians but who, nevertheless approved of the wall, the ‘green line’, because there have been no bombings since and ‘my children can get the bus to school in peace’; people who only escaped being bombed in restaurants by chance; a mother who was appalled that her son was going into the military because he might end up at the checkpoints humiliating Palestinians ‘but at least it will be him…we have taught him to question everything…rather than some other redneck’ (sic); the young teachers in training worrying (like all teachers in training) how to do their very best for the kids with learning difficulties that they were trying to help.

And what I, as an outsider, mostly learned was that Israel is not/will not go away anytime soon. Whether other people like it or not, Israel IS going to continue to exist. That it is full of ‘us’ too and that some of ‘us’ are pretty good people and some of ‘us’ are nasty thugs. Not much of a revelation I suppose. But the craziness of Israeli politics – a system that ensures no government ever has sufficient power to REALLY do something (like make peace) – the debilitating indoctrination that military service offers (the Arab Israeli taxi driver would never go to the army ‘to kill my brother Arabs, but now they are killing each other! Arabs! It is a crazy world.’), and the impossibility of getting anyone in the region to agree about anything…all that does not provoke much optimism. So what can you do if, like me, you have no power or importance?

The great Jewish musician Daniel Barenboim and the late-lamented Arab Edward Said set up the West Eastern Divan Orchestra, an extraordinary collection of musicians from Israel but also the Arab world – Jewish Israelis and Palestinian (and other Arabs). A great political act? No. Here’s Barenboim talking (in Parallels and Perspectives) about the first time the young musicians met:

“One of the Syrian kids told me he had never met an Israeli before and, for him, an Israeli is somebody who represents a negative example of what can happen to his country and what can happen to the Arab world. The same boy found himself sharing a music stand with an Israeli cellist. They were trying to play the same note, to play with the same dynamic, with the same stroke of the bow, with the same sound, with the same expression. They were trying to do something together. It’s as simple as that. They were trying to do something together, something about which they both cared, about which they were both passionate. Well, having achieved that one note, they already can’t look at each other the same way, because they shared a common experience. And this is what was, really, for me, the important thing about the encounter…..the area we are talking about – the Middle East – is very small. Contact is inevitable. It’s not only dollars and political solutions about borders that are going to be the real test of whether a peaceful settlement will work or not. The real test is how productive this contact will be in the long run, I believe that in cultural matters – with literature and, even better, with music, because it doesn’t have to do with explicit ideas – if we foster this kind of contact, it can only help people feel nearer each other, and this is all.”

And here they are playing the Adagietto from Mahler’s 5th symphony, one of the greatest love songs ever written.

Reference:

Harmer, T (2011) Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War. The University of North Carolina Press

How long does preparation take YOU?

Forgive me for repeating myself (a frequent and unattractive trait), but there’s this Dickens thing coming up. Tomorrow.

(By the time you read this it will probably have happened already).

Oh sorry! If you don’t know what I am talking about, it’s a show I am doing/have done with friend and colleague Steve Bingham about the magical storytelling of Charles Dickens. The British Council asked us to do it and we have had great fun putting the words and music together for the show. Oh, and since it’s his 200th (and 1 day) birthday today here’s a last photo of of him!

But the point is – and the point of this post – is that it took a long long long long time to choose and prepare and rehearse and tryout our 65-minute show. Hours of time.

And it’s the same with conference presentations. I was talking to my colleagues at a conference in Barcelona last weekend, and there seems to be some variability about this. Some presenters (like me) spend hours and days and weeks building huge documents of notes, suggestions, pictures etc until they gradually coalesce into something that has a narrative – and the possibility of engaging a group of listening teachers. Others seem to be happy to throw a new idea – or a quick description of what they are doing – at an audience in record time.

And what happens when/if the talk is ready? Well for me it takes about two or three ‘goes’ before I feel really comfortable with what I am talking about – before I know how to pace things well.

At the weekend I saw a brand new talk from Scott Thornbury on the use of gesture, physical movement etc in language learning and teaching. I would happily listen to it/watch it again tomorrow because like all his talks it was engaging, thought-provoking and enjoyable. I’d love to see it again after 3 or 4 more outings too – to see how it has evolved!

Is that the same with planning lessons, I wonder?

Right now I SHOULD be preparing 3 new talks for a trip to Vietnam in two weeks. But I am blocked by the knowledge that there is no time.Help me someone!!!

It’s all Mr Dickens’ fault.

What about you, I wonder? How much preparation do you need to do when you present to teachers (or work with students)?

I’d love to know.

Make your pitch! But how?

Last week I went to a book launch at a bookshop in Cambridge. It was for the debut novel by Penny Hancock, ex-TEFLer, and a writer of readers in the Cambridge English readers series. The novel is Tideline – which I bought and have started reading. It looks great so far; dark, well-written, interesting. Her publishers are certainly confident that she is the next big thing.

(This is, I guess, a companion piece to Ken Wilson’s blog about ELT novelists – though it’s about to go off in a different direction…)

Whilst at the launch party I got talking to a successful literary agent and we started to talk about the number of manuscripts she gets from authors who want to be published; how many she rejects/accepts etc. So how can authors who want to be published, I asked, try and make sure that she (and people like her) will actually LOOK at their material?

It all depended, she said, on the synopsis and the sample chapter, but mostly the former. Getting noticed (and then accepted), she said, depends on your PITCH. It boils down to how you can interest someone in your novel using only a sentence or two sentences,

I thought of people whose talks are not accepted at conferences (there has been a flurry of comments recently about the 2012 IATEFL conference on this topic ). For many conferences, such as IATEFL,  submissions are read anonymously, so the pitch obviously matters.

“Pitch me your novel,”" said the agent (it wasn’t me who had told her that I have written one called The Whistle at Siete Vientos – he said defensively), so I did. “Not interested,” was her immediate and dismissive response so I countered with the following: “choose your favourite novel by Charles Dickens (I’m on a bit of a Dickens ‘thing’ at the moment!) and pitch that to me”. She Chose Great Expectations and made a complete mess of it. Which pleased me!!

So here’s a bit of a challenge. How would you pitch your favourite novel, your own novel, you teaching  material, your  website, your talk, your approach etc in one or two sentences – so that everyone sits up and takes notice?

It’s not easy!