Talkin' about Teaching

Awesome

In an attempt to mock the cover letter workshop I sat through at SIT, and the process I went through to get my current internship, I recently composed an email application, in cover letter style, to a friend who goes by the monkier the Director of Awesomeness.

My awesome application was as follows:

Dear Director of Awesomeness,

My name is Heyward Gignilliat. I am a candidate for a Master of Arts in Teaching at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, VT.

I recently embarked on an eight-week internship to Veracruz, Mexico, and I would be honored if you bestowed upon me the title of Ambassador of Awesomeness.

I feel I distinguish myself from other applicants because I am ever mindful of the Big Here and the Long Now. If granted this honorary title, I vow to teach, learn, speak, study, listen, laugh, eat, drink, joke, play, surf, spin, skip, jingle, dance, groove, twist, squeeze, drop, flush, climb, win, lose, conquer, smoke, rip, tear, thrash, roar, thrust, finish, slash, and even burn in the name of Awesomeness.

Please consider this application, and I am looking forward to hearing from you in the near future.

After a couple days of deliberation, my friend wrote me back with the following response:

Dear Candidate,

After extensive review of your application the selection committee (comprised only of the Director of Awesomeness) would like to honor you by conferring upon you the title of Ambassador of Awesomeness.

It is with great pleasure that this position is filled by such an ambitious candidate in its first conferral as of date. It fills the director with much pleasure that awesomeness will be brought to the people of Veracruz.

Everyone, especially beautiful women, need awesomeness and I trust that you will spread as much of it as possible to Veracruz and the surrounding region. Just be sure to do all that you have said you will... especially groove, squeeze, burn and thrust.

I guess I am now a diplomat... of awesome sorts.

Veracruz Vlog

Sushii w/ Salsa?

I knew Veracruz had a small Japanese restaurant around somewhere, but I’d nearly walked all the way to the beach before I stumbled upon the squat building with Kanji painted around all the windows. As I stepped into the nearly empty restaurant, a short and weathered old Mexican man stood up to greet me, “Buenas tardes.”

I thought for a moment and then muttered in Spanish, “Hablo Ingles?” In a split second, it occurred to me that I’d conjugated the verb wrong. The old man just waved me off and motioned for me to sit down.

Not exactly sure what to do or say next, I reached down to the nearest table and picked up a pair of chopsticks. The old Mexican man looked puzzled and said, “Hashi da.”

With renewed confidence and a gleam in my eye, I asked, “Nihongo hanasemasuka?”

“Un,” grunted the Mexican.

“Eto ne… Boku wa Eigo no sensei desu. Kyo no jyugyo de hashi tsukaitai. Moratemoii desuka?”

“Ii desu yo,” he said delightedly and gestured for me to take the chopsticks in my hand.

“Yon seto de ii desuka?”

“Ii yo,” the Mexican’s son said coming out of the back kitchen with a handful of chopsticks for me.

“Arigatogozaimashita,” I said with a bow as I backed out the door. “Shitsuraishimashita.”

As soon as I was back out on the street, I thought it was strange to meet a Mexican family that could speak Japanese.

Then, I began wondering what they thought. Some white boy pops in off the street, can’t speak a lick of Spanish, but in Japanese says he’s an English teacher and wants to use four sets of chopsticks in his class, and he pops back out.

Yeah, that might be a little odd. I smiled and hurried towards the bank. Now I needed to ask for $20 worth of coins.

Xalapa: Museo De Antropologia

Yesterday, Anna and I decided to take advantage of our day off (our work schedules don't really kick in until next week) and go to Xalapa for the day. It was an easy hour & a half bus ride north.

Below are some pictures from the amazing Anthropology Museum. Enjoy!

Veracruz: The First week in Pictures

Here are some photos, in no particular order, of my first week in Veracruz, Mexico.

I suggest playing Latin music in the background as you watch.

Veracruz Music

SIT Internship

Winter Holiday 06

The Ride South

I sat in the backseat bleary eyed from the drive yesterday. Occasionally, I would glance at a book Atasi had given me an hour before. I didn’t really feel like reading, but the weight of the book felt comfortable in my hand.

The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Freire. At one point, I opened the book and began counting how many times the word ‘oppressed’ appeared on a single page… one, two, three, four; flipping to another random page… one, two, four, six oppressed; another random page… five oppresses. This is not the kinda book I wanna to read while going home for Christmas, and my gaze drifted out the car window to the passing mountains for an undisclosed amount of time.

An unfamiliar street sign snapped me to attention. “Hey, Gooch” I called from the back seat. “Where are we?”

“Ummm. I dunno,” he said. I think I woke him from a daydream too.

“Are we still heading south on 29?”

“I’ve just been driving straight,” he reassured me.

Suddenly, a cell phone went off somewhere inside the car, and Mario sitting shotgun answered it on the second ring. “I’m on my way to Atlanta… No, I’m not there yet… I dunno… I’m still in Virginia.”

Christmas Day


Taylor and Kady: the singing, dancing Christmas princesses.


New Years Eve

“What exactly is flare and panache?” I asked Chris as he brought out a box full of Mardi Gras beads and other tacky knick-knacks. “ I don’t think I have either of those.”

Stiles quickly reached into the box and pulled out a black wig with pigtails. He tried it on and walked into the dining room to see himself in a mirror. “You look like Pocahontas!” someone laughed.

I guessed wigs were the way forward this year, so I walked up to the box and grabbed a blonde one. Jason looked at me as I put it on and began trying to the clear the hair from my eyes. “Uhh, dude! You look like the guy from Spinal Tap.” I guess I can dig that; I thought and headed to the front door to leave for the party.

“Come on in!” was the greeting at the basement door of the mayor’s house by an older man. “What’s your name?”

“Me? I’m David St. Hubbins,” I replied.

“Hi, David,” said the older gentleman, who turned out to be the mayor’s father.

Then, almost as if on queue, Chris deadpanned, “The patron saint of quality footwear.”

“Hey! I’m Randy. Nice to meet you,” said a jolly guy in a penguin suit and a top hat. “I’m the mayor. Ya’ll are safe here. The cops in this town work for me.”

“Happy New Year!”

Merry Christmas!

This video is long overdue on this blog. I recorded this with my students a few years ago, and it still makes me laugh.

Happy Holidays!

SIT MAT38 Blog

Recently, I've been learning about various approaches to teaching languages and the guiding principles behind each specific approach.

As I was looking into one approach, it occured to me how much emphasis and value I put into the concept of community. I've come to realize that 'community' is very important to me everywhere and I go, and my actions reflect this in different ways.

In the same vain as the Meet the MATs podcast I started earlier this year, which has slowed down recently, my newest project is a team blog for all my classmates.

The SIT MAT38 blog is now up and running. Hopefully, in the coming months as everyone goes out into various corners of the world for their internships, this blog will give some interesting insights.

http://sitmat38.blogspot.com/

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead

Musicovery : interactive webRadio

This is a mash up between Pandora & MusicPlasma:
Musicovery : interactive webRadio

Happy listening!

Multiple Intelligences

I'm currently doing research about Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences and how they apply to an ESL/EFL classroom.

I came across this 15min clip on Google and thought it's really interesting. It concentrates more on the emotional aspect of intelligence, but if you're in the field of education it's worth taking a look.

Learning Log Pt. 2

This is an email I sent a colleague in Japan as part of a school assignment. I'm trying to retain my sense of humor as I wade through years of linguistic theory, and I think it's working. My teacher loved these analogies!

Dear Mrs. Keiko,

I hope you are doing well! It's time for me to write you another email for school, so I hope you don't mind. I want to tell you about some of the things I am studying, but I'm worried it might be difficult to understand. If you have any questions, please ask me and I will try my best to answer them. I hope this will be a good learning experience for both of us!

In my Second Language Acquisition (SLA) class, I have been studying about many theories for language teaching. In class, we recently had a very fun assignment to summarize all the various theories from the past 50 years using metaphors. My classmates all presented very interesting metaphors, but I want to share my musical themed presentation with you.

In the 1950s & 1960s language learning was characterized by a theory known a Behaviorism. Linguists thought that learning a language was like learning anything else; it's a formation of habits based on stimuli and responses. This is very similar to the "Call & Response" technique we used in Jyushiyama JHS. The teacher is always the center of attention and the students listen and repeat.

The metaphor I used to describe Behaviorism was an album by James Brown. He was a very famous musician in the '60s because people could not take their eyes off him. He was the center of attention and he conducted his band and the audience with call & response techniques.

In the 1970s, a linguist named Corder began studying students' errors and a new theory called Error Analysis was born. This theory noted the fact that many errors by students did not originate from their native language. For example, Spanish and English have very similar plural tenses, but Spanish speakers often forget to add the plural marking when speaking English. Linguists could not understand where these kinds of errors were coming from.

To associate the Error Analysis theory I used Led Zeppelin's first album, which has a famous picture of the Hindenburg crashing. To me, aside from the fact that the Hindenburg was a major error in and of itself, Led Zeppelin's music was based on electric blues, but it was full of feedback, and listeners were baffled at where this new genre, dubbed heavy metal, came from.

In the 1980s, a linguist named Krashen put forth a theory about comprehensible input. Comprehensible input is defined as "second language input just beyond the learner's current second language competence." This is more commonly referred to as "i + 1." It claims that if a student is studying something too easy or too difficult, it will not be useful for learning, but if the input is slightly higher, the student will be intrigued and want to learn.

This was my favorite metaphor. I used Michael Jackson's "Thriller" album. Michael Jackson was the first pop star in the '80s to take traditional musical input (audio) and add a visual component (video). By adding a new aspect to music, he captured the world's attention and intrigued millions.

As language learning moved into the 1990s, a new humanist approach started to take hold. Linguists continued to build upon theories explored in previous decades, but they started looking into more social, cultural, and psychological variables. More emphasis was put on the learners individual characteristics like motivation, personality, and personal learning style.

To capture this refined humanist approach, I used a CD by a band called the Flaming Lips. Their album "The Soft Bulletin" was a symphonic pop album created by modern technology melding synthesizers with guitars to make blissful melodies. All the while, the humanity of the album comes through loud and clear because the lyrics are about basic human emotions like love and loss and the beauty of life.

Now in the 21st century, my teacher says, "we're wearing a lot of hats." Linguists tend not to adhere to any one specific theory, but to a multitude of possible approaches centered around the learner.

To represent this all-encompassing idea, I brought a DVD called "1 Giant Leap." I used this because it's a fusion of all kinds of music from all over the world, spoken word, and very powerful visual imagery. It's presented in a surround sound mix for home theaters, so the listener really is encompassed!

I hope this was informative for you, and I look forward to reading your response. Again, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask me.


Take care,


heyhey

Just so you know, my teacher asked to borrow the Lips CD and the Giant Leap film!

Brian Eno: Let there be Light

Apple - Pro - Profiles - Brian Eno, p. 1

Brian Eno paints with light. And his paintings, like the medium, shift and dance like free-flowing jazz solos or elaborate ragas. In fact, they have more in common with live music than they do with traditional artwork. “When I started working on visual work again, I actually wanted to make paintings that were more like music,” he says. “That meant making visual work that nonetheless changed very slowly.” Eno has been sculpting and bending light into living paintings for about 25 years, rigging galleries across the globe with modified televisions, programmed projectors, and three-dimensional light sculptures... Cont.

www.77millionpaintings.com

Burn Your Pants & Dance!

As the winter weather set in, I earned a reputation around campus because I advocated everyone at SIT burn their pants & dance at a bonfire party.

This may sound like a crazy idea, but there was logic behind my lunacy, and I just submitted this essay to our school paper in order to explain myself.

Why I Burned My Pants (And Danced)

Over the past few weeks, I conducted a social experiment on the campus of SIT called "Burn Your Pants & Dance." I advocated students burn their pants at a bonfire party, and now, after a few days of reflection, I want to explain why.

I love SIT; I love the various people. I revel in the diversity and knowing that this campus and its myriad of personalities have the potential to make a deep positive impact on the world. This idea alone helps me wake up for my 8:30am classes.

With that said, I feel it is necessary to address an underlying aspect of our campus. Everyday we send emails to inform about various religious holidays, sexual orientation parties, and immigration action meetings. These are all very serious topics. In some parts of the world these are a hotbed of discussion that create major turmoil and it’s just the stuff piling up day-to-day in our email Inbox! This is the reality we live in at SIT.

In an effort to combat the level of daily seriousness, lighten the mood, bring some kind of balance to our campus, and shed the proverbial PC layer that keeps building up, I sent, what I thought, was a humorous email. I advocated that everyone burn their pants at the next bonfire party. Burning pants, to my knowledge, does not infringe on anyone's religious beliefs, sexual orientation, nor does it have anything to do with immigration. It simply targets the opposite end of the contextual spectrum, and if you feel so inclined, it could be seen as a symbolic gesture.

The reactions from campus I received for doing this ridiculous thing are very interesting to me, and I actually feel I learned a lot about diversity and acceptance. I can separate the responses into three contrasting categories that I call the Partiers, the Questioners, and the Silencers. The Partiers' reaction was the most entertaining to me. They just laughed at me, gave me high fives for doing something silly, pointed and yelled in unquestioning solidarity "Burn your pants!"

The reaction of the Questioners was a little more interesting to me. They laughingly approached me and asked, "You want me to do what!?" "Why do you want me to burn my pants?" To them, I tried to explain the idea of a group of people working towards world peace standing around a bonfire in their underwear seems like a hilarious concept, and one I want to put into action because of the novelty. Can you imagine sitting in a conflict transformation class, looking over at your classmates during an intense debate, and realizing they were standing around in the cold in their underwear with you last week? It would have to put a different perspective on things, not to mention the bonds and the memories that would be formed by doing something so simple.

A slightly different, but frequent, response I heard from the Questioners was, "I like my pants, and I don't have any pants to burn," or, "I would rather donate my pants to the homeless." For this, I suggested they go to a thrift store, donate to the local economy, and buy a pair of pants that expressed who they were, or a pair they felt was begging to be burned because of the hideousness of the pattern. To me, this made sound sense.

The third and final reaction, from the Silencers, was one I least expected, but one that assisted my learning the most. I categorize this response as peoples' total silence or aloofness to my absurd request. I could overhear the Silencers whispering at lunch tables, "I can’t believe he did that. It’s completely inappropriate." The most hurtful response I heard came straight to my face. A person looked me in the eye and bluntly said, "I don’t get you." I do not know what that person meant, but it felt like they were trying to distance themself from me because they didn't understand where I was coming from. This reaction was most surprising because I didn't expect it on SIT's campus.

The heaviness of these reactions hit me like a lightning bolt as I was standing around under the stars in my underwear. If I got reactions like this from people on our campus for making and following through on a preposterous request about burning pants at a party, I can not imagine the reactions that someone might get for making serious statements they wholeheartedly believe in that might not fit with our societal norms.

Of all the places in the world that can benefit from political incorrectness, it is SIT. Our mission is world peace, but how can we work towards such a goal if we continue to shroud our language and actions in a polite, but lifeless, manner because we fear we might be misunderstood? I think we need to expose ourselves to draw out feelings that might be deemed incorrect, so we can look at them objectively, and analyze why we feel that way.

Bob Dylan once sang, "You’re invisible now, you got too many secrets to conceal." Only when we open up our secrets, speak, and act from the heart, will it be possible to see the true differences between everyone on this campus. When that happens, we can start learning how to approach the real problems that arise, and take what we learn away from this tiny microcosm on a hilltop in Vermont and apply it to the rest of the world.

Now get out there and take your pants off!!

Vermont Fall '06

I've spent the past couple weekends playing soccer and driving around with friends taking pictures of the scenery. Check out the photo gallery here:
Vermont Fall '06

Highlights include:

* driving one hour west to Bennington College with four friends in total silence because everyone was staring out the window at the Fruit Loop Mountains

* going to an apple pie festival in Dummerston to find all the apple pies were sold out due to an influx of Harley Davidson riders, so we decided to go for a drive on a few dirt roads; got lost, found Dummerston, got lost again, found Dummerston again, got lost again!, found hot apple pie, then found Brattleboro

* having Stiles come up for a few days driving a rented PT Cruiser with a red dash board and knowing he was in Brattleboro a whole ten minutes before buying a Neil Young LP

* going to Marlboro College for a soccer game; arriving an hour early to warm up, and actually seeing people play Quidditch, from the Harry Potter books, for real!

Brattleboro is treating me well.
Come visit!

My Morning Drive

This is a snippet of my drive up Black Mountain Rd to SIT's campus. I do this every morning and recently the weather has been perfect!

Learning Log

As an assignment for one of my classes I have to keep a reflective journal about my learning process and write a letter to a colleague explaining what I'm studying.

I thought I could incorporate this blog into the journal and get some feedback from anyone who reads this, so below I copied & pasted the first email I sent to a teaching liason I worked with in Japan, and in the future I'll try to do more reflective writing about what's happening here in Brattleboro, VT.

Dear Mrs. Keiko,

Long time no see! How are you? Is everything okay at Jyushiyama JHS?

Recently, I have been very busy with graduate school, and I have a homework assignment to write to a colleague about my studies, so I thought it would be a great idea to tell you a little bit about what I'm learning here.

For the past month, my new classmates and I have been getting to know each other and our new surroundings. During school orientation, we played many fun games like: 60 people lining up in alphabetical order without talking! This was a fantastic activity because everyone learned each other’s names while having fun. We also cooked dinner together and went contra dancing! This was great because we had to take responsibility for each other and work together while learning about local culture.

This school puts a lot of emphasis on group work and reflection, so we have been given many group projects. For example, my first group project was to find information about local restaurants and display our findings on a bulletin board for other students. I learned many things about my new town and I got to share the information with others.

The first two weeks of class were very interesting too! I had two classes: Shock Language and Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Shock Language class was very thought provoking because I had to study a language I’ve never spoken before. I learned Korean! It was easy for me because the grammar rules are similar to Japanese, and my teacher was great! She used many games and activities to make the class fun; I learned what it feels like to be in a language class as a student.

My SLA class is much more difficult because I’m studying about language teaching theories. I’m reading about famous linguists like Chomsky, Krashen, Swain, and Vygotsky who changed the way education systems teach languages. Also, there are a lot of new vocabulary terms I have to know, but my teacher is very good and lets me ask lots of questions.

Just recently, I began three new classes: Approaches (a class where I have to analyze myself and my teaching techniques), Four Skills (a class where I learn how to incorporate speaking, listening, reading, and writing into to my own classes), and Language Analysis & Lesson Planning (a class where I study about English grammar and making lesson plans). These classes are new to me, so I can’t write about them yet, but I want to share them with you when I learn more.

I hope you are doing well, and please tell all the students at Jyushiyama JHS I said hello.


Take care,


heyhey

If anyone finds this the least bit interesting, please leave a comment because I can use it in my classes.

Thanx.

Podcast Preview

It's been a while since my last post, and I apologize. Moving to Brattleboro, VT and starting school at SIT have kept me pretty busy; not to mention it took three weeks to get the Internet hooked up in my new apartment.

Anyway, things are up and running at full speed now, and I do mean FULL SPEED. For the first time in my life, I need a day-planner to keep track of everything that's happening.

In the coming weeks, I promise to get some pictures online of the Vermont foliage, but in the meantime I started working on another project to interview all of my fellow classmates one by one and podcast it on my DotMac site.

If you're interested, please check it out: HeyHey's Podcast

Peace.