Week 15: Definition Paragraphs

And finally...drum roll please...the last paragraph lesson!  This final type of paragraph organization is definition.  I thought this one might be a bit boring, but, as it turns out, I found some quite good material online to supplement what the book taught; I think this is the most thorough and well-thought-out explanation of the concepts that I've done yet.  Which means, it probably was boring.  But anyways...

I won't bore you with all the details of the lesson.  The main gist is to practice writing paragraph that explain the meaning of something: a concept, a holiday, a ceremony, a type of person, an occupation or role.  Objects usually end up just being a description.

Anyhow, the fun part of class was, as usual, after the main lesson.  I made a rather weak tie-in: "I am defining the meaning of a holiday: Thanksgiving."  Really, it was more of just a description...

The students, having already studied English for about eight years now, have of course already heard of Thanksgiving and know the basic idea, so I didn't repeat the whole Pilgrim and Indian story; they heard it last year.  I focused more on what we do on the actual day.  I showed them pictures from the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade; they were really impressed with the humongous balloons. I also showed them how to trace your hand and make a turkey drawing, which they thought was cute.

Food is always a popular point of discussion; Thanksgiving food especially so, because they don't eat turkey here.  None of my students have ever seen or tasted a turkey.  Also, food here (since you're going to have to eat it with chopsticks) comes to the table already cut into bite-sized pieces. I think the photo I've gotten the biggest reaction out of both in Jingzhou and here is the photo of the whole roasted turkey on the table from Thanksgiving 2009.

I also explained the wishbone tradition, which they thought was just a bit gross, really--pulling on a slimy bone. Probably, I haven't done it myself in years.

Then, of course, it's always good to try to focus minds on the important things in life.  I taught them the phrase "count your blessings,"  and gave them a few minutes to think of things they were thankful for, then I had them take turns telling the things they are thankful for.  You do have to specify that you can't just say "I'm thankful for my family and friends," but intead should be specific.  What about your friend are you thankful for? What does your mother do that makes you thankful for her?  They did really well, though; my students in Jingzhou needed prodding to say more than two or three words, but my students here I more often have to try to cut off; they'll talk and talk.  One students did try to butter me up by saying he was thankful for me and for the English parties I've been organizing.

And one last picture for you...Thanksgiving 2001.  Is 2001 really eleven years ago already?

Anyways, happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Classification in Week 14

Only two more ways to organize paragraphs left, including this one!  I never realized how many someone could come up with.  However, I do agree with with those who put the curriculum together that it is good for the students to get this practice.  As you would expect of students writing in a second language they're not totally comfortable yet, their writing tends to be formulaic and vague; hopefully, looking at different ways to organize their thoughts will help them to write more specifically and clearly.  The vagueness was so bad in their last assignment, though, that I think I need to work specifically on that again at some point.

Anyhow, the 14th (out of 16) lesson of the semester was on organization by classification.  Basically, writing about things in categories. I really liked the examples in the book for this one (the examples, to me, seem to be hit or miss; some don't seem to be very clear illustrations, but this week's were): one example began "There are three kinds of book owners. The first..." Another began "Every educated person has at least two ways of speaking hsi mother tongue. The first..."

I began class with the boring lecture part, reiterating the ideas from the book and going over the vocabulary; I had a little bit of nerdy fan by using the four Hogwarts houses as my first example.  I used another example I found online about the sections at the local video store; it was a bit of an ode to a bygone era--it's hard to find a video store now that everyone uses netflix or gets movies online.

To wake everyone up after the lecture, I had them all get up and move into groups; I wrote paragraphs about the groups of students in the classroom as they organized themselves by birth month, home province, and favorite color.  They always enjoy any opportunity to goof around a bit.

Finally, I gave them a simple personality test to fill out; it was the one that divides people into four groups: lions, otters, golden retrievers, and beavers.  The version I used gave personality traits of each in the categories of relational strengths, strengths out of balance (weaknesses), communication style, relational needs, and relational balance (what to do to overcome the weaknesses).  Just to give you an idea, the first part, relational strengths, for each were:

Lion: takes charge, problem solver; competitive, enjoys change, confrontational
Otter: Optimistic, energetic, motivators, future oriented
Golden Retriever: warm and relational, loyal, enjoy routine, peace-maker, sensitive feelings
Beaver: Accurate and precise, quality control, discering, analytical

It turned out to be a good activity for vocabulary; there were several of the adjectives in the questionaire that they were unfamiliar with, so I spent a while explaining terms; once they had finished, I took a poll of how many we had of each type; we had about five lions (including three of the boys), quite a few otters, a good number of golden retrievers (predictably, many of the sweeter girls), and one beaver.  Blare was looking around bemusedly; was she the only one? Of course, she might not have been; when I tallied up the answers there were about three people who never answered.

Their journal assignment, which I gave them the last ten minutes or so of class to start on, was to discuss whether they agreed or not with the results of the personality test; which traits were accurate? which were not?  Of course, I reminded them that a test with only four types was overly simplistic; many would fall somewhere between the types.   Finally, what is the value of having different personality types? How do they work together?

Hopefully, reading this assignment, I'll be able to get to know my students better! Oh, by the way--I took to quiz myself while the students were working on their journals (I don't know why it didn't occur to me to do that ahead of time), and it turns out I'm a  beaver.  Not surprising, really, and now at least Blare isn't alone.

Halloween in Class

The twelth class just happened to fall the week of Halloween--and we ESL teachers rarely miss the chance to work in some American culture by enthusiastically celebrating a holiday.  And isn't the power point background I found online cute?

The lesson itself was pretty straight-forward; writing about cause and effect.  The normal power point, vocabulary, lecture, examples, etc.  However, I rushed through the lesson.  "Anybodygotanyquestions?No?Okay,nextthing..." On to the fun part!

First, because I am an English professor, I introduced them to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven".  I love it.  "While I pondered, weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore..."  I had to memorize the first stanza in the sixth grade, and I still remember bits of it.  However, the poem is extremely long, and the old-fashioned English way beyond their level.  So, while in general I don't find the Simpsons to be very academically helpful, they did the Raven in the first Treehouse of Horror episode years ago.  I think I remember watching it when I was in high school, even.  I hoped that by showing "The Raven" acted out as a story, at least my students would get the gist of it, even if they didn't get the full impact.  I did read the first stanza out loud to them, and even though they didn't know all the words, they could appreciate the alliteration and rhythm of the words.  Amazingly, however, I couldn't find the video on youtube; here's the link I used: The Simpsons' "The Raven."

When I lived in Jingzhou, I found an small but appropriate pumpking to carve, and took a jack-o-lantern to class.  Unfortunately, I didn't find one this year.  Still, I wore my fortune teller costume to class (although, still not locating anything to serve as a crystal ball, I mostly just looked unidentifiably weird). Although several of my students took pictures of me, somehow I never took one, so no pictures, sorry.

I showed a slide show of pictures; we talked about pumpkins and costumes; I tried to explain Trunk or Treat to them, but I don't think they quite got the point of that.  I also explained bobbing for apples, and at the end I played "Monster Mash" for them.

Finally, their journal for the week was a bit different: instead of something practicing the skills I'd just taught (like a responsible teacher would assign, and I normally do), I gave them this story starter, and told them to finish it:

One Halloween my friends and I were going trick-or-treating in our neighborhood. Down the street from us was an old deserted house that everyone thought was haunted. My mother said, "Don't you dare go near that house!" Naturally, her warning made us even more curious. We went to the house and rang the bell. There was no answer. We tried the door. It was unlocked, so we entered the house. The door slammed behind us and...

I found it online somewhere; I don't remember where now; so, no copyright infringement intended...I'm really looking forward to reading their stories; they seemed more excited about this journal assignment that usual, too.  At least they shouldn't all be the same thing!  

Finally, one of my example pictures: my Halloween costume from 2006, at a party at the Bible School in Florence:

Writing Lesson 10: Look Around

The 10th writing lesson focused on organizing by space, which mostly means describing places.  The previous paragraph-writing exercises had organized details mostly chronologically, but in this lesson the students had to think spatially.

When writing a description of a space/place, you can organize your details from left to right, right to left, bottom to top, top to bottom, edges to center, center to edges, near to far, or far to near.  Probably other ways, too, but that's enough to cover most situations.

For my examples, I used four pictures and a video.  First was a picture of a group of friends (Me, Smith, Lokey, and Kim in the corn maze from October 2009 if anyone's interested); my example paragraph described the scene from left to right.

The second example was a picture of a dining room from a home interior website; in this case, I wrote a description from the outside in--describing first the walls and windows, then the furniture along the wall, then the rug in the center of the floor, then the table and chairs in the center of the rug, and finally the odd vases in the center of the table.

The third example was a paragraph I found online from a 1957 book, Talents and Geniuses, by Gilbert Highet--it was a description of a filthy subway station.  I found a photo of a station in New York City that matched the description pretty well.  His description was a perfect example for top-to-bottom organization: first the glaring light bulbs, the paint peeling on the ceiling, the crusted white tiles on the walls, the gum spots on the pavement, the gleaming steel rails, the sludge of debris below the tracks.

My next example was a photo I took during my trip to Anhui Province during the October holiday; standing in one of the large public squares of the little town of Jiuhuajie, the scene unfolds in layers: the ponds in the foreground, then the arc of buildings, then a lower ridge with temples silhouetted above it, then the higher, more distant ridge pale against the evening light.  So, organized by distance.

My last example was a video.  My senior year of college, I bought a new comforter for my bed, and as I usually feel the need to do with any new purchases, I had to show Mom.  (By the way, Mom, I bought a new purse the other day--it's gray suede and has striped fur on the side! Remind me to send you a picture!) But instead of taking a picture that time, I took a quick video standing in the middle of my dorm room and turning in a circle.  Somehow the video has survived the intervening seven years (has it really been that long??).  It provided an interesting way to describe a place--left to right while spinning.  Also, college students here are usually really curious about what college life is like for American students; the video was a great jumping-off point for a discussion of the differences in university life on either side of the Pacific.

For the rest of the class period, I put up a photo of a room from an interior-design google search, or rather, Bing search, as google often doesn't work well here (I'm going through Google withdrawals! Bing just can't compare...and I NEED my maps!!).  I used a different picture for each class; I'm finally learning to vary my journal assignments; now I'll only have to read twenty-something descriptions of each picture instead of seventy-something of the same one.

Writing Week 9: PB&J How-to

Week nine was the second paragraph lesson; this time, organizing by process.  Really, practicing writing directions on how to do something.  As usual, I tried to have some fun with it rather than just lecturing the entire time; for one activity, I had the students plays the old game where one was blindfolded, the second students then moved somewhere else in the classroom, and the third had to give verbal directions to the blindfolded person on how to arrive at the other person.

Other examples including giving directions based on a map of central Beijing, drawing a simple frog step by step, and watching a howdini video on how to make and decorate a butterfly cake, thinking through the directions in each case and how to express them in English so as to be clearly understood.

The final example was the highlight of the class--how to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  I brought bread, peanut butter, jelly, knives, plates, orange juice, and cups to class; four students in each class volunteered and I instructed them step by step in making the sandwiches.  The final step was to cut the sandwich in fourths and share with their classmates.  This may sound like a bit of a silly example, but most of my studens had never even heard of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, much less made or tried one.  Most liked it; a few didn't.  However, most had fun trying a new food that I explained to them was the staple of many American children's diet.  (Although I didn't confuse them by enlightening them as to the staple of my childhood diet--it wasn't jelly with my peanut butter on the sandwich).

The Waiting Time

Lately, I've been going back and typing up some old journals and adding them as posts here.  I've got a couple from my first experience living outside the U.S. on a semester abroad in Belgium when I was a junior in college (fall of 2004, if you're looking for the posts).  It took quite a while to click back enough months to put them in their right chronological place in the blog...kind of like watching life fly by.  It'll be eight years this year since that trip. 

I guess everybody struggles sometimes with time passing by.  I'll be twenty-eight this year; sometime I feel near panic at how fast time goes.  There's so much I want to do in life; I want to marry, have children, write, travel, live...and the biological clock is ticking louder and louder insinuating that I had better hurry, I'll run out of time, it'll be too late...

And here I am, living with my parents, working a job that I know is just a time-filler and that, though I once enjoyed, is becoming more and more grating.  I'm in the same place as I was when I was twenty, before and after that grand adventure of being an inexperienced college student thinking I was a great world traveller sitting in coffee shops in western Europe, drinking hot chocolate because I don't even like coffee.  Depression seems to close in sometimes; it has for the past few days; feeling shame at not being on my own, at not having accomplished more, at loosing myself in stories instead of living my own--but i know it's lying.  Yes, I'm in a boring point in my life, but it's only a stop.  I haven't built a great career or started a family or earned more degrees, but the last few years haven't been wasted.  The work I did in Italy and in China was worth the time spent, and the traveling in between has been more of an education that many college classes. 

I'm in a rut right now, and there has been a lot of wasted time.  And I don't just mean time spent with him; even though it didn't work, the relationship and the time spent in it taught me a lot about myself and what I can and can't give up and compromise.  It would have been nice to have learned those lessons in less time, but life is life and there's no point worrying about it now.  And where I am now, this is not because I'm floundering around looking for direction.  I know my direction, but I need to stay here for now and save money to be able to start on the next adventure.  By August, I should be ready. 

It's only my own lack of self-discipline and caving in to depression that makes this period a waste of time.  I have so much to be doing--I have years of photos I've been looking forward to scrapbooking, stacks of books on my to-read list; I need to be working on my Chinese, and studying the Bible with much more discipline and purpose.  I need to write more; I've wanted to write ever since I knew what letters were, but again it's my own self-discipline that's holding me back.  I need to get back in shape so that I can climb mountains again. I have so much I need to do now, before I'm busy teaching and travelling again and won't have the time.  But it seems like I go through too many period like this weekend of accomplishing very little, because I let the boredom and loneliness settle into a great weight around me. 

The last couple of weeks, I've drowned myself in the Harry Potter series.  I'd never read the books before, and I'd seen only one of the movies.  I always thought it sounded like the sort of thing I'd like, but when all my friends were reading them in high school and college, I didn't want to read them because they were too trendy--I, as the cultured English major, didn't want to be reading something just because of the sensationalism around it.  I'd wait and see if they stuck around awhile.  (However, I don't think I'll ever get around to Twilight, no matter how long they stick around.  I value my brain cells).  Of course, once I started reading the Harry Potter books, I couldn't stop.  I read during my lunch breaks, and for a couple of hours every night, and read the entire series in about a week and a half.  Then, I watched all the movies.  I've watched the last two probably three or four time each.  I don't know why this blinding obsession, but I had a hard time focusing on anything else.  This weekend, though, it felt like I was stuck in the foreboding, stress, and uncertainty of the search for the horcruxes; the scene stuck in my head was the one where Harry and Hermione dance in the tent, trying to break a little of the unbearable tension of their lives.  I've watched the last movie twice and read the last half of book seven again to get myself past it.  Weird how a fictional world can pull you in, but I guess I'm particularly vulnerable to getting lost in a fictional world right now as my real life isn't particularly interesting. 

However, getting lost in them also just reinforced the bit of panic about time passing by--in the Harry Potter series, it's now much closer to the "nineteen years later" than the original series.  If it were real, Harry and Ginny's kids would now be seven, six, and four.

I've been thinking lately about the epic stories that capture our imaginations--Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter series, the Narnia series...and in each, it's children or teenagers who have the bravery to change their worlds...Frodo, Harry, the Pevensie children...I haven't read the Hunger Games yet, but my friends are all screaming at me to do so, but from what I know of that, it's the same thing...now, I know the "coming of age" plot is a staple of literature, but for someone closer to thirty and than twenty it's also a bit depressing sometimes.  I know they aren't real, and that real life doesn't go like stories, but I can't help but wonder sometimes if it's not too late; if I wasn't a child prodigy, is there any chance of being a hero now?  Has anyone else ever felt like that, wanting to read about the "Harry Potter" who is a thirty-year-old single woman?  It seems everything written about people my own age is all about sexual relationships that just emphasize the desperation in the continued wait for Prince Charming to come along and finally usher in a beautiful life. 

You know, that was part of why I wasn't happy with him.  He could offer me that--getting married, having children--that's supposed to be the happily ever after, but I wanted more than that; while I do want that, desperately, having children is not the end of my ambition in life.  I want them, but I want them to be raised as part of something bigger than themselves, as part of work that is more than just muddling through day after day.  I didn't want to have to give up adventure and purpose and feeling alive just to have them, for their sakes as much as mine. 

New Chapter in Life

As usual, I've gotten behind on my blog.  I guess the act of writing, especially about traveling, makes me want...more.  When I'm writing, I long to learn, to experience, to grow, to have adventures...and over this past year I was living a life where those thoughts were a bit...dangerous isn't exactly the right word.  Well, thinking too much about traveling, writing, learning, having adventures made me dissatisfied with the life I was living.  It was easier to just not think about those things as I tried to be "normal" and settle in to small-town life.  So I focused my mind on other things, because the days I spent listening to travel podcasts or researching destinations made me feel like a traitor to this life I thought I wanted.

In the end, the dissatisfaction with that life won out.  I don't want to have to avoid what makes me happy, what makes me feel alive, what makes me feel like I'm developing myself as a person, just to be relatively contented in a life that I'm told is "normal" and that everyone around me is happy with.  And so I've left that life, and although I hate that it hurt the person I shared that life with, I can look to the future with excitement again.  I'm still staying in middle Tennessee for a while; I've got a (broken down, unfortunately) car to pay off, a new job, and some life-organizing to do, and besides, I need to save up some money.  But I'm planning.  I'm dreaming.  I'm living my life again, instead of tagging along on someone else's.

And so, I decided it was time to revive this blog.  I've got so many stories I've never told, and now I know there will be stories ahead to tell as well. 

Writing

Classes are going pretty well now.  I dropped Modern Lit.  I enjoyed the things we ere reading, but it was time consuming, and it's rather annoying going from upper-level English major classes to a lit class with various non-majors complaining about how long things are.  Besides, I still have twelve hours without it, and there's no need to bother with a class I don't need anyhow.  It's so nice to have a break.

I'm really enjoying the Western Heritage class.  It's a lot of cultural history, mostly, and it's really interesting.  We're learning about art, architecture, philosophy, and history, all intertwined.

I finished the book I brought, Barbara Kingsolver's Homeland.  It's a collection of short stories.  I really enjoy her work, and I think it will help me when I write my short story for creative writing, as her style is close to what I'd like to write myself.  I have a few starts for it, but I guess the hard part is writing something that will be interesting and coherent to everyone who has to read it.  The class reading my writing in Advance Comp wasn't a big deal because it was just more non-fiction--essays and term papers and such, like I've been writing for years now.  But this--no one but my mother, that I know of, has ever read anything fiction I wrote, well, besides a few poems and some stories when I was very little. 

The more I think about writing, the more things I remember writing as a child.  The first I remember was about a girl, her older brother, and her mother, but I remember nothing about the plot; Mom says she still has it somewhere.  Then there were the stories of Janella the Bear, and some I wrote in Gifted.  There was one that was something about someone who fell in a pit.  Of course I illustrated them all.  In fifth grade, I had a whole folder of story ideas--I loved to create characters.  I remember one about a mother of six who crashed her care over a cliff and landed on a ledge which opened into a cave, and how she survived, and how her children refused to accept her disappearance and finally found her.  I started my first novel that year, too, and called it "Together but Alone," which of course sounds corny now but seemed clever at the time.  It was a bout a family who won a trip on a cruise ship.  The shop crashed while at sea, and the three daughters were separated from the parents and were stranded along with a few other children on an island, and how they survived.  I had quite a bit written and typed it on the computer at school in what was supposed to be my "gifted" time, although it was more just a way to keep me busy because they didn't know what to do with me.