Guest post 6 – Arjana Blazic on teaching, travelling and exchanges

Today’s guest blogger is Arjana Blazic from Croatia. I really enjoy her cheerful and positive blog-writing style. She’s made this blogpost very competitive and, like me, has offered food and drink to the winners, so she’s a woman after my own heart.

Plus, although I love all the countries that I’ve visited in former Yugoslavia (and hoping my Serbian and Slovenian friends will understand), I have a very soft spot for Croatia. I think Arjana’s home town of Zagreb is a fascinating place and I’ve also been lucky enough to explore the Dalmatian coast in a series of author and training visits.

Do you know where this photo was taken? If yes, a home-made chocolate cake awaits you in Zagreb.

 My name is Arjana Blazic and I’m an English and German teacher from Zagreb, Croatia. I have been teaching for 24 years and I love it, even more than I did on the first day. I’m an avid user of new technologies and one of my major goals is to teach my students how to take advantage of all the possibilities that technology-enhanced learning can offer. I’m committed to lifelong learning and I do it with great joy. I also have a passion for travel.

On Travelling and Teaching

While I have no idea when and where I got bitten by the travel bug, I certainly know the reason why I am a teacher. Teaching runs in my family. Thirteen of my family members are or used to be teachers. The first to take this path was my Aunt Teresa, who started her 40-year teaching career before World War II in a small village not far from Zagreb.

She used to say that in those days teachers were not only more respected than today, but also better paid, because her monthly salary could buy her a cow!

I’m not sure if I could afford to buy a cow a month with my teacher pay today, but what I’m sure of is that teaching and travelling don’t go together so well. We might have long holidays, but we can’t travel during the off-peak season when the prices are lower. That’s why I came up with three different scenarios on how to do what I like doing most, to teach and to travel:

1)    Become a published author and get invited to conferences worldwide,

2)    Marry an airline employee and fly (almost) free,

3)    Organize international student exchanges and learn from your peers.

The only book that I’ve written so far was published in 2003 and has sold 1,000 copies. Unfortunately, I have never been invited to speak at a conference, as my book is actually just a basic guide to computers and the Internet.

 

: Can you translate the title? If yes, a home-made chocolate cake awaits you in Zagreb

The recipe for scenario # 2 is really simple. All it takes is love, or at least it does so in my case. In fact, I met my airline employee long before he landed himself a job in the airline industry. No, he’s not a pilot; he’s in computing, which is a true win-win formula for a bitten-by-the-travel-bug technophile teacher like me.

Do you know where we are? If yes, a home-made chestnut cake awaits you in Zagreb.

The third scenario is the only one where you’ll be rewarded with the opportunity to learn about people, their countries, customs and traditions first hand, from a native’s perspective, not from a touristy, guidebook point of view.

Say where my students are and you’ll get a cake of your choice.

The first step towards a successful exchange project is to find like-minded teachers who are eager to collaborate. Fund-raising should be your next step, followed by fund-raising and even more fund-raising. After that you can travel with 2 or 22 students of yours (depending on how successful your fund-raising was) to different parts of the world to learn about understanding, tolerance and respect. 

My first exchange project, organized in 1998 with a school from Switzerland, was started purely by coincidence. Julia, a Swiss teacher who wanted to collaborate, knew someone who knew someone who had a friend whose friend’s friend worked at my school.

This has been the only exchange project that the two of us organized. We have also visited each other privately on several occasions, and we are still in touch, although not as often as we used to be, because she quit teaching and went sailing around the world!

It was during this visit to Switzerland that we learned how quickly and easily the differences between us can cause misunderstandings. We arrived in Buchs early in the morning after a long bus ride and went straight to the school. When the time finally came to go to the hosts’ homes, we were both starving and totally exhausted.

One of our students, when asked by the host mother if she wanted to have something to eat, declined her offer, even though she was hungry. You may call it a lie, but she did it because this is the way we’re taught, firstly because we don’t want to bother our host, and secondly, because we know that the host will make the offer again, and then we’ll readily accept it, as this is what we consider polite.

However, the Swiss mother didn’t ask again. To her, a No meant a No. Since then our students have been taught not to be hesitant to speak their mind and no one has ever gone to bed hungry 

 

Arjana blogs at http://traveloteacher.blogspot.com.

Guest blog 5 – Özge Karaoğlu’s amazing animations

I am very excited to have Özge Karaoğlu as my guest-blogger today. If you’re on twitter, you probably know Özge – she’s the one who fires off about 20 links a day – she’s a one-person PLN, capable of providing you with enough reading and links to write a thesis on teaching English.

I met Özge in Istanbul in September, and I can tell you that the enthusiasm she shows for her work is absolutely infectious.

Özge won the MEDEA Award for Creativity and Innovation this year for Daisy and Drago, the series of animated films she made with her kindergarten pupils. Below, she describes the process that she and her pupils follow to make the films.

I’m an EFL teacher and a teacher trainer in Istanbul,Turkey. I’m also the educational coordinator, script and screenplay writer of “Yes,I Speak English” DVD series in America. 

Visit my blog: http://ozgekaraoglu.edublogs.org/ or follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ozge

Children and “Teachers” Filming Their Dreams

“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.”

Before you read anything, please watch this video.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xbfwba_daisy_shortfilms

Children have great aptitudes, they are open minded, curious, expressive, excited, imaginative, willing, inspired, playful and funny with a great sense of humor all the time. They welcome every opportunity and this may be the reason why they are more creative than we are.

If you are teaching children who are learning English as a foreign language, you know that repetitive stories that cycle the sentences or vocabulary in different context, work better with kids. They learn the story faster. They internalize it and use it into their daily lives easily.

I teach topics such as community helpers, food and drinks, clothes, seasons, body parts with related vocabulary and sentences. I was looking for topic based stories to teach my kindergarten students. I couldn’t find any and decided to create my own stories. My stories have two main characters, Daisy and Drago.

Daisy is the heroine of my stories. Each story tells a new adventure of Daisy and her best friend Drago. I use cardboard with pictures and two puppets of the characters made of paper. They both have their personalities that we decide with kids. Daisy likes playing tennis and eating ice-cream. Her favorite color is red and she wants to be a princess when she grows up whereas Drago wants to be a Spiderman. My dream was to publish my stories one day but something better and magical has happened.

We have animation classes in kindergarten at my school. I thought one of my stories could be a cartoon to be used in our English lessons as a material so we decided to turn it in to a project with Havva Kangal Erdoğan, the animation teacher.

First we decided on the best story that could be animated with kids. I wrote the story and Havva illustrated the pictures. We taught the story in our English lessons. We played games, did re-telling, role-playing, question/answer and craft activities. Students liked and learned the story. They had animation lessons at the same time. When they learnt the basic skills, they started working with the characters.

Drago was difficult to draw so it took more time to get used to the characters. Then, they started animating pictures on light tables in our animation studio. Some students were animating the pictures (making them talk, smile, jump, walk, play etc.) where others were drawing the background or coloring the pictures. When they finished the animation and coloring, we had more than 400 pictures. We scanned them and our technical crew put the pictures together. 

Recording students’ voices was the most difficult part, as they were so young, it was hard for them to concentrate, and some of them didn’t have their front teeth so they sometimes had to repeat one sentence more than ten times to get the right intonation and pronunciation. They had to be silent and wait their turns while others were being recorded but they managed to do it!

You can watch our journey of recording here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1352486947893285486#]

We listened the recording from the beginning to choose the best intonation and pronunciation. When we finished with this, pictures and recording were put together and it became Daisy and Drago film.

With this project, our aim was to entertain young learners while they learn a foreign language and help to build permanent learning in English but we achieved more than that. Students created their own material for themselves and others who are learning English that can be used over years; they learnt how to animate pictures, gained artistry and language skills through the production of this film, how to work together as a team and the importance of team work and experienced the enthusiasm and joy of creating a material and audience’s applause.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6109028310424842448#]

I do enjoy being a kindergarten teacher; it makes me feel I am important for someone else and it is very rewarding. Children inspire me every day. You can do as many projects as you can do with older kids. This amazes you and others more, because they are so young and enthusiastic and can do great things in spite of their limited world, with their limited language. This is the story of how we filmed and fulfilled our dreams. I hope you enjoy!

I feel extremely honored to write a guest post on Ken Wilson’s blog! I would like to thank him for sharing his light with us and empowering my PLN.

ozge_karaoglu@hotmail.com

Özge blogs at: http://ozgekaraoglu.edublogs.org/

Guest blog 4 – a sketch from Brazil

My fourth guest blogger is Carlos Gontow from Brazil. I have to admit a special affection for Carlos and his wife Cris. I have mentioned before on this blog that they are, as far as I know, the only people in the world who ever interrupted their honeymoon to come to listen to one of my talks (in São Paulo in 1994). Carlos is also in my good books because he once wrote in a blog comment: “I have always said that when I grow up, I want to be Ken Wilson.”

Carlos certainly wants to be known for his sketch-writing skills, and he has kindly offered as his blog post a sketch from his book The Classroom is a Stage.

I hope you enjoy the sketch. Warning if you are planning to use it in class – the stage directions stipulate a lot of passionate kissing!

Carlos performing the sketch with his working partner Mila Rey

My name is Carlos Gontow and I’m from Brazil. I’m an English teacher and an actor and I’ve been involved with teaching English through theater for more than twenty-two years. I’m the author of The Classroom is a Stage – 40 Short Plays for English Students. ‘Don’t leave me’ is one of the plays in the book.

Level of English Intermediate to advanced. The students have to know if-clauses.

Recommended age: Teenagers and adults

Structures: Grammar: If-clauses – first, second and third conditionals

Vocabulary: Parting verbs: go away, leave, abandon

 Number of characters:  2  – John and Mary

Costumes: Ordinary clothes. The characters can be any age, but old enough to be married, and the clothes they wear have to reflect that. If you’re working with teenagers, they can wear their parents’ clothes.

Playing time:  Approximately 5 minutes

DON’T LEAVE ME

                 John and Mary are at home, holding hands.

JOHN:      (Romantically.) Oh, Mary, I love you so much!

MARY:     (Romantically.) I love you, too, John.

                     (They kiss.)

JOHN:      You’re the only woman for me. I can’t live without you.        

MARY:     And you’re the man of my dreams. My life means nothing without you.

JOHN:      Oh, my love…

MARY:     Dear…

                      (They kiss passionately.)

JOHN:      If you left me now, you’d take away the biggest part of me.

MARY:     Don’t worry, John. This will never happen!

JOHN:      I know it won’t. That’s why I said, “If you left me now, you would take away the biggest part of me. It’s an untrue, impossible, or imagined situation.

MARY:     Yes, John, I know. But don’t worry. I will never leave you.

JOHN:      I know, my dear. And I really love you.

MARY:     I love you, too, John.

JOHN:      But let’s suppose you decided to leave me.

MARY:     What?

JOHN:      Yeah, just a supposition.

MARY:     Oh, come on, John…

JOHN:      If you went away, I would be desperate.

MARY:     (Annoyed.) I’m not going to go away.

JOHN:      If you left me, I would die.

MARY:     (Angry.) I’m not going to leave you, OK?

JOHN:      I said, “If you left me,” just an unreal condition.

MARY:     (To the audience.) Oh, my, why did I marry an English teacher? (To John.) John, stop it! You’re making  me angry.

JOHN:      If you abandoned me, I would kill myself.

MARY:     (Very angry.) That’s enough. (She exits, gets her suitcase and comes back.) Good bye, John.

JOHN:      Where are you going?

MARY:     I’m leaving you! I can’t take it anymore.

JOHN:      Why? What have I done?

MARY:     You always think I’m going to leave you.

JOHN:      I’m just afraid. You know I can’t live without you.

MARY:     Why don’t you believe me when I say I won’t leave you?

JOHN:      It was just an imaginary situation.

MARY:     Well, I’m tired. Good bye. (Starts exiting.)

JOHN:      (Crying.) No, Mary. Don’t do this to me! If you leave me now, you’ll take away the biggest part of me.[1]

MARY:     I don’t care.

JOHN:      (Crying even louder.) Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, no, baby, please don’t go!

MARY:     It’s too late now!

JOHN:      And if you leave me now, you’ll take away the very heart of me. Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, no, baby, please don’t go!

MARY:     Oh, come on, stop crying…

JOHN:      Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, girl, I just want you to stay!

MARY:     John, this is ridiculous!

JOHN:      A love like ours is love that’s hard to find. How could we let it slip away?

MARY:     (Embarrassed.) John…

JOHN:      We’ve come too far to leave it all behind…

MARY:     Stop it!

JOHN:      How could we end it all this way? If you leave me now…

MARY:     (Shouts.) Stop! Don’t say that again!

JOHN:      What’s the matter? I said, “If you leave me now,” because it’s a real possibility. You’re about to leave me, so I say, “If you leave me now, you will take away the biggest part of me.” Because this is what is going to happen.

MARY:     I’m not leaving…

JOHN:      If you leave me now, I’ll die.

MARY:     (Louder.) I’m not leaving…

JOHN:      If you go away now, my life will be over.

MARY:     (Shouts.) I’M NOT GOING AWAY!!

JOHN:      (Happy.) You’re not? (On his knees.) Oh, thank you, my love. You know I can’t live without you.

MARY:     Let me take my suitcase back to the bedroom. (She exits and comes back.)

JOHN:      Oh, Mary. You scared me. I thought you were going to leave me.

MARY:     But I didn’t. I’m here…

JOHN:      Yes, my love. I love you…

MARY:     I love you, too.

                 (They kiss passionately.)

JOHN:      I was really afraid. I really thought you were going to go away.

MARY:     Oh, John, don’t think about that. I didn’t go away.

JOHN:      I know, but you almost did. I was terrified.

MARY:     I was very angry. I don’t know what happened to me.

JOHN:      Oh, Mary, if you had left me, you would have taken away the biggest part of me.

MARY:     What?

JOHN:      If you had left me, you would have taken away the biggest part of me.

MARY:     John, I didn’t leave you.

JOHN:      I know, honey. I said, “If you had left me.” That’s an imaginary condition in the past. You didn’t leave me, and you didn’t take away the biggest part of me, but if you had left me, you would have taken away the biggest part of me.

MARY:     John, don’t start again. You’re not talking to your students. I’m your wife.

JOHN:      (Dramatic.) If you had abandoned me, I would have died.

MARY:     (Angry.) Stop it!

JOHN:      If you had gone away, my life would have ended.

MARY:     (Angrier and louder.) Stop it, I said!

JOHN:      It’s just an imaginary past condition…

MARY:     I’ve had it! That’s enough. I’m up to here with your conditionals. (She exits, gets her suitcase and comes back.)

JOHN:      Where are you going?

MARY:     Back to my mother’s house. I’m tired of you. (To the audience.) Why did I marry an English teacher?

JOHN:      What’s wrong with English teachers?

MARY:     (Shouts.) What’s wrong? (Shouts louder.) What’s wrong? I’ll tell you what’s wrong. If I hadn’t married an English teacher, I wouldn’t have to listen to conditionals all day long… Good bye. (Exits.)

JOHN:      (Cries.) No, Mary! Don’t go! Come back! I can’t live without you… (He sobs.) Oh, Mary, why did you leave me? Living without you makes no sense to me. My life is empty. My life is sad. If you hadn’t left me, you wouldn’t have taken away the biggest part of me. But you did! You did! You left me and you took away the biggest part of me… (Cries uncontrollably.) Come back! Come back! I need you! I want you! I love you! Come back… (He looks at the audience. Very dramatically.) I’ll think about it tomorrow. After all, tomorrow is another day.

(We hear the theme song from “Gone With the Wind.” Blackout.)

THE END

[1]  This line and the next ones are taken from the song “If You Leave Me Now,” by Chicago.  If you want to see Chilean singer Nicole singing the song with the band themselves, go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id51WP4E5ho

 Some staging and follow-up suggestions:

You can use chairs and a table as scenery, trying to make it look like the couple’s home.

You can have different pairs of students present this sketch and create a different ending. Then the class can vote for the best ending.

After performing this sketch, ask the students to write a sketch using the same grammar structures. They can write a sketch about a teacher and a student, a mother and a child, etc.

 Carlos’s quiz sheets are at cgquiz.sites.uol.com.br

Guest post 3 – a Romanian story…

My third guest blogger is Cristiana Crivat from Romania. Her post is a rather eerie story about an ordinary every-day event…

Cristiana Crivat

My name is Cristiana Crivat and I became a teacher in the late 90s. I graduated Foreign Languages – French and English language and literature and I also have a degree in Translations and an MA in British Cultural Studies. I am a teacher of English and I am currently teaching in “Class”, a Language Centre founded by the British Council and the Teachers of English Association in Constanta, Romania. I am also the Head of Training at a drilling engineering training centre situated in the port.

My main focus is to create motivation and teach my students the way I know best. A special interest is cultural anthropology and for this reason I write from time to time about the shifts in society, about how life unfolds to me in a civilization that is constantly changing like fractals. Therefore, my goal is to instil good in people by motivating them to expand what they know and use their knowledge and creativity to better our lives.

My experience with teaching children and adults has reached the 12th year and I intend to continue and learn every day, as I love this job.

A visit to the Post Office

The other evening I went to the Post Office to buy a stamp for a card I had written and carried with me for too long. Of course the Post Office in my neighbourhood is open until 7 pm like it always was since I knew it. The building is an old one, flat and long, just the ground floor, no lights above the entrance, no Xmas thingies hanging…just a plain, unlit building with tall windows. Sunken in the dark as it has always been. Some things never change.

At first I thought it was closed for some strike reason as practically inside there were three dimmed neon lights in a room the size of a ballroom. It turned me back in time in split seconds, the same tiles on the floor, the same phone booths that nobody uses anymore, the same tall-to-my-chin tinted marble counter. It smells like iron scrap and humid walls.

The woman behind the counter with puffed-up hair like it’s candy floss looks at me over the shoulder under her glasses and asks: ‘What can I do for you?’

‘Do you have stamps for US?’

‘US?? Oh, no. I don’t think so. If you’re lucky, maybe I’ll find one…’

She pouts, looking through a pile of messy grey papers, but not really looking.

‘If I don’t find one, you’ll have to pay more. I can give you one for Europe and another stamp which covers the sum.’

‘Fine, how much more?’

She doesn’t reply.

Suddenly I remember the Post Office in Marseille, where I asked for some credit to charge my French card. The woman there had the attitude of a dead platypus too and when I asked if there are instructions of the credit I bought, she just said: “Je ne sais pas, presse 09 and parle avec le robot’.

This lady here is much scarier and I am almost riveted in this suspense and feel as if I am going to lose the big pot unless she finds that stamp.  ’Ah.’ She manages to find one. ‘There you go’.

She then goes back to loudly stamping her piles of papers and starts printing on a machine that is as old as the Post Office or older, one of those printers that go nee-ah; nee- ah; nee-ah – I can’t even remember their names. I can’t seem to be able to communicate with such people, not even at the level of “Have a good day!”

I go out of the Post Office and I notice two teenagers with checked bandanas, large jeans lowered to their butts, school-bags thrown on the ground, laughing and drawing graffiti on the wall: it reads – “Vampires will eat you”.

Couldn’t agree more with them.

Further on, there’s this greengrocer woman selling fruits and veggies at the bus stop outside on a very small and dodgy stall – she asks me who am I voting for in the elections.

I answer I want more oranges please and return the question: she proudly announces with a grin she votes for a man that wants to kill all Hungarians and shun them away from Romania, a man who would call for the armed forces if needed be, and there is a need because teenagers nowadays have no respect and spit on the streets and push old women on buses, and she feels this country should be taught a lesson and be run by force, by a strong hand.

‘Pretty lady, let me tell you how things are: we Romanians learn out of fear,’ she adds my pears in a very un-eco plastic bag.

Erm, fear? I leave her stall wishing her a good day and ponder: What did I learn out of fear? Hmmm, I must remember fear, it’s a pretty strong feeling… All I remember is a feeling – a grey, cold as steel bars, ash-tasting and pretty slithery down the spine feeling of fear when all the lights in the city used to be turned off for economy reasons and mom used to light up a candle so that I could learn multiplications by 6, 7, 8…etc. by heart.

Maybe that’s why I failed Arithmetic in high-school. Guess I was lucky I had a choice later to choose foreign languages, out of a hatred stirred by fear, fear of learning in the dark.

Cristiana blogs at bloggishinglyours.wordpress.com

Editor’s note: You can find another Romanian Post Office story at the Bucharest Life blog http://tinyurl.com/ycwy32f. The blog is written by a very funny British guy called Craig Turp. The Post Office picture on this page was taken from Craig’s blog  bucharestlife.net.

Guest post 2 – growing up in Canada

Welcome to Day 2 of Guest post week. Today’s guest-blogger is Vicky Loras, who first came to YHB’s attention when she contributed to the culture debate here a month or so ago.

Vicky Loras

My name is Vicky Loras and I am an English Teacher, born in Toronto, Canada. For ten years, my sisters and I co-owned an English School in Greece, The Loras English Academy, but I have now moved with my eldest sister to Switzerland, where I work as an English Teacher. I believe in teaching as an ongoing learning process, both for the benefit of the students and the teacher. One of my primary educational interests is celebrating diversity and multiculturalism in the classroom.

Canadian Education: Salad Bowl or Melting Pot?

Canada - the second biggest country in the world

It is a snowy morning in Toronto, Canada and all the kids are in the school yard for assembly before going into their classrooms to begin the day. All of them are singing the Canadian national anthem. The principal makes the announcements for the day and all the kids file into their classes, laughing and looking forward to a new day.

This was a typical school day of my childhood, growing up in Canada. I remember all the different faces of the children and the teachers. Each one with their own, unique characteristics. My best friends in school were Hungarian-Canadian and Portuguese-Canadian. I am Greek-Canadian.

One would notice that we all have a different first compound in our nationalities (Hungarian, Portuguese, Greek) and the same second compound (Canadian). And that is what I say when someone asks me where I am from – I cannot separate them. They are both characteristics of my make-up as a person.

Every day in school our lessons were interesting and exciting and one way or another, multiculturalism found its way into them. When it was story-time reading, it was not just Little Red Riding Hood or Hansel and Gretel; Ruby Bridges came into our lives, the little girl who was not allowed to go to school in the United States of the 1960s because she was African-American. Little Two Feet, a Native American boy who wanted to go and find a horse on his own when he had to do it as a rite of passage, was also one of the stories we were read to or could easily find in the library.

For show-and-tell we would be encouraged not only to bring in our new doll or toy car to show the rest of the class, or do a new dance or sing; we were told once in a while that it would be nice for everyone to share something about their second country.

Canadian athletes at the Beijing Olympics

I remember once saying the Greek alphabet out loud to class, or a Greek poem, or song. One of my classmates came into class in a sari and showed us the beautiful fabric and the meaning it has for Indian people. One boy brought in souvenirs from Trinidad and Tobago. Another told us about traditions and customs of their country.

For us, at such a young age, it was something magical, as we learned about how people lived in other countries and we were drawn to how different we all were. At the same time, we were learning how to celebrate this diversity and that it is what makes humans so wonderful, each in their own way. In any case, we came into contact with real facts of life.

In addition, we also learned to respect our own origins and the new identity, that of a Canadian, which would both co-exist and comprise a dual identity for all of us. That was the meaning of the Canadian national anthem: something that brought all children and teachers together early in the morning and served as a kind of bonding, but we were never to forget our parents’ or grandparents’ origins either. We were told never to forget where we came from and that Canada welcomed everyone no matter where they were from. This is a fact, as Canada has one of the most diverse populations in the world, which manage to live together harmoniously.

This has accompanied me to this day. I am very fortunate to have been educated in this system for my first school years. I always try to have my students’ think about multiculturalism and diversity and I bring them in stories or facts from all over the world to get them thinking about how to show acceptance to all people no matter what their country of origin is, skin color, religion or belief, or sexuality.

The most encouraging thing is that children, even very young ones, are very open to this kind of thinking and just need someone to show them what diversity is and how wonderful it is. The first people to introduce them to diversity after the parents should be the educators. It is the educators’ responsibility not only to transfer knowledge but also to introduce students to values. It is my belief that giving students a humanitarian knowledge is the first priority.

Vicky blogs at vickyloras.wordpress.com/

Guest post 1 – a Polish dinner party in Brazil…

Welcome to the first guest post on my blog. For the next week or so, this space will be hi-jacked by other great bloggers that I have discovered in my surf around the blogosphere. So first a warm welcome to Agata Zgarda…

Agata Zgarda

Agata Zgarda Chaves Nunes

I’m a teacher and coordinator of Cultura Inglesa in Teresina, Brazil. I was born in Poland where I graduated in bio-engineering and fell in love with English language. This love took me to London in 1998 where I spent three years studying and mastering my language skills. Thanks to my adventurous spirit and curiosity, I made my way to Brazil.

I started working as a teacher and discovered this is something I want to do in my life.  In 2001 I was invited to write a book “The Language of Hotels in English”, which was published in 2004. Nowadays, I mainly coordinate but still keep in touch with teaching.

In 2008, I attended the ACINE conference in Fortaleza and loved the experience. I’m planning to be a more frequent guest at any possible ELT conference in the future. It’s a great opportunity to meet wonderful people like Ken Wilson, who invite you to be a guest writer in their blog, which is a great honour.

Dinner experience

Polish casserole

One of the biggest pleasures in life for me is having friends come around, no matter where – Poland, England or Brazil. So once I settled in Brazil and considered my home a ‘friends friendly environment’ (read: fully furnished and decent looking) I decided to have some of my Brazilian friends over for dinner.

Following Polish tradition (‘czym hata bogata’- treat your guests better than yourself) I set up a date, time and menu.  I even called up my guests asking if there was something they considered not edible to avoid surprises later on, seeing somebody struggling with separating onions from the rest of the food and decorating the edge of a plate with them, or shyly smiling over a glass of water.

Before I proceed with the dinner description let me explain Polish habits regarding hospitality.  Whenever you invite somebody to your place, the food is ready and the table is set at the time your friends knock at your door.  Then you sit by the table enjoying your food and company until things disappear from the plates.  After this happens, you just sit around enjoying a nice cup of coffee/tea and a lengthy conversation that usually lasts till your guests decide it’s time to leave.

There I was then. Cleaning, cooking and checking the remaining details before my guests arrive. The time has come and… nothing. No big deal, even people in Poland get late from time to time. After about 30 minutes, I started to feel worried as my delicious casserole dish could turn into dry overcooked food in the oven.  One hour passed and believe me, you don’t want to know all the baroque chain of adjectives describing my friends that went through my head. Finally about one hour and some minutes later, my long expected friends knocked at the door.

Well, apparently surprises in Brazil are inevitable. I expected four people but seven appeared instead, to enjoy my cold (by that time) dinner.  I wasn’t prepared for seven people of course.

That was the first of a series of improvisation classes at the Great University of Brazil.

Agata Zgarda, Coordenação Acadêmica

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Unrecognisable? Who ARE these people?

Hiding behind elaborate make-up or simply face foliage, here are five of the world’s most famous actors (M/F). Tea and home-made cake for the first to identify them…

What? No British movies?

A number of people have complained about my list of favourite films. One person asked if I had stopped going to the cinema in 1984, and someone else pointed out that there were no British or Irish movies in the list. You could say that Carol Reed’s The Third Man is sort of a British movie, but I take the point. So, I started making a list of my favourite British movies, and realised that there were really rather a lot that I liked, so the following set of stills is of a random ten of my top 25 or so.

However, you won’t find much modern comedy in here, and certainly no elaborate re-workings of Britain’s colonial history. And you may note a bias to my home town of Salford and the two most famous old boys of my school…

The usual prize of dinner cooked by Mrs Wilson for the first person who can identify all ten films.

My ten favourite movies of all time – named at last!

Yesterday, I asked people if they could name my ten favourite movies of all time, and Michael Gerrity did it very quickly, and wins a meal cooked by my wife Dede. Anyone who has eaten chez Wilson will tell you what a fabulous prize this is. Here are stills from all the films. Scroll down to find out the names.

And my all-time all-TIME number one…

1     Some Like It Hot (1959) Billy Wilder

 Two musicians are on the run after witnessing a Mafia slaying. They take refuge in a women-only orchestra playing at a hotel resort in Florida. Wonderful ensemble piece, with George Raft playing a Mafia boss in exactly the same way he played it in ‘serious’ movies about the mob. Marilyn Monroe and her problems got all the headlines, but the real story of this film was that it showed that Tony Curtis (a) could act and (b) could do comedy.

2     Bad Day At Black Rock (1955) John Sturges

Tense drama about a one-armed man, played by Spencer Tracy, searching for a lost Japanese friend in a small remote community. Remarkably liberal film made during the Cold War era which questioned American attitudes towards outsiders.

3     Double Indemnity (1944) Billy Wilder

Who would have thought you could make such a taut thriller about an insurance claim?? Terrific performances from Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck (pictured) and the brilliant Edward G Robinson. Directed by the same man who made Some Like It Hot fifteen years later. Two more different films it would be difficult to imagine.

4     The Third Man (1949) Carol Reed

 I’m always amazed that so many people make Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane their number one movie of all time. It’s good, but not as good as this post-WW2 film noir starring Welles and Joseph Cotton which, at least for a while, made Vienna the spookiest place on the planet.

5     This Is Spinal Tap (1984) Rob Reiner

 The story of a rock band’s embarrassing slide into ignominy whilst on tour in the US, Spinal Tap is usually referred to as a ‘spoof rockumentary’. It’s generally regarded as a classic comedy, which it most definitely is. However, after seeing it about 15 times on video, I then saw it in the cinema. On the big screen, it comes across as a very sad, poignant film about friendship.

6     Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives Of Others) (2006) Florian Henckel

ALMOST the only film in the list that was made this century. Pre-unification East Germany and the nightmare life of those who were spied upon by the Stasi, the Secret Police. Brilliant central performance from Ulrich Mühe, who was himself under surveillance as an actor in East Germany, being spied on by his wife Jenny Gröllmann (although she denies this). An assured directorial debut by Henckel, who also wrote the screenplay. Mühe died aged 54 a year after the film was made.

7     Mujeres Al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios (Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown) (1988) Pedro Almodóvar

 In fact, I love all of Almodóvar’s films more or less equally, but this one was the first I saw, so it’s here to represent the whole œuvre. If you’ve never seen an Almodóvar film, get someone to buy you one for Christmas.

8     Y Tu Mama También (2001) (And your mother, too) Alfonso Cuarón

This Mexican film is a road movie, a rites of passage movie and a movie about love, death and destruction of the environment. And it has a fabulously sweet sad scene of a beach soccer game. With a wonderful central performance from Maribel Verdú, this is also the film that introduced most of us to Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal.

Many thanks to Nicholas for putting me right about who plays Luisa.

9     Black Cat, White Cat (1998) Emir Kusturica

An exuberant tornado of a film about drug dealing (sort of) and set around a gypsy wedding on the banks of the River Danube. The cast are mainly amateurs and the film contains some of the most unforgettable scenes of high farce ever. Anyone who has seen it will know what I mean if I remind them of the scene where a man cleans himself with a duck. A friend said it felt like people were throwing cans of paint at you right from the start.

10   Steamboat Bill Junior (1928) Charles Reisner

The last and best of Buster Keaton’s feature length films, made classic by the hurricane sequence which culminates in the scene where the front of a house falls onto Keaton (illustrated here). Keaton’s film crew tried to dissuade him from doing this scene because it was so dangerous, and none of them were able to look as it took place. You can see the whole film here http://tinyurl.com/yaakljh or if you just want to see the house falling sequence: http://tinyurl.com/y8sr6tv

Shanghai Surprise 2000 Part 2 – Brides in bowers, brides on beaches – and finally we do a SHOW…

  

The 2002 China tour team: David Drysdale, Sophie Russell, Matt Bates, Lizzie Lewendon, Stuart Nurse; this poster had nothing to do with the show, merely a pastiche on the poster which advertised the movie 'Trainspotting'

The story so far: March 2000: The English Teaching Theatre, five actors and your humble blogger acting as director and teacher trainer, have just arrived in Shanghai. YHB has woken from a post-long-haul-flight sleep to find the garden below his hotel room balcony full of women in wedding dresses. Now read on…

After my eyes and brain had adjusted (both to the light and the fact that the landscape was crammed with brides), I began to make sense of what was going on. There was a bower stage left as I looked at the garden. I think bower is the right word for it – a kind of wooden edifice with flowers and plants all over it. Poets write about bowers:

Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,

This lime-tree bower my prison! (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

Someone shouted from the bower and one of the brides pootled off in that general direction. Near the bower, there was a man in a brightly-coloured suit, and another man with some expensive camera equipment.

Ah, now I understood. The bride and groom were having their photos taken. I still thought it was a bit odd for 15 women to be getting married on a Wednesday, but eventually this was made clear, too. As some of you may know, it’s a Chinese tradition for the ‘happy couple’ to have their pictures taken in some leafy place a few days before the wedding.

The Rui Gin Guest House was a popular place for these photos, because of the abundance of flower-bedecked bowers.

The wedding dress the brides wear for the pictures is rented for the day. Their real wedding dress doesn’t make an appearance until the big day.

I didn’t have a camera with me that day, but here are some pictures I took during a later visit to China, when I once again bumped into a posse of brides having their pictures taken. These brides were further north in Qingdao, and it was a lot colder, which explains the unusual outfits.

A bride and groom having their pre-nuptial photos taken on a wet and windy beach in Qingdao, Shandong Province

 

 

 

A cheerful couple keep warm while waiting for their photographer to arrive...

Meanwhile, back in March 2000 and in Shanghai…

We were there to do shows, of course, not take photos of brides. So what actually happened when the actors got on stage?

Let me first remind you of something that had happened during the rehearsals for this tour. If you remember, my co-director Doug Case had had second thoughts about a line in the script early in the show.

Here’s a quote from my previous blog:

At that point (the end of the first song) four of the five performers exited, leaving the fifth alone on stage to do a short link into the opening sketch.

One of the lines that we usually gave to the link-person went something like this.

“Well done! You all sing BEAUTIFULLY! I can’t sing … but I AM beautiful.”

This, believe it or not, usually got a big laugh.

An actor called Mark Siddall was cast to do this link. When we were rehearsing it, Doug came through from his office and said: “I think we have to drop that ‘I AM beautiful’ line.”

Doug’s very reasonable point was that we really had no idea how Chinese teenagers would react to a line like that. Would they think Mark was being serious? At times like this, we tended to take the safer route, and the line was dropped. Mark looked a little disappointed, as it was his first funny line in the show. 

This is the story of how that line was reinstated in the show…

After a day to acclimatise to the time difference etc, we set off to do the first show.

The British Council minibus approached the first venue, a huge, beautifully-designed modern high school. There were more than 3,000 students at the school, some of whom lived there, so it was part boarding school.

As we drove through the monumental iron gates at the entrance, we noticed that all the pupils were wearing a uniform, a dark blue and white tracksuit, with red flashes on the shoulder. Most of them looked very cool indeed wearing it.

We were shown into the performance area, which was actually a raked lecture hall. Raked seating, seating that goes up in steps, is good for theatre – easier for everyone to see, and easier for the actors to see the audience. Lecture halls are usually NOT good for theatre – no wing space and no walk-round, which means that stage entrances can only be made from one side.

This was indeed the situation. However there was a door stage right leading to a large room which was perfect for our needs. There was also lots of fruit and water there, not something we would generally find backstage.

The group unpacked, set up and then went onto the stage – ie the front of the lecture hall – to do some vocal warm-ups. I checked that the lights were OK, and the actors went backstage again.

Everything seemed in order, and we told our very helpful organisers that they could let the audience in. The doors opened, and a noisy throng of 15-year-olds burst into the room, screaming blue murder, as 15-year-olds do everywhere in the world (except Finland). Within less than two minutes, every seat was taken.

Time for our first-ever show in China to begin…

The first thing that used to happen in an ETT performance was the pre-show. The five actors came out from back-stage without fanfare and walked into the audience. Each of the five wandered to a different group of students and engaged them in conversation. It was our way of checking out the language level of the audience and identifying any possible trouble-makers (who we would generally bring on stage later in one of the audience-participation moments).

Not all the actors liked the pre-show but everyone agreed that it wouldn’t be the same if we didn’t do it. Some actors were brilliant at it and Garry Fox, one of the actors on this tour, was one of the very best.

Garry emerged from backstage, started talking to the nearest group of students, and within seconds, there were gales of laughter from his corner of the room. I don’t know what he said, but he amused them enormously. The other actors began to engage with other sections of the audience, but most eyes were on the corner where Garry was entertaining his new gang.

I was by this time sitting at the back of the audience, at the top of the raked seats. After a few minutes, Garry trotted up the steps to have a word with me.

“These kids are excellent,” he said.

“It looks as if they feel the same about you,” I replied.

“I think Mark should put the ‘beautiful’ line back in,” said Garry. “Can I tell him to do it?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Let’s see what happens.”

The actors withdrew backstage and three of them, the non-guitarists, emerged almost immediately to open the show.

“HELLO!!!’

After two minutes of warm-up, the two guitarists came on. One of them was Garry, so the applause was amplified. The first song started. The response was incredible. It went down a storm, the applause was electric. Four actors left the stage, leaving Mark alone.

“WELL DONE!” he said, loudly and with feeling.

There was a massive round of applause, punctuated with whoops and cheers. I could see from Mark’s face that he hadn’t expected that.

“You all sing BEAUTIFULLY!” he said, enthusiastically.

The wall of applause and cheering was deafening. And the punch line still hadn’t arrived.

“I can’t sing….” said Mark.

“Yes, you can!” shouted one of the students, and the rest of the audience applauded loudly to show they agreed.

When the noise finally subsided, Mark delivered the punch line.

“….but … I AM beautiful!”

If Mark ever gets a bigger laugh in his theatrical career, I would love to be there to hear it. Laughter cascaded down the raked seating like a tsunami. I was beginning to worry that the audience were going to run out of energy before the first sketch started.

Thankfully, their energy levels remained constant, and it turned into one of the best ETT shows I can ever remember watching.

And so our China adventure started. There were two more tours to China in 2001 and 2002. There would have been more if we hadn’t closed down for good after the third one.

The 2001 ETT team who visited Hong Kong; Matt Bates, Lizzie Lewendon, me freeloading again, Angela Carr, Andrew Carr and Dominic Fowler

For me, this was the first of 12 visits to China in the next five years.

Why so many visits? Well, that’s another story…

Hope you enjoyed Shanghai Surprise 2000.