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Language into Flow: A Tbilisi Experiment

Part One Autumn Term This will be achieved without memorizing without traditional memorizing without drills, without textbooks, without any written material at all, without taking notes, without homework - MICHEL THOMAS Anyone who acts without paying attention to what he is doing is wasting his life. I'd go so far as to say that life is denied by lack of attention, whether.[one is] cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece. NADIA BOULANGER Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain. ISAIAH

Three great teachers. From left to right Michel Thomas.

Ilya Gershevitch (Iranianist)

Nadia Boulanger (musicologist)

I : Aria A true teacher, I suggest, always comes across to the students as a bearer of a masked lucidity. For being a teacher is to experience and share existentially a momentary (or even prolonged) condition of experiencing a spiritual high; and is not to be confused with the humdrum profession of being a teacher i.e. through ones bearing, attitude, way of speaking, mode of dress etc,

Of course one can hardly aspire to the lucidity of the great teachers pictured above, two of whom I heard lecture; or that of Michel Thomas with whom one feels an immediate personal encounter if one follows his language courses. But just as Orthodox churches are full of icons, so it is good to have some role models and inspirations before ones eyes as one sets out to guide students, wherever possible, into the paths of flow and lucidity, via ones teaching, always aiming to make every mountainlow and the rough places plain. I see quite a strong link between language teachers and musicians (as well as language teachers and prophets). Musicians, too, may just occasionally experience the true meaning of being a musician . When everything gels, and thanks to a great soloist or a great conductor, the whole is suddenly more than the sum of its parts. * But people go to concerts expecting some sort of spiritual uplift; while students come to English classes even to private English classes frequently unwillingly or with small enthusiasm No-one would aspire to deliver an English lesson along the lines evoked by Tomasz Synalki, a Polish enthusiast of English via active memorization: You have to read, he complains, about Michael Jackson; or a woman who lived in the African jungle for two yearsand [then] talk about them with the other studentsThis is madness. All this nonsense that you dont care about. On the other hand, a teacher may take on the liminal role of a Magus, as in T.S.Eliots Four Quartets :

If you came this way, Taking the route you would be likely to take From the place you would be likely to come from, If you came this way in May time, you would find the hedges White again, with voluptuary sweetness. It would be the same at the end of the journey If you came at night like a broken king.

The teacher, I think, has much in common with the broken king. He is, in John Drummonds wonderful phrase, tainted by experience and the students may somehow sense that in this liminal figure, the foreigner teacher, there may lurk wisdom precisely because of some hurt, some injury, some gnosis acquired along the way: there may be in him some light-shedding potential, something experienced outside the confines of the known galaxy, which might rub off on the students in their turn

Landscape near Little Gidding (photo credit, laniersbooks.com)

Remembering, therefore, that my exoticism might contribute to my image (only that I am on the giving, rather than the receiving end, this time) I went about teaching three classes for about one term at Language Center, Tbilisi in late September 2013; but not without a certain trepidation, I may say, as this would be a sea-change after the cheerful disorganization, the large trashed classrooms, of Bolnisi Mesame School, where I have functioned in Georgia until quite lately. Language Center is a school where I am known, and it is open to progressive and innovative methods. Its ever-cheerful director, Ia Razmadze, is keen to use some non-standard methods, channeled by the native speaker English teacher. I also wanted to test out some intuitions I had developed over the summer regarding effective teaching practice; and perhaps to conduct one or two discreet experiments, adhering to a premise which I believe to be the corner-stone of all language learning, namely the need for a clear separation between top-down and bottom-up learning strategies, with nothing such as exercises manipulating the language as if it were some kind of algebra or those extraordinarily wrongheaded exercises in which you have to strike out what is wrong in between them... Because LC is a private and fee-paying - an after-school-hours language school rather than a state or public school (in Georgian parlance) the political playing-field between pupil and teacher is also subtly different. The students are in fact customers or rather their parents are the real customers to whom the product-testers the children report

But its subtler again. There has to be a sense of enjoyment, of having experienced something different and somehow renewing; of having obtained a growing grasp of things in the language as a result of a certain pedagogic interaction, in the minds of the children however dimly they may perceive such arcane ideas. And the parents, too, need to get some sense that from the charismatic and the other foreign teacher something desirable (and above all locally unobtainable) has been transmitted their childrenmuch as the Sacre was transmitted to Stravinsky In such a context, enforcing the need for diligence and discipline is a difficult grey area. Of the three groups I taught, in two where this issue surfaced; however some avuncular warnings and cajolings from myself, reinforced by no-nonsense directives from Ia, were generally sufficient to get things back on-track; and I could thus let the richness and impact of my materials and the welcome freshness of my approach gradually win over new converts. By far the best tactic to adopt in such a dilemma, I would say. My initial aims: 1. Penetration to exploit the dimly-perceived archetypality of the teacher; 2. Persuasiveness to win over hearts and minds (those of the children, this time, rather than those of my colleagues, as at Bolnisi; and where it did not really succeed) to a more relaxed and innovative way of studying; 3. Proliferation one might say, of both a nuclear and a non-nuclear sort: i.e. to advance and adhere to my emerging ideas and philosophy of how best to inculcate a sense of the English language in young minds; always being willing

to say. No, I was wrong there!; and always being ready to modify the project in the light of emerging needs of the students. My resolve was to conduct them from way-mark to way-mark on what I hoped will be an exciting learning journey.

II : Scherzo The beginning phase was characterized by all sorts of difficulties and ambiguities. There was, for example, a huge conflict between the demands of my teaching and that of my own learning of the Russian and Georgian languages (also at Language Center) which could be kept alive only by their drastic reduction. But the teaching, too, needed to be planned with regard to the huge stresses which living in Georgia visits upon the hapless migr: so it was already 50% of the way through the term before I felt that any kind of balance had been obtained; and fully 75% along the route before I felt that we were obtaining, in general, good to very good results. I resisted all attempts to increase my workload beyond four and a half hours a week in the hope that the philosophers stone, once discovered, could be prepared for the mass market quite easily The key thing being: to find it.

* The first class I encountered (consisting of four or five girls aged about 12) consisted of gentle, quiet and helpful girls, but they came across at first as quite shy and timid.

So I began, more or less in diagnostic mode, with a bottom-up approach, broaching words (listed by subject-area) which I had mapped and ordered in the dying embers of the Bolnisi School days, using as my source just the vocabulary in the first level MacMillan textbook. As Thoreau said: It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow men to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but I returned it sharper than I received it. Not unexpectedly, the girls had full mastery, for example, of the words for animals and weather and seasons; and I expanded into a BBC photo report of splendid autumn weather: Hyde Park at dawn, russet-tinged trees in a Birmingham park; and a breathtaking view from the Old Man of Storr, Isle of Skye. The students were able to use the given words recreatively and showed familiarity with much of the meteorological and geographical vocabulary which emerged from the splendid pictures and their captions.

The Old Man of Storr, Isle of Skye, Scotland

Towards the end of the first lesson we arrived at Category 3 of my MacMillan Word Map Fruits: apple, orange, lemon, melon, banana; and in a short space of time the girls covered an entire whiteboard with drawings of, and words for, not only fruits, but pastries, cakes, ice cream, soft drinks and more. There was a significant preoccupation with food and the pleasures of the table. As my taxi plied through the disordered Tbilisi traffic, I reflected that these girls were in fact at a higher level than I had imagined; and that we could soon try a different approach and work at a more advanced level.

Initial analysis of base words in the MacMillan Level One Textbook

III : Minuet and Trio Its always interesting, the process whereby it takes a while for a new class to establish its identity its characteristic emotional field in the teachers mind.

The other two classes I had at the Language Center were at first just like this: shapeless and indistinct in my mind to start with. I knew only that I had on my hands one group of jumpy boys, aged 8 or 9, leavened by a chirpy girl, Nino. Boys who were keen to fiddle with, handle, manipulate and be distracted by every small object within reach; and engage in constant banter and self-induced hysterics (battling the Hydra-headed proliferation of mobile phones, in some cases almost larger than the students themselves, being a constant battle for the teacher) The third class, by contrast, an evenly-balanced group of boys and girls of about fifteen, seemed friendly and capable enough; but appeared to be in a state of posttraumatic stress, after a taxing school day. Here banter, hysterics and fiddling with mobile phones were also met with; but I did not sense that pullulating uncertainty generated by a very deformed emotional field noticeable among the eight-yearolds; and which at first was so very hard to gauge and combat Soon, all three classes would be running reasonably smoothly at full steam; but not without quite a few revisions and reconnaissances along the way. I next tried the quiet twelve-year-old girls on a series of dialogues a mini-drama, really of my own invention, in which I had imagined them showing a foreign acquaintance of their own age around Tbilisi, going shopping at a large hypermarket, and being responsible for family catering for one week. This was in response to the groups obvious interest in exotic foodstuffs. But in spite of my jolly. well-characterized scenarios, full of witty repartee, there was no spark, no initiative from my group: the students seemed psychologically out of their depth; and I realized that what I needed to address head on was exactly what was holding them back: their timidity, immaturity for their age and general lack of chutzpah; rather than their intellectual side, or their language learning skill-

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set. So it was that we next came with success on to the medium of film: Brief Encounter and Babettes Feast. But more of that later.

IV : Allegro ma non troppo

For the shell-shocked group, our real work was preceded by some Blueprint

Intermediate which I started them out on more or less for diagnostic purposes.
Students will be blas when confronted with any sort of textbook they have seen hundreds of them and thats why its very important to give them in general something different; just as a cordon bleu chef does not normally cook with supermarket-prepared items But as I was feeling my way, one day I forgot to bring the Blueprint textbooks and so was forced to dumb down even further, The only lesson materials I had that day were some line drawings for colouring in, derived from photos of fruits and foodstuffs, intended for the quiet girls rather than the fifteen-year-olds; with an associated quiz, where there were sentences-with-blanks about each picture, (An enterprising website allows those who wish it to upload photographs and for a small fee receive back line drawings.) The images were not without subtlety persimmons in Japan, apple trees in Almaty, Kazakhstan (apple comes from an old Central Asian root, alma) and true British bread and butter. It took some guessing which were which, and the quiz was by no means obvious. The sentences were transferred by the students to the back of each completed image. I took feedback that this had been a little too easy in my stride; I had made my

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point; the soil had been loosened; and now the seeds of true learning could be sewn. * Before leaving for Georgia I had bought a Sony eBook Reader of a fairly primitive sort, at length uploading, as an interesting experiment, the musician Harold Bauers outr autobiographical volume, His Book.. Quite by chance I discovered that in this obscure volume of artistic reminiscences from an excellent violinist and pianist (whose heyday was in the Thirties) there was an excellent and interesting section about many aspects of life in London in the late Victorian era, specifically the 1880s. Bauer succinctly covers education, civic beliefs, tradesmen, food, transport, fashions, the class system and primitive technology. The English was easy and the subject-matter compelling; especially given Georgias retarded evolution in one or two of these areas. Here is a sample or two:
My mother and my aunt taught me reading and writing and the elements of music. My father taught me a little arithmetic, and twice a week two gentlemen, one French and the other German, came for an hour or two to give us (my sisters and me) some "simple notions" of history, geography, and the languages. They were poor teachers, and I was a worse pupil. I hated both them and the tasks they left me to perform, which I did badly and unwillingly. Nevertheless, I did want to know something about the world and natural science, and I remember begging my father frequently to tell me about what I called the "ologies," and hoping that he would bring me home one of those little primers over which I loved to pore, even though I understood them only partially. I had the usual boy's interest in mechanics, and sometimes, when I look a clock or some other article apart. I succeeded m putting it together again. I made telephones, electric batteries, and other apparatus, and amused myself in countless ways. The one useful thing that survived from this was my acquisition of the principles of musical-instrument making, and I have always been glad that I learned how a violin and a piano were constructed.

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The ease of my father, earnings were inadequate to make any savings, and we lived in respectable poverty, practicing the strictest economy. Living was cheap and simple enough in many respects. Many things which today are considered indispensable and are cheerfully paid for had not yet been invented or were luxuries in the hands of the wealthy. Most fair-sized houses had one bathroom, but the general practice was to wash in individual tubs. This is why most of the middle-class people used to smell of soap. They never had extra water to wash the soapsuds of their bodies. The one bathroom was usually provided with a large sponge used by the entire family. Central healing was unknown. There were gaslights in some of the bedrooms, and candles were used elsewhere. Electric light had not come into general use, and the street gas lamps were turned on each evening by a man carrying a long pole with a lighted torch at its upper end. The incandescent gas mantle was a great innovation. There were no telephones, no radios, no fountain pens, no typewriters, no electric domestic appliances of any kind. We made toast over an open fire with a long toasting fork. Laundry was done mostly at home. There was a mangle over the washtub: and I used to turn the handle. Meat way roasted in front of the open kitchen fire, turning it round and round on a spit revolved by clockwork which I was permitted to wind up. Cakes were usually made at home, as there were very few bakers shops in the vicinity, and the cakes made there were both poor and expensive. The Muffin Man, carrying his wares carefully blanketed on a shallow tray balanced on the lop of his head went his rounds on late winter afternoons, ringing a bell, just as in the time of Dickens.

It was tremendous stuff, I recorded several sections on audio-tape and played the tape to the students over four sessions. Meanwhile, they followed the text onscreen and made notes and drawings on whiteboards. There was more or less complete attention, and we discovered interesting information about ice houses, metro systems, early typewriters (and the hazards of jamming your fingers between the keys!) and ways food could be delivered by horse and cart. There were occasional echoes of the life of my paternal grandfather and greatgrandfather in the outer Eastern suburbs of London; and reminders of the acute poverty (allied to a great desire for self-improvement) in which they lived.

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V : Appassionato In general these students seemed to resonate to what I could occasionally sew into my lessons of personal, family reminiscence. This is maybe because they sense dimly that in Georgia there has been such a cut-off, strange, abnormal history that everyone, nowadays, is looking out for indices of normality, much as Robinson Crusoe might daily go down to the beach in order to descry a sail. For example, the quiet girls were especially interested when I noted that the ages of the young women in the film Brief Encounter (which we studied next) and thus their dress fashions, and social behaviour, and mode of speech - coincided almost exactly with those which my mother and aunt would have had at the time of the films making (1946). Here is the end of the film, where we experience the dual counterpoint of the storyline. This clip (where Laura feels dizzy after the final departure of her lover and momentarily toys with suicide under the train wheels as a solution to her dilemma) corresponds structurally exactly with the beginning; but there, instead of feeling dizzy, Laura goes out to watch the express go through [the station] while her talkative companion (who by her chattering unwittingly ruins the magic of the lovers last moments before they collectively enact their vow of separation) buys chocolate from the refreshment room counter. Nonetheless, in this same scene at the start of the film, Laura also feels unwell, and sheds crocodile tears over this when she arrives home; we already sense that she is covering up for some act of infidelity. Not only does David Leans filmographic tactic perhaps echo, intuitively, the true nature of reality, where in quantum

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physics, an event has a dual modality: two ends; but the openings surface content chocolate bars and tea-spoons, Tristanesque feelings and thoughts of life and death in other words, the prosaic and the profound work off each other to achieve a perfect ironic balance, transcendently underscored by Rachmaninovs music.

A diagram of a wormhole, a hypothetical "shortcut" through the universe, where its two ends are each in separate points in spacetime. (Credit: Wikimedia commons/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license) [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131205142218.htm : You Can't Get Entangled Without a Wormhole: Physicist Finds Entanglement Instantly Gives Rise to a Wormhole. Below: one of the greatest moments in all music: the E flat clarinet takes up the yearning theme. (Movement begins in C sharp, t he polar opposite to the C Minor of the opening; but has moved into sulnlit E Major before you can blink an eyelid)

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Laura and Alec: a different type of entanglement; exquisitely mapped by David Lean

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hubyFqSUaGA See also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f52jjwOuVQk (Rachmaninov)

Brief Encounter kept us occupied for several weeks: unraveling the plot, picking
out key expressions; looking indeed at the work as a piece of film art; sensing the decisions taken to relate the story to the music; looking at the interesting web site of the location where it was filmed, Carnforth Station, Lancashire; and relishing some of its greatest lines. For example this reverie beautifully enmeshed in the start of the film, while the music surges is worthy of Shakespeare, a crystalline emotional lodestone glowing in the cosmic dark:
This can't last. This misery can't last. I must remember that and try to control myself. Nothing lasts really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long. There'll come a time in the future when I shan't mind about this anymore. When I can look back and say quite remember every minute, always, always to the end of my days. peacefully and cheerfully how silly I was. No, no I don't want that time to come ever. I want to

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VI : Subito giocoso

The key point about the sentence in English or any other language is that it is capable of being analyzed as consisting of three or a maximum of four elements to which (for the sake of simplicity and cuteness for Bolnisi students) I had already given the names: PEOPLE, POLICE, SECURITY POLICE and LANDSCAPE. At any given time, usually only three such elements are present The subject of a sentence can frequently be subsumed under People; verbs are of two types, i.e. those which partially define what follows (Police) and those which

totally and necessarily do so (Security Police). Landscape picks up everything

else. A more conventional analysis would be Subject-Verb-Modal or Auxilliary Verb-Complement/Object. Its interesting that Subjects and Complements originate from the objects in the world about which one wishes to speak; whereas verbs and especially modal verbs are mechanisms language uses to narrow down the choice, arrive at clarity This almost seems to suggest paradoxically that language pre-dates man; which is nice if you believe that, In the Beginning was The Word. I can guarantee that within half an hour of applied study, intermediate level students of some intelligence can analyze almost any sentence in English correctly under my fourfold schema as soon as they have picked up two key principles: (a) that there may be some jumping about to and forth under the different headings; and (b) that with portmanteau sentences (typically those with dependent clauses) you need to make a fresh start from the LH side (People)

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for each new clause. A third principle might be that there are several possible right answers. And so it turned out with some of the students in my fifteen-year-old group; although what I was working towards a language board game involving the physical deposition of the component parts of a sentence in specific rule-bound locations was intended not for them initially, but rather, for the youngest group. I felt that the act of placing cardboard letters or words on a board ought to concretize the act of linguistic thought involved in producing language in a more conscious way than does merely the writing up of a sentence on the board albeit analyzed under the four headings just mentioned. Secondly, I felt it had the great advantage if practiced over time of reinforcing unconscious memory; an area which may be the most powerful player in the complex of mechanisms which are involved in the acquisition of a new language. * Beginning with the idea of catalyzing the students in the youngest group into the skill of being able to come up with English sentences about the themes of natural phenomena, weather and seasons, and animals (which we had started with using the MacMillan sample) I imagined some plausible statements about the animals, such as , The eagle spends its life in the air, each of which would need an article, subject noun, verb and complement; and allotted to each functional type of word a characteristic shape and colour. A technical ruler allowed me to draw a variety of shapes. Here we see the guiding game plan and (following picture) the shapes being drawn out and transferred to card.

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After this, it was a question of mass production of possible words or phrases.

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Some individual letters were available from a previous game; and I laid them out initially in an egg carton. Next, I had to give attention to the playing board itself. To add interest, I decided to superimpose the grid for making words on a map of Georgia. The different Georgian provinces thus coincided roughly with different semantic areas, definite articles, for example, being located in Abkhazia. This was where play would begin if you made a sentence beginning with a, an or the.

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When the playing board was eventually finished (with the help of some students from Bolnisi School) the main shortcomings which I discovered on trialing it were that the word slips were too flimsy and that I had no real rules. Moreover the children especially when I introduced the notions of prices and money (paying to acquire a word or letter to play) became over-excited and it was near-chaos. The word slips were made more consistent and sturdier and stored in match boxes, which had their own specified place of layout on or near the playing board. The game, ready to be played, looked something like this:

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Money, and a separate playing board for dice (q.v.)were added. The idea was that a dice score should designate the money available to spend, to buy either complete, pre-composed words or individual letters which might constitute a word. The sentences formed would be laid out on the board in the right locations. A trial with the oldest children suggested that the aim ought to be (a) to try and complete a full sentence with the money available from ones score; and (b) to end up with as little spare money as possible.

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And as a prelude to a second attempt with the younger children, to calm them down and get them in the mood, I used some exercises from the excellent Collins

Enchanted English series, where winsome pleasantries are allied to necessary (and
quite traditional) theory. The authorial self-parody and sense of wearing knowledge lightly is highly attractive to children of eight or nine who are keen to use make-believe as an escape from pressing reality; but this is not a TEFL book; its one intended for Key Stage Two English schoolchildren.

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I also presented a short Powerpoint series of about forty usable sentences. These I recorded on audio-tape, synchronizing the timings with the Powerpoint slide changes. The children were completely captivated and silent: the only trouble was that when we tried the game again, they were still too ebullient and effervescent.

* Following the success of the medium of film with the middle group, I then decided to try Avoir et Etre the classic French movie about a provincial French school with the youngest students, in order to leaven the mix, raise absorption levels, and give them some new materials about which they could eventually use to make sentences in the context of the board game, Here are a couple of iconic

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images from the film which I stiched into another Powerpoint presentation, and on YouTube, the entire film is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hZDiPbALRA

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In the New Year, my last classes would, I hope, make a link between the subject matter learned from the different films viewed, and my board game, where sentences about the characters encountered as well as on more general topics could be deployed. But for now it was Christmas, and the term ended on a high note not without flow especially in the Christmas pop song, which I felt ready almost to choreaograph and in the sense of blending (if only for an instant) into a learning community. Thats more easily achieved in the context of fixity which a state school represents, true; but there too often its usually occluded by extraneous bourgeois values which schools always feel to ready to high-jack.