State of flux

Recent developments have radically changed two of the projects I'm working on which means that I'm now feeling in a bit of a state of chaos, in a good way, I think. This means that besides juggling last night in a flood-lit parking lot with the Beijing juggling club from 10pm till midnight last night (our venue was being deconstructed next to us as we played, ready for another shopping mall or similar) and English corner tonight, I've lots to be getting on with.

The talks from Strings 2007 (see previous posts for links) are coming online and they are good quality recordings on the whole.

A few quick photos from Tsinghua gardens from the weekend where I sat and worked on Saturday in the sun, overlooking the lily ponds.



Just a selection from those on my Flickr site.

English Corner ideas

English corner returned this week and I managed to collect a couple of hours worth of material this afternoon.

It's difficult to find material online, simply because the students are all pretty advanced and the last thing I want to do is make it feel like a class. Most online EFL information is either too basic or too much like being at school for my purposes. A game of Call my bluff turned out to work pretty well however.

Having chosen five words for each team, that the students were unlikely to know, I gave each of the two teams the correct definition and asked them to come up with two more false but plausible definitions for each word. They then explained all three definitions of each word to the opposing team who had to guess which one was correct. As always I was impressed with their imagination and lateral thinking. Spoonerism was defined to be the philosophy of one who is born into a rich family (with a silver spoon in their mouth), a somnambulist was an expert in cognitive psychology and ebullience was the license you needed to drive oxen in Spain. For anyone who's trying to come up with an English corner idea, this seemed to work well. The idea is simply to get them talking fluently which they're all doing now. I've got some debate plans afoot but this will take more than a couple of hours of planning to make a success of it.