The little things that cross my Mind

I like going to the market on weekends in autumn when the weather has begun to cool and the vegetables have begun to come back in season. In the summertime, it’s just too hot for many vegetables to grow well, but I guess some still do. Mangoes grow well when it’s hot; yet once again the mango branches bearing fruit at the wrong time of the year are extending ever closer to my balcony in search of the energy efficient LED light bulb. Taiwan is unique so I’m told, as it has three growing seasons per year as opposed to one or two, as many places only do. If I had a bigger refrigerator at my apartment, I’d probably buy way too many fruits and vegetables. So I guess it’s actually a good thing that my fridge is not so big.

It’s a weekend and I’ve got midterm exams to write or projects to create to give students something to do and/or show for the ritual we call exam week. For the most part, I’m once again leaning in the direction of doing projects instead of traditional kinds of tests. Plus, the projects are usually easier for me to design up front (as opposed to creating the tests and having to later check them). Furthermore, as students have to post their projects to the internet, they, as well as I will then have “proof” (or something like that, like a representation perhaps) of their learned skills. And in today’s world of packaged products, having a well designed online portfolio doesn’t hurt when it comes to finding a job just out of university.

Thus, I endeavour to make sure in all of my classes that students are able to walk away with a certain amount of academic work that will remain attached to their names (as part of their internet portfolios) as proof of the skills they’ve acquired. Ok, I’m laughing a little and while I would like to say a lot more about the education system, I consider myself to be like one of the frontline soldiers, and while I tremendously enjoy what I do, I also view myself, as well as other educators, as having the ultimate responsibility of deciding which information to let through and/or focus on.

Thankfully at the university level, instructors have a tremendous amount of discretion when it comes to deciding which content to focus on. For example, in two of my high level classes with very bright, curious and even sometimes courageous first year students, I’m required by someone, somewhere out there to use an extensive number of publications (can you say information overload?) while I’m also strongly encouraged to prepare these same students to participate in the upcoming university wide slide presentation contest on fake news. So, do I focus primarily on the publications consisting of globalist propaganda or do I lean more in the direction of learning about fake news?  Of course it's a difficult decision, but someone  has to make it.

So, I weigh the pros and the cons. In my left hand are the publications comprised mostly of Hollywood chatter and globalist propaganda bestowing the benefits of carbon taxes and what not, while in my right hand is an opportunity not only to teach students how to design presentations and present them, but also to introduce them to the reality of fake news and the business of corporate/globalist propaganda. Of course, it’s an easy decision for me, and to top it all off, the proof of the valuable skills that the students have acquired gets posted to their blogs as part of their internet portfolios for all the world to see.

As I’m on various lines of thought in this post, I think I’d like to open up a couple of other points that have been on my mind recently. The first has to do with my dreams of late. While I’m often familiar with the characters in my dreams even though their faces don’t appear to be the same as the faces that I see in my imagination or I see when I’m awake, I still recognize them for who they represent to me, and the same applies to the area of the environment in which my dreams take place - while I recognize the areas for the places they represent, the pictures I remember or see when I’m awake often seem completely different. Perhaps it has something to do with how my mind translates reality into pictures or holographic images for me for me to make sense of. While I do appreciate viewing colorful pictures, I would also like to see everything as it really is - instead of just the pictures.

The other point that I’ve been wanting to bring up (for the record of course) is the noise inside of me, in the space between my ears. I guess it’s the system that I hear whenever I’m quiet or simply decide to tune into it - in that space that is my mind. It’s almost always with me; however, the other morning when I got up and 5:00 am for a chat, when I looked, the frequency noise wasn’t there and for a moment my mind was just quiet. Why is that, I wonder.

Redefining and Living Words in the Classroom

Although I regularly get up in the morning and pick a word a word to express for that day, I have yet to expand my living-word vocabulary beyond 5 or six words. Let’s see, there’s joyful, joyfully interacting, excitedly engaged, interested and maybe one or two that just aren’t coming to me at this moment. Or perhaps it’s just four words and in looking at these words, I notice they’re pretty closely related, meaning there’s not much difference in how I actually live these words, i.e., their definitions are all grouped within my idea of joyful expression.

There is also the word, care, which I guess I have in word and deed embodied as a part of me or signature of who I am, how I relate to others, wherein it’s no longer required for me to constantly remind myself be caring. I have become that word and I am and I really thankful that I chose this word as my first word to embrace, understand and live as a doing in relation to people, animals that things.

So I guess it’s now time to expand my living word vocabulary. The only problem is, I’m not really an expert at redefining and living words. Furthermore, I’m not even that  motivated to do so. My solution (considering the position I’m filling in the world system), if you’re not really sure about how something works and you want to motivate yourself to be better at it, why not teach it others and learn it together? Thus begins my journey to teach while I learn, specifying myself while expanding my living-word vocabulary for the purpose of seeing, realizing and understanding my potential.

As I’ve said to myself many times before, I’m not here to redesign the wheel. It’s already been done and if there is a better design to be created, there are others out there who are probably in a better position to do so. Or maybe I will come up with some suggestions on how to streamline the process. Either way, I’m thankful there are already solutions, examples and lessons on redefining and living words which are available on the internet at SOUL, the School Of Ultimate Living on Facebook, Youtube and a soon to be created Homepage on the Web. Now, it’s simply a matter of deciding how to proceed in the classroom, introducing the process, teaching and learning while I teach. This where some experimentation comes in.

In the first week’s lesson (two weeks ago), “How do we create ourselves and our reality?” I talked about how we create ourselves and our reality as the words we think, speak and write. Then we watched the first twenty-five minutes of Introduction to the School of Ultimate Living. Then in the second hour of class, we all wrote blogs on the topic of What is the meaning of Life and What is my Purpose? Originally, I had only planned to do this with three of my classes. However, since students seemed more interested than usual (lol), I ended up expanding the lesson to six different classes during the week.

In the second week, last week I decided to present students with some scientific background in relation to the importance of words. Even though the Bible says, in the beginning was the word and the word was god (or something like that) and the Koran says in the beginning was the word and the word was creation (or something like that), I still felt that it was useful/important for me to also present students with a scientific basis for going into this topic. Thus for the second week of lessons, I explained my interpretation of the discovery that Russian scientists have made in relation to words and DNA. Then we read some of an article titled, Scientists Prove DNA Can Be Reprogrammed by Words and Frequencies. After discussing the article, I asked students to do the following:

In pairs:

1. Choose one word that you would like to be more a part of your living. For example, if you often find yourself getting impatient with others, perhaps you could choose the word, patience. Or if you often find yourself feeling disinterested, you might choose the word interested or engaged.
2. Use your smartphones to define the words and then add sentences to the definitions to fit into your life, friends, relations, etc.
3. Note! Be as specific as possible in describing how you plan to live these words.
4. Share your results in groups and with the class

Next week, I plan on watching another SOUL video. I’m not sure yet which one I’ll use; however, in consideration of attention spans, I’ll probably choose one that is not more than around sixteen minutes. Then after discussing the video, we will write blogs expanding on the words we’ve chosen. Specifically, in the introduction or first paragraph, we will look at and explain how we often experiences ourselves other than how we would like to be and then how each we would prefer to experience ourselves. Then in the next one or two paragraphs, I will ask the students to present their redefined word or words and specify how they plan to live and express that in relation to others for a whole week starting with sounding that word when they wake up each day.  

Interestingly, even though very few of my students bring laptop computers to class, we still hardly ever use any paper. These days, instead of opposing the smartphone in the classroom, I embrace it as a useful tool (but not for playing video games in the classroom, lol) and students seem to enjoy writing so much more when they’re holding onto their smart phones.

So this is my plan so far for introducing students to redefining and living words as a way not only to create themselves, but also to practice English and become better writers in the process. Overall, I would say it’s a win win situation/process for all involved. Plus, whenever students write and post blogs in the classroom, I also write and post as an example.

Process Update – Part II, july 1, 2016

As I was saying in my last post (here), my mission or intention was to somehow get into the education system at the university level in Taiwan and create change for the better from within. I did not really have a long term plan as to how I was going to do this; however, I did figure I would have a lot more autonomy at the university level than at other levels that I had been teaching. Of course, a big part of my decision also had to do with money, having a more stable salary and a feeling that it was time once again for me to get out of my comfort zone home.

In my first year at the university, I did a lot of teaching English and attempting to explain issues that, I later realized most students did not have a basis or reference to understand. Then, in the second half of that year, an opportunity came along to design a new course for the university, which we would use to compete with against other Taiwan universities for funding from the Ministry of Education. I took this opportunity very seriously, spending a lot of time researching and writing with the intent of inputting words into our proposal that were specifically targeted at winning the competition and getting funding so as to legitimize the topics that I cared to teach. I inputted a lot of broad international topics so that, once we won, I would have the freedom to choose which topics were most relevant. We ended up getting second place in Taiwan, which was cool because it indicated to me that people high up in the ministry of education were considering the necessity for a change in the focus of education. Luckily, the topics that we had inputted – the environment, war, terrorism, democracy, money, culture, etc., are broad enough to have given me as much leeway as I wanted to uncover and explore with all of my classes, consisting of almost four-hundred students, issues that I considered relevant, yet too often ignored.

Thus, beginning in my second year at AU, I readjusted my focus of “English” teaching and learning away from acquiring information and skills relevant to achieving better standardized test scores, to that of acquiring knowledge and information relevant to taking responsibility for humanity and our planet as a whole. The biggest challenge for me has been 1) to get students to care about what’s going on outside of their worlds and 2) to get them to realize that, through our words and deeds we have the opportunity and/or responsibility to create change for the better. I introduced issues such as democracy, inequality, money and false-flag terrorism and instructed students on how to use some of the technology to enable them to collaboratively assess issues, develop solutions and promote their solutions to the rest of humanity.

Towards the end of my second year, I had been wondering how much of a difference my input has had in our university and the educations system as a whole. As for Asia University, I could se, through other students’ presentations that, geopolitical topics were now starting to be addressed, not always the way I wanted them to be though, lol. Then just a few weeks ago, I was encouraged to join a group of teachers visiting one of Taiwan’s national universities to view their end of the year presentations. To my surprise, every one of the their topics was of the topics were of the topics that I had deliberately inserted/inputted into our original proposal for the Global Citizenship and Cultural Literacy course that we as a group had designed. I guess that, because we took second place in the contest, other universities (or at least this one) figured that this is the direction that the Ministry of Education wants to go. For me, this is an indication, as in feedback that, the effort I have been putting into changing the system from within has been having an effect, much more so than I had imagined.

Now, I am on vacation and intend to refocus my attention back onto me, my personal process. However, I am also formulating plans (such as democratic learning, letting students decide what to study) for next semester and I will probably get to this topic in the couple of months and included it in another post. Finally, I would like to say that, English teaching no longer has to be done with the focus only on learning to speak the language. We as instructors have the ability, a responsibility to expand the learning process to that of acquiring relevant information and knowledge so to best assist all of us to understand ourselves as the creators creating the created.

Process Update: Part I - June 25, 2016

I guess it has been about one year since I last wrote one of these updates, where I am and how I am doing. The plan was and still is to change me to a point of responsibility to stand within and as (as the saying goes) the system and change it as I change me.

A couple of years ago, I realized that, I still had quite a few limitations, real or perceived that I was still holding onto. Therefore, instead of attempting to influence or move the entire globe of humanity, I decided to focus on what I was already familiar with, the education system in Taiwan and to an extent, mainland China. My plan was simply to do as I had been calling for others to do, stand within and as locations of the system and change it from within.

In short, I chose a university that was close to home and in very nice area in central Taiwan. The name of the university is Asia University, Taichung Taiwan. It took me about one year to get a job there. I spent the first six months setting up my getaway (LOL) and I used the second six months to target my words very specifically so to do everything I possibly could to get that job. Whow! If only we humans (including me) understood fully the extent or impact our words have on creation, as in who we are and the outcomes we influence... Actually, I’m not certain how much would change with just understanding, because in essence we already understand how we create. The problem is that, we as a whole have not yet taken responsibility for our creation from the starting point of equality and oneness with what is best for all. This is a point that is changing rapidly and I’ll probably expand on it a little later.

My plan was (and still is) to remain positioned at Asia University for 3-5 years. I am now in the last week of my second year and I have signed a contract to do a third year. The school has not yet signed my contract; however, I guess they are probably going to sign it. This afternoon, I will attend a Ministry of Education conference on education reform in Taiwan. Thirteen universities will be there to present the outcomes of their reform projects that they/we have been implementing over the past two semesters. I am scheduled to present a couple of ppt slides and perhaps say a few words. I will probably have about five minutes. I have an idea what I will perhaps say; however, having practiced opening up points when it’s time to open them up, I have come to agree that there is little sense in attempting to plan every word that I am going to say. Actually, my boss or a colleague  may end up using all the time, lol. So, I will let you know (read inform you) how that goes in part II of this process update. There is so much more to say. Having completed a part of a mission that I have undertaken, I now plan to refocus a lot more effort unto my personal process. I begin to refocus by posting part I of this update.