Teaching

What aspects of your cultural heritage are you most proud of or interested in?

What aspects of your cultural heritage are you most proud of or interested in?

Right now, I am quite interested in (re-) learning the Welsh Language. Although I was born in Wales, I was never allowed to speak Welsh at home and my parents sent me to schools in which Welsh was never seen nor heard, let alone taught. That didn’t stop me from hearing out on the streets, reading it on the street signs, or visiting places whose names were only available in Welsh, or an Anglicized form of Welsh.

I am no longer an assiduous student of languages, but I get a Welsh Word a day by e-mail, and each word comes with an explanation of meaning and extended meanings. I also receive the words’ pronunciation and its phonetic changes (something peculiar to Welsh – they come in written form and can be quite complicated). Useful sentences are added – not long, but 3-4 seconds, repeatable ad infinitum, by reliable Welsh speakers, who often offer the variant pronunciations not only of North and South Wales but of other regions as well.

A great deal of linguistic and cultural history is wrapped up in language and the origins of the word are analyzed – sometimes going back to Indo-European, proto-Welsh, Medieval forms, and modern changes to the language. Emphasis is also placed on the survival of Welsh and its preservation, in written form, in Y Beibl Cymraeg, The Bible in Welsh. This fixed the language and helped enormously in its preservation.

I am also interested in Welsh Songs and Hymns. I already know most of the tunes having sung them in English during my childhood. Now I am learning them in Welsh and am currently working on the words to Calon Lan, one of my favorite hymn tunes. So, there you are. A new start at a very advanced age. A return to the past and an investment in the unknown future!

Poisoned Pawn

Poisoned Paw

Openings are so important.
They should be magnets
drawing the opposition in,
but sometimes they’re whirl-pools
dragging you down.

You try to hold your breath,
but you must breathe deep, let go,
go with the flow and prepare for
whatever awaits you in the deep.
Down there, it’s a different world.

Light breaks its black and white bishops,
and the knights walk a forked path
when not pinned down. When you lose
do you mourn for the simplicity of draughts,
or Fox and Hounds or do you strive
to establish, once more, your light in the dark,
down there, where no sun shines.

You are the glow-worm,
glowing where no light glows.
You are the line, the sinker, the hook,
the bait, the temptation that encourages
your opponents to sacrifice their own peace,
 to join you, and together, to swim, or drown.

Commentary:

My family didn’t play much chess. I bought my first chess set when I was ten years old, at Boot’s the Chemist, down by the market, in Swansea. I also bought Harry Golembek’s book The Game of Chess. I still have both the set and the book, seventy years later. Descriptive notation. Absolutely bewildering. I stared at the chart that gave the code names of every square and remained totally confused. I had to look up each square, from its notation, locate it on the chart, then move the piece on my board into the appropriate position. And remember, each side had exactly the same format – QR1, QKt1, QB1, Q1, K1, KB1, KKt1, KR1. Not quite a mirror image as the squares reversed themselves on the other side of the board.

I remember clearly the day that ‘Light broke where no light shone.’ I looked at the maze of numbers, and suddenly the pattern clicked into shape in my mind and I understood the whole idea of descriptive notation. Boundary Knowledge – you cross a boundary after days of bewilderment, and enter a new phase of enlightenment ‘light breaks where no light shines’. When I watched the film, The Poisoned Pawn, I remembered my own learning days in chess. Great fun, that particular opening. Do we take the poisoned pawn, or do we leave it? I will leave you to decide. But remember, it’s not called the poisoned pawn for nothing, damned if you do and damned if you don’t!

I used descriptive notation throughout my school days. I had one particular friend in boarding school who also played chess. We slept in the same dormitory, two beds apart. After lights out, no talking, no reading. Prefects prowled at night to enforce the rules. After lights out, one of us would call out ‘P-K4’ and thus the game started. We weren’t exactly talking, so it wasn’t easy to catch us. Every night, we played the game in our heads. A great memory trainer. Occasionally we managed to finish a game – not often – we were both too wary of Fool’s Mate and the simple early traps! Each day, during one of the school breaks, we would restart the game of the night before, from memory, and then play it to its end. We very rarely forgot the moves we had made and we virtually never disagreed on the board position.

This was totally unlike chess with my family. The grown-ups would all gather round the board. Their object was to distract me, to move pieces when I wasn’t looking, to remove (MY) pieces and leave me in a desperate situation. “‘Knock, knock!’ ‘Who’s that at the door? Go and look.” And off I would go to return to a battlefield that had totally changed its shape and mood. I would carefully reconstruct it, piece by piece, square by square. But I have never forgotten the black looks, the accusations of cheating, the fury of the old ones being beaten by the younger generation. In the end, nobody within the family would play me, unless I gave them a handicap by removing a rook or one of the bishops.

I didn’t discover algebraic notation until I lived first in France, and then in Spain. Algebraic notation. Each of the 64 squares had its own letter and number and, as a result, there was no way to confuse the position of the pieces. Staunton chess sets in England became a variety of different piece shapes on the continent and I often lost games when I forgot that the pawn had one circle, the bishop two, and the queen three, but they all looked like. Many a time I gave up a bishop thinking it was a pawn – oh that poisoned pawn again.

Now, in my dotage, I play chess against the computer. I haven’t played a live opponent for years. But I do have a chess book collection and I have played Fisher’s best games, and Fisher vs Spassky, and I have studied the Russians and how they play and think – very differently from me. And so, in my old age, I sit at the chessboard of my life, and I move the pieces here and there, and remember old friends, and how we shifted across the shifting boards of our days. So many pieces have dropped from life’s chessboard, but a few of us are left, and we move more slowly, but we wander on and on.

PS Moo, sometimes slow in understanding, offered me several paintings that suggested the aftermath of the Poisoned Prawn. When I explained the basics of chess to him, he said he didn’t have a chess painting he could recommend, so he suggested this painting – the correct way to teach. ‘You can’t teach chess,’ I said, ‘it is so instinctive.’ I took one look at the right way to teach and loved it. Here we go The Right Way to Teach! X – WRONG!

Why do you blog?

Why do you blog?

Good question. And there’s no easy answer. I guess, in my case, that my computer and my teaching (I have been retired for 16 years) were closely linked. I used programs like Blackboard and WebCT to teach hybrid courses, online and in the classroom. The online factors – chat groups, info sharing, course analysis – backed up the in-class material and gave students a space in what was, back then, late 20th Century, a new, but rapidly developing teaching space and style.

I found the development of a web page allowed me to preserve course notes, to construct class material, to allow students to access material (in their own time and space) and many found this useful. I also encouraged students to build their own web pages (and this was in the twentieth century, remember!). I also told them that they would probably, long term, find the web page building more important than the material that I was teaching them, for my material, like that of many other teachers, had a limited shelf life, and was not carved in stone and everlasting. This was particularly true as rapidly changing times, methodologies, and students – often from different cultures and with different styles of learning and levels of knowledge – spelled the end of the single course outline imposed, top down, on all members of the class.

When I retired from teaching, I kept the web pages I had built. Then, some five or six years after retirement, I decided to start a blog, rather than just have a webpage. Now, blogging has become a habit. Not an incurable one – just this year I missed four months ‘blog time and space’ on this web page / blog of mine.

But is this web page of mine a blog? Not really. I don’t sell anything on it, rather I give my books away to friends who wish to read them. I don’t charge for accessing my ideas, my thoughts, my creativity, my poetry, my photos, my paintings, my philosophy. My oh my, look at all those ‘my -s’!

At this point in time I am wondering whether to continue blogging or not. I have been approached by many people who wish to enrich themselves by enriching my webpage so I can then enrich myself. But I neither want nor need that. Rather, I follow the philosophy of Miguel de Unamuno, the great Spanish philosopher. “If I can reach out and help just one person,” he said, “I will not have lived in vain. And I guess that’s why I blog – to reach out on the off-chance that one or two of my words will touch someone in a meaningful fashion and help them to understand the world a little bit better and even, maybe, to help reshape their lives.

Name the most expensive personal item you’ve ever purchased (not your home or car).

Daily writing prompt
Name the most expensive personal item you’ve ever purchased (not your home or car).
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Name the most expensive personal item you’ve ever purchased (not your home or car).

I began by checking the meaning of item and found the following – an individual article or unit, especially one that is part of a list, collection, or set. Then I started to think about the meaning of meaning. Is an education an item? Is it an individual unit? Can it be considered part of a list, collection, or set? Let’s put it this way – I started school when I was four years old. I continued until I was 18. Along the way I collected many items of knowledge and many certificates to prove it. Then I went to Paris for a year to perfect my French – now that was an expensive adventure, I can assure you of that. Next came Santander, Spain, for a whole summer, to do for my Spanish what Paris had done for my French. I guess I didn’t really pay for these items, as my parents did, though I helped a little, with odd jobs here and there.

These adventures were followed by 3 years of undergraduate studies. They were covered in part by my local government authority, for which I am eternally grateful, also by my parents, and then I too assisted, again with odd jobs and summer work. Next came graduate school, at the University of Toronto. This was financed by my earnings as a Teaching Assistant and then a Teaching Fellow. My beloved and I got married in Canada, and she found work and also assisted with graduate school and the general cost of living. Assisted? She carried me along when the work load grew too heavy.

Then there was a Canada Council Doctoral Fellowship that helped finance two more years of study in Santander, Spain, where I completed manuscript research at the Biblioteca Menendez y Pelayo. This was followed by my first job, as a lecturer, at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. I taught full-time while completing my doctorate, but my education did not stop there.

I pursued coaching certificates with the National Coaching Certification Program of Canada and soon related coaching methods to in-class teaching methods. This revolutionized my teaching. As did a Certificate in Multi-Media Studies (at UNB), followed by courses in Digital Film and Video. Then came a Teaching Certificate from IATHE – the Institute for the Advancement of Teaching in Higher Education (based in Ottawa, but no longer extant). My Certification process was topped off by a Certificate in Creative Writing from Humber College, Toronto.

All of these degrees and certificates cost money. All contributed to the list of items that go together to form my education. But a personal education, in the meaning I give to the word, goes way beyond an accumulation of certificates. It is a life -long process of growth, personal development, and understanding, of reaching out to other human beings and helping them to create their own lives and their own paths to life-long learning.

Has this been expensive? You bet it has. But its worth is priceless compared to remaining static and enmired in a past knowledge that never develops and never grows, as sometimes – I might even write ‘often’ – happens when learning stops with the acquisition of the Ph.D.

When asked what I teach, my reply is always the same – “People, real, live people.” And that is something that I continue to do whenever and wherever I can. “To know the cost of everything and the value of nothing” – I scarcely remember – nor do I care to know – what cost I paid for each step along a road along which I am still travelling. But I do know and totally appreciate the value of the continuing education that I working so hard to buy.

What Bothers You and Why?

Daily writing prompt
What bothers you and why?
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What bothers you and why?

I went to the pharmacy today for my regular shots, booster and upgrade. The pharmacist asked me if I was allergic to anything. “Yes,” I replied. “I am allergic to stupidity.”

Stupidity is a singular thing, but it comes in many forms. The car driver who weaves his car through thick traffic, breaking the speed limit, threading a narrow pathway, overtaking on the inside, the outside, turning a two way street into a three way street by adding a third lane, even though there is oncoming traffic in the new lane he has built for himself. Such people rely on the charity of others to give way and make space.

Then there are incompetent teachers. Not all teachers are incompetent. Some are wonderful, kind, friendly, and comforting. Others are martinets, escaped from the army cage, and strutting the classroom, using the ruler to beat the students into submission. ‘My way or the highway,’ they claim, and what they say goes, even if it climbs to the height of stupidity or falls to the bottom of the well of incompetence.

Goya illustrated the nature of various kinds of stupidity in his wonderful etchings. Witches flying, donkeys braying, simple people worshipping the expensive clothing but never seeing the corruption it covers. So, turn to the Caprichos and the Proverbios, or, if you want to receive a real lesson in man’s inhumanity to man, look at the Desastres de la Guerra, the disasters of war.

Stupidity – a simple word – but with multiple meanings. What bothers me, and why? Stupidity, plain and simple, in its multitudinous forms.