The summer of 2009 - free and easy

The attached photo was taken on my very last day of school - July 1...most students are happy that the second semester turned out nicely for them...some will have to pass a make up exam in August and the option to repeat the semester is also available for those very few who didn't quite make it.

For me it was time to clear my desk and to return all keys to the office - I had hoped to be able to return for yet another semester or two of subbing ( substitute teaching )but that didn't materialize - a colleague will be back from his sabbatical and another colleague increased her teaching load - this meant redundancy for me and my partner colleague H.T.

I am confident that something very useful will come out of this - and one great option that would otherwise not be available for me is to visit my cousin Didi in Canberra,Australia for two exciting weeks in November....

Good Bye in 100 seconds - Stufen ( Mai 1941 ) H.Hesse

My teaching contract at the college is about to expire and a colleague will take over and teach the new semester......I keep telling myself that this change will - like all other ones before - be a change for my own good...and who knows what LIFE has in store for me next...I enjoyed my one year teaching "gig" at the college and I thank my students for the learning experiences they provided me and also for their patience and good will.....some will have to either repeat the semester or to explore alternatives..the core group however has established itself and I am optimistic and confident that most of them will graduate and pass their Abitur in two years from now....I hope they will still remember me by then and send me an invitation to their graduation party....enjoy the attached poem by Hermann Hesse - I find the lyrics very touching and therefore quite appropriate for my departure.... the text is spoken in German.

Digital Inclusion

A friend of mine sent me this funky video - it pretends she was in Cannes and part of the glossy people there..then the company behind it allows for entering your own name into it - in other words to include myself digitally...see the result for yourself:

Ist die Luft schon raus?

I have not been blogging for quite some time - and there can be only one explanation: somehow my motivation to blog for myself and to encourage my students to do likewise has hit a snag - in Germany we say: Die Luft ist raus...and that may well be the case now that we will have only seven English sessions before the official summer break starts on July 2...there are however two more major tasks ahead of me: I need to come up with a fair grade for each student based on her or his individual performance during the last semester AND four students will have to come in and write their make-up tests.

In the meanwhile I continue my studies of the teachings of Eckhart Tolle and by visiting his new website I was linked to this fast paced TV interview...I hope that you will not only understand the spoken English but that you may enjoy these thirteen minutes of great insights as well...and let us not forget: Eckhart used to have Ulrich as his first name and he was born in Lünen not very far from our college - that makes him almost one of us.

All Learning is state dependent...

It is so obvious that the state ( Zustand ) I am in - deeply influences my learning progress...so in what state are my students in when I enter the room? And am I able to change their states for the better once I start the lesson of the day?And do I manage to maintain their by then hopefully resourceful state throughout the entire lesson?

And what about my own state? In what state am I in most of the time?

And who helps me to "recharge" either during or after the lesson?

Lots of good questions with their inherent consequences....so here is a video about how Barack Obama and his wife Michelle were introduced to a group of journalists the day before Mother's Day....just watch how people change their states in just a few seconds...so I know it can be done...and maybe I should bring a portable CD/Cassette player and turn up the volume and play some wake-up music as I enter room 1.11 at 7:45 in the morning ??? - this would certainly be a great pattern interrupt!

Which one? The iPod Touch or the new Kindle DX

I love well designed high-tech gadgets...there are two that have caught my attention for some time new: the Apple iPod Touch ( without the phone function ) and the latest version of the Amazon Kindle e-reader.

Once you have watched the video you may just decide that paper based materials are definitely not as hot any more as they used to be - and maybe the paperless office
or the paperless school is not that far off anymore...

Are we as humans the only creatures who are conscious.Yes or No?

In class we are currently practicing how to write a comment.There is a certain structure to it and it usually has four parts etc. etc. and as I was searching for some additional topics for our pre-test practices I hit upon the above key question involving human consciousness and it led me to a series of ten minute YouTube films - the speaker there is Peter Russell whose book: The Global Brain is available in German under the titel:Die Erwachende Erde.

These books were published in the early eighties - just after my return from a very stimulating sabbatical year in San Francisco and they played a major role in my renewed interest in human consciuosness - the first exposure happened thru the writings of Timothy Leary in the mid-sixties..then Peter Russell crossed my path and now some 25 years later the writings of Eckhart Tolle deepen my understandings in this area even more.

And my thought was: what if my students were one day ready to argue in ENGLISH the most difficult question if we as humans are indeed the only creatures who are conscious - and as a meaningful preparation for this exam we would go thru some of these fifteen YouTube based mini lectures?