Pilar Mateo Herrero – a woman of rare talent

During the last two weeks, Sherbourne Priors has welcomed an internationally renowned scientist and humanitarian – Pilar Mateo Herrero. As a biochemical engineer, Pilar has dedicated her life to finding a way of controlling and possibly eradicating insect-borne parasitic diseases such a malaria and Chagas.

Chagas, the scourge of Bolivia’s indigenous population has no cure. There is treatment available, but it is financially out of the reach of most of the people who suffer from it, generation after generation. Not one to be defeated, Pilar Mateo took it upon herself to tackle this seemingly insurmountable problem. She went to Bolivia in 1998 to live with the people, study the Chagas beetle and start a grassroots project to try and eradicate this blight. As head of a company called Inesfly, she developed a house paint that contains microcapsules of insecticide which, once mixed with the paint and applied to the exterior and interior walls of a house, can keep the house insect-free for up to four years.

The importance of this is incalculable. For countries benighted by the spectre of unrelenting poverty, particularly among the indigenous people, capital investment in research to combat disease is notoriously underfunded. For Pilar’s company to have developed and produced such a relatively cheap and simple way of effectively controlling the insects that carry the Chagas parasite is nothing short of miraculous. The hope it has inspired and the generations of suffering it will alleviate cannot be over-estimated.

There is now wide-spread, international interest in Pilar’s work and her revolutionary product. The BBC are busy making a documentary on Pilar’s years in Bolivia and it will also include her next challenge, which is to set up a centre in Ghana to try and combat malaria using this revolutionary product. She has been invited to speak at the Vatican City in 2013 as part of an independently organised TED event. She will be speaking about her work and her vision of eradicating malaria in the southern hemisphere during the 21st century.

Pilar is also a very dedicated ambassador for women’s rights. She is a member of Momim – Indigenous Women of the World Movement -which seeks to give indigenous women back their dignity and promote awareness of the cultures of and the problems faced by indigenous women across cultures and continents. She has very strong feelings about the role of indigenous women in Third World countries – not only as stable and nurturing influences in society, but also as playing a critical role in helping to look after and maintain the good health of the people of these societies. She sees herself as their ally in the fight against the debilitating and endemic parasitic diseases that ravage the poorer Third World countries.

Women like Pilar make me proud to be a woman and students like her make my job one of the most gratifying in the world. It has been a privilege and a pleasure having her at Sherbourne Priors.

OEFL TOEFL

I am going to say at the outset that I know next to nothing about the TOEFL. I know it exists as some kind of standard and that some people really, really need it and there is a whole industry dedicated to “teaching” it and, by the look of things, creating (word used quite loosely) materials for it to be sold at vast expense to them as needs. And I’m totally not against any of that, so no high horses please. I’m just thoroughly relieved that I don’t have to get involved with it all – except at the moment for what is going to be an agonising 6 weeks.

I have someone who appears to be a terminal TOEFL examinee who is desperate to “get the TOEFL” or at least “100 on the TOEFL” – whatever that means, and he is paying me. (We all sell ourselves at some point). Today he handed me a vocabulary list of “typical TOEFL words”. I have no idea what to say.

agrarian absenteeism
Apolloian
antebellum
to baffle pursuit
beam splitter
brace box
to brisk about
buttress up the facts
cavity magnetron
cicerone
dip net – WHAT?
elasticity of compression
famine fever
fatigue party
hasty pudding
helical gear
languid attempt (poetic, though it be)
lax vowel (could be tricky on the pron front)
the Massacre of St Bartholomew
minute anatomy
Olympian calm
resurrection man
rural dean
spell down
spot broadcasting
supple Tam
tease number
ternary time
thorough bass
tilt hammer
trying plane
utter barrister
vacant possession
visceral divination
ward heeler

Oh woe……

In Response to Monkey Mind….

I’ve just read a blog post from one of my favourite bloggers – he writes with such devastating accuracy and unrelenting humour, I am at once uplifted and madly envious.

His latest contribution is about the art/practice of meditation Zen style.

(http://giaklamata.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/monkey-mind.html Here it is – copy and paste, I can’t make hot text.)

“Stilling the mind”. Uh-huh. I think, for what it’s worth, only we can do that. No amount of “coaching” or “training” or “instruction” will make it “go right”, or help you to “do” it. Excuse the overuse of inverted commas: they enclose words that we of a western mindset understand, but with which meditation has no truck. This makes me sound like “an authority”. Pfffft! Far from it. Because, you see, I’m a cheat.

Some 20 odd years ago, I was in – as they say – a fairly Bad Place: Things falling apart and the centre not holding sort of thing. I caught the Prozac wave and became mentally and emotionally anaesthetised. The only thing my “monkey mind” said was, “I don’t care; no really, I do not care. I couldn’t care less and I can’t be bothered to make myself care and go away and leave me alone so I can not care in peace.” Some dim, dark fragment of my brain fought valiantly and told me to “do something”. Randomly, I gave up smoking (extreme form of ‘doing something’, I admit), explored “alternative medicine”, spent huge amounts of money and trundled off to meditation. Except the giving up smoking bit, it was all vaguely entertaining. But being in the mood I was in, I decided that I was going to be The Only Person In The World who couldn’t be taught to meditate. “I CAN’T”, “How do I ‘Let the thoughts go as easily and they come?’”, ” I don’t WANT a mantra, I thought we stared at lotus flowers.” You get the idea…..

Then, because I THOUGHT I was being very biddable and “in need of help”, I made an appointment with a so-called guru, who was recommended for particularly “stubborn” cases. I had two appointments with him which have to rank as two of the most bizarre experiences of my life. He lived in fairly opulent comfort – probably off donations from hapless, pre-menopausal women. I was ushered with due reverence into a dark room which seemed to be holding a chain smokers’ convention. There the guru sat puffing away, which he had clearly been doing for some hours. The smoke was acrid and dense, there were cigarette butts everywhere, the ashtrays were jammed to overflowing, he had two fags on the go and was randomly flicking ash everywhere. This was not good for a recent quitter. As I sat down, he barked, “I didn’t tell you to sit.” Cowed and ashamed, I bowed and fumbled and muttered my apologies. He called in a youth of indeterminate age and sent him off to buy more cigarettes. He looked at me crossly, and gave me a 2 litre bottle of water and a collection of what looked like homeopathic pills. “Dissolve these in the water, take two tablespoonsful twice a day, sprinkle the water to East and West and come back in two weeks.This stuff is so powerful it will change your life.”

I stumbled out of the room, coughing and spluttering, eyes streaming, reeking of cigarette smoke but with my water bottle under my arm. I got home and proceeded to follow the guru’s instructions. After maybe half an hour, the monkey in my head laughed and laughed and said, “You really can’t be doing this. It’s too ridiculous for words.” I watched impassively as the powerful stuff gurgled away down the plughole.

Two weeks later I returned to guru man, pretending I had followed his instructions to the letter. He had quit smoking apparently as the room was cool and fresh and dark. There were quite a few other people in the room all kneeling in humble adoration. He immediately pointed me out. “YOU!” he shrieked, “you have not done what I told you.(How did he know?) You think I am a joke.(HOW DID HE KNOW?) You will get fat. Go.”

I left, shaking with fear, rage, embarrassment, I don’t know. And guess what? I started to put on weight. I had always been a 48 kilo wraith. I’m now what my grandson calls, a “comfy gran.”

ho hum……

But what about meditation? I read a book about it once that said, “Just DO it.” And that is probably the only “instruction” one needs.

Ennui

I belong to/am a member of/participate in and contribute to a fair number of social networking sites. There are the two ning sites – BESig ning, managed and run by the exceptional Carl Dowse and the ning site for the company I work for; there’s Twitter – not my favourite; Facebook, where I have two “presences” – friends/family and work; and two blogs – this one for my work interests and another one as a marketing tool for the school I work at. Then there’s email – work, personal and gmail accounts, and the ubiquitous text machine – the phone.

Suddenly and without warning, I’m tired of it all. I love the idea, don’t get me wrong. All of the social networking I have joined up to and contributed to have made an enormous difference in my life. I have found old friends I thought I’d never see or speak to again, I have made new friends that I never would have met. I have shared ideas, music and photos, memories, laughs and tears. I’ve argued and discussed, pontificated and soap-boxed, ranted and raved, colluded, concurred, sympathised and praised. But for some reason, I have dried up. I cannot think of a thing to say: even emailing my oldest friend has become a chore. It’s all too much. It sucks up too much time; being witty and erudite and interesting and controversial and innovative and shocking and challenging and amusing and enthusiastic all the time is exhausting. And lately a lot of my posts have been misinterpreted, caused upset, got people in a huff and generally not been as well-received as they used to be. Maybe my mood is tainting what I write.

And I have noticed too that there has been a slow decrease in the number of posts from friends and colleagues. Daily updates have become weekly; spirited exchanges have become less spirited and dwindled to a few desultory comments; pages on Facebook that once changed minute by minute, don’t change for days; Twitter feeds have slowed to a trickle and bear nothing more than cursory comments or a lonely link. Comments on ning sites remain unanswered and interaction is short at best.

What’s happened? Is it just because it’s summer? Is it because we are all glued to the telly watching and waiting for the golds to materialise? Or is it more that that? Have we become indifferent to and bored with it all? Does it no longer interest us, excite us, inspire us or enthuse us? If so, what’s next?

Killer Instinct or Helping Hand?

This is Ye Shiwen. She’s 16 years old. She has just astonished the world – not by winning the gold medal at the Olympics, lots of people do that, but – by swimming the last 50 metres of her race faster than the world record and faster than Ryan Lochte, the fastest man in water.

Of course now there is the inevitable humming and ha-ing about drugs and doping and how is it possible for this to happen and in fact it isn’t possible, so there must be something suspicious going on. It all just makes me wonder about competition and what it is that drives us as humans to do it better, faster, higher than anyone else? What is the allure of being the best? Why do we strive so hard to achieve gold? What makes us want to do that so much we are prepared to sacrifice almost anything? Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for striving and improving and overcoming difficulties and limitations through effort and dedication. But….. and here’s a little story, also about Chinese children.

Many years ago, I lived in a little paradise called Swaziland. Surrounded by South Africa, it was a little multi-cultural jewel, with all sorts of nations living and working there as part of international aid schemes to develop this small country. I was at primary school with children of all races and nationalities and all was very well. As a British Protectorate, Swaziland ran its schools along good old British public school lines – lots of of “games”! On a hot summer’s day, we all gathered together at what was called “The Oval”, for our annual inter-house athletics day. In typical primary school fashion, everyone got a chance to “have a go”. The youngest children at the school – all about 5 or 6 years old – were lined up ready for the “GO”. Some were excited, some fearful and some a little bewildered. But this is all character-building stuff. At the ”GO” they all started off down the track, urged on loudly by their parents and siblings. There were about five Chinese children in the mob all running along with the others when suddenly one of them stumbled and went sprawling in the dust. Without any hesitation at all, the other four little Chinese tots stopped running and went to help their friend get back on his feet. Everyone was screaming at them to “RUN RUN RUN”, but they, collectively and without faltering, chose to help their distressed friend instead and togther, once he was standing up again, the five of them toddled over the line – he came first, not winning the race.

And that has stayed with me my whole life – helping each other is more important than winning at any cost.

De-subjecting English.

It’s a quiet day on the school front, so I have been doing some trawling around my favourite blogs. I’m not sure of the actual frequency of these bits of lexis, but the language used to speak about EFL is the same language that is used for any “school” subject – curriculum, testing, exercise, subject matter, lesson, lesson plan, coursebook, notes, class, teacher etc. But it’s patently obvious that learning a language is NOT the same as learning Biology or Geography or History. Learning a language is actually the development of a skill and the subsequent increase of control one experiences over the deployment of that skill in a variety of circumstances.

I know this isn’t an original thought, but what is it that makes us want to turn a practical driving lesson: negotiating traffic, managing gear changes, checking blind spots and keeping to the left, into a lecture on the workings of the internal combustion engine?

It’s time to “de-subject” English.

Butterfly wings and all that

Once again Willy Cardoso and I seem to be circling the same planet as we groove on the cosmos.

http://tinyurl.com/7n8hlkm

Where has all the SLA theory and experimenting and sudden waves of wide-eyed, staring proselytising led us? What great conclusion is there? Is there an answer or indeed The Answer to this question of how a second language is acquired? No and again, no. It just is. I think it was Stephen Hawking who said, “Leave some things be, they will always be mysteries”. And so to the next wave of “newness”…….

No one would ever call me a sceptic. No really, I try not to be an iconoclast, but I always seem to provoke sacred cows and glare with slitted eyes and think, “Not going to catch me out. Not going to fall into your devious little trap. No need to try and sell me your new ideas and gimmicks – it’s all baloney.” Well that’s a bit harsh, but not too far from the truth either. Okay okay, I’m a deeply suspicious cynic but, as someone once said, “Iconoclasm is good for the soul.”

So what’s “coaching” in the EFL classroom all about? It seems to be the “in” thing, with everyone talking about it, hailing it as the “new” way of getting people to do stuff and filling it with all sorts of panacea-like wonders. Someone I know calls it “transformational”. What? Like a religious experience that turns people from hard drinkin’, cussin’ and fightin’ layabouts to gentle, God-fearing, philanthropists? “Well,” he said earnestly, “if you don’t like the colour of your hair, you dye it. That’s change. The outward appearance is differnt, but the hair remains hair. Coaching TRANSFORMS THE HAIR INTO SOMETHING NEW.” Not that I want anything other than hair on my head, but I got the point.

So does coaching do this? Here’s a quote:

Coaching is a collaborative, solution-focused, result-oriented and systematic process in which the coach facilitates the enhancement of work performance, life experience, self-directed learning and personal growth of individuals from normal (i.e. non-clinical) populations.
(Anthony M Grant, Solution-focused Coaching: Managing People in a Complex World)

I suppose it might, but there never are any guarantees, and at some level it sounds like something gleaned from the Dilbert webpage on “mission-statements”.

And what about coaching in the BE language teaching environment? Does language really create reality, or is that just some sort of popular psychobabble? So much of what we say are sucked-up collocates we’ve heard somewhere. Do we really – I mean HONESTLY and TRULY – KNOW what we mean when we say “outcomes-based”, or “goal-setting strategies” or “owning the language”? Or is it just something we say that sounds quite cool?

Maybe we are trying to put words around something that is inexpressible – like last night’s dream. Krashen and Chomsky and The Bangalore Project notwithstanding, it remains – to me at least – a deep mystery that my student can say, understand and use in the correct context: “overcoming the crisis, using austerity measures”, but fails to be able to use in any meaningful context, “Could you tell me…….?” I just plain don’t know. Neither does he and we are at the point where neither of us is that bothered. Maybe it just doesn’t want to be part of his linguistic furniture for reasons that are neither here nor there. Accept it as a mystery and move on.