Well, the intensive is over, and i am exhausted! Learning really sucks it out of you. Our lecturer was concerned that we take care of ourselves during this stressful period. I was kinda scoffing a bit - how much harder is this than working for a full week? [Uurr, let me edit that, what im trying to sarcastically say is; how much easier is attending workshops than working for a full week!!!] At the same time, i know that learning is tiring, and the more sleep you get while you are doing it the better it sticks in your head (check out the evidence here).  I was also kinda scoffing because the course didnt seem that hard, a lot of the material has been covered in other courses, there were only a few new concepts and mostly familiar content in a new context. But not everyone found the same thing…

I wasnt sure whether I would know anyone on the course, but there was a whole bunch of us that had taken a weekly course together last semester, so we naturally formed a work group. It was fun working with this bunch! Some of the newer students in other groups were having trouble at different times, but that’s to be expected, isn’t it? I mean, if we all know it all already, what are we doing there? But the lecturer, a lovely woman, a practicing psychologist, well, she was a bit harsh when people expressed their confusion, shutting them down quite abruptly. I realise that she was concerned to stop one person’s confusion from infecting the rest of the class (a danger at a couple of times there) and she also wanted to be clear about what was right and wrong, and we are all adults… At the same time, i have worked with people who have much better ways of dealing with student confusion and errors, and i am wondering whether the styles of correction i used with Japanese students might not be the best applied to Social Science (touchy feely) students too. Anyway, considering that the course was Conflict and Communication, the lecturer could have modeled the skills she was teaching better thans he did.

Genuine conflict flared just before lunch on the 4th day, when a student who had been corrected in a shut-down way for the 3rd time made her feelings know. The whole exchange was pretty minimal and well handled by both lecturer and student, but there was some electricity there and we all felt it. It was great! It was probably the high point of the course! Suddenly we had a genuine conflict in our midst to analyse with our new tools!!! One of my friends in the course asked for my opinion as a former teacher on what had happened, so it was interesting and useful applying and discussing that and trying to understand from the lecturer’s perspective how this could have happened.

Probably the most useful point for me was the crystalisation of a perspective on blame that has worked really well for me but i havent been able to express well to others. I plan to write about this later. I promise it wont be like the community post that never came… Its useful for me to write about that im studying, but its also a lot like study rather than blogging, and resistance and procrastination comes in. I dont want it to be this way. Im working on it.

For tea (I LOVE how everyone says that here! I had forgotten that!) I’m having roast veggies and gnocchi (and bits of bacon) with some pesto i made the other night. Yum! And very soon after that im going to bed.

• Sar said on 06/09/23 at 04:43 PM.....

  Me to - whenever I go home or talk to my parents or brother on the phone, they always say ‘tea’ and I so rarely use it these days.  It’s so cute isn’t it.