[Oe List ...] Fwd: Jaime's March Sym report

[Janice Ulangca]

Wow, Jaime - decor & room set alone will open up their images.  Thanks for sharing this.
Janice Ulangca
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Jaime R Vergara 
  To: oe at wedgeblade.net 
  Sent: Friday, March 16, 2012 9:11 AM
  Subject: [Oe List ...] Fwd: Jaime's March Sym report


  Sharing with the OE listserv a March report to colleagues with the Symposium of Realistic Living; 


  j'aime la vie



  *****

  All of my oral English classes at Shenyang Aerospace University surprisingly were assigned to the same room so I did not wait until I took over the space.  All the classrooms follow Russian Spartan minimalism (nothing but chairs, desks and a green board with a large podium in a lecture hall format), and ours is no exception.

  The earth poster was the first to get raised on the back wall, with a map of China immediately below, flanked by a world and a US map, tapering into a Roman empire nat/geo spread on the right, a China nat/geo 7,000 yr historical timeline on the left.  

  Stage right are large windows looking into the courtyard, and stage left wall is the other side of the hallway so it got the local regional, provincial and city maps.  Chairs parted like the Red Sea, with a center table graced by a broken cup and spilled rice along an old unseathed Ming knife on the side.

  Students walked into a room where they are seated facing each other rather than look up to a Lao Shi (teacher) by the green board.

  The focus on space and historical timeline in the decor points out a difference between the Chinese (Putunghua, common language) and English languages (strict dichotomies are never trustworthy, but this one holds in general).  The Chinese focuses on space, on the “where” and the “who”, while the English language, rooted on its Greco-Roman lineage’s historical conscious of time, defines its verbs on “when”.  (E.g., Chinese has no tense on the verb, “go” to the market yesterday, today, and tomorrow, while in English, one “went, goes, and will go.”)

  First context of the first day of class in March is the journey of the folks from the Mongolian steppes that peopled the Americas long before the Europeans, and if one listened to the chants and songs of the so-called Native Americans (from the Inuits to the Incas), they are not dissimilar from the songs and dances heard in the mountains of Sichuan, Guangxi and Yunnan, the highlands and barren expanses of Xizang (Tibet), Xinjiang/Qinghai/Gansu, around the Yurts of Nei Menggu (Inner Mongolia) , and the ice lights of Yanbian (Korea in China) in Dong Bei (northeast).

  Comes the explanation of the iterative cyclical series of natural "listen-repeat-speak-write-read" method in language learning, indicating that China formally teaches its students to read and write first, and now were are just getting around to listening, repeating and speaking.  


  Our first exercise is mimicking Denean' "As One" from Joyce's bioregional sounds, amplified slowly followed by passing out a printed copy of the lyrics.  

  We introduce ourself as a "global" citizen.  Thus, began the 16-week journey of university imaginal education on learning to speak English while their consciousness of life gets a secular Sinocized RS-1 assault.  I suppose, it is my metaphorical translation of a religiously expressed process!

  We are having pedagogical fun!


   Jaime R Vergara 


  All of yesterday, thanks; all of tomorrow, yes; all of today, let it be!






------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  OE mailing list
  OE at wedgeblade.net
  http://wedgeblade.net/mailman/listinfo/oe_wedgeblade.net
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/oe_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20120316/fcc30c25/attachment-0001.html>