Archive for the ‘Misc’ Category

Catching up and refocusing

Saturday, September 4th, 2010

Back from my summer holiday :-)

Image under Creative Commons license: Details at http://www.ehow.com/how_4489334_focus-mind.html

Well that was a longer-than-planned summer break – from both my blog and my Twitter account. I did look in on Twitter occasionally just to make sure it was still there.

It was good to take some time out from blogging and tweeting and get round to doing a few other projects on my to-do list.

One of those are my new websites, one of which I hope to have finished in the next couple of months – I’ve finished writing 100 articles for it and have done the listening. Now all I have to do is make 2,000 pages of activities and create the website pages. More on all that later. The other two are ideas and ideas that have a few pages to them, and more on those later. I also need to get back on track with www.FreeESLmaterials.com.

Also been trying to get to grips with Facebook for the first time. It’s one of those things that has taken me years longer than everyone else to see the usefulness of. I thought Twitter was enough, but now I see them both as being great ways to stay connected and share. Still tweaking privacy and account settings before I fully dive in.

It was also good to re-focus a little. Stepping back from blogging and Twitter for six weeks has given me a lot of time to think about the past year. I started tweeting in earnest last July, and my blogging began in December of last year. It was a great decision to start both. Blogging and tweeting while running seven websites and making more is quite a lot of work to do in your spare time. They’re all interconnected and what I learn from one I can apply to the others. And I enjoy it.

Anyway, a new semester and school year starts for me tomorrow. I’m confident I’ll learn more in my job to write about in my blog and tweets.

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Sayonara and As-Salam-Alaykum

Monday, December 14th, 2009

The last three months of 2005 were a real rollercoaster ride, complete with all the loops and rolls but without the thrills. The life savings had dwindled to piggy-bank proportions and the revenue from my website had still not broken a dollar a day.

Two miracles happened. At least that’s what they seemed like at the time. Two different educators in Japan gave me leads to possible jobs at universities. I was interviewed and offered both jobs. The downside was that both jobs were hundreds of miles from my home. There was no way I was going to live apart from my family, which meant we would have to sell our house and relocate.

Then another idea came along. If I was to sell house and home and move on, moving overseas became a viable option. I had always been interested in working in the Middle East. Many years earlier I looked at jobs in Saudi Arabia. I didn’t have a Master’s degree then so dropped the idea.

The very first search I did on Google came up with a college in the UAE that was looking for teachers. This was in November; the positions started in January. In my very best typewriting, I completed the application forms. I got and passed a video interview and then waited for the screening process to take its course.

In the middle of December I got the e-mail that said, “You’ve got the job. You start in four weeks.” After months of thinking I’d be bankrupt and jobless, I suddenly had three job offers. As much as we dearly loved Japan, we decided on a new adventure.

We had four weeks to empty our house and tie up the hundreds of loose ends. It’s amazing how much stuff you accumulate when you buy a house.

I lived in a quiet village in a valley. The road in front of my house had recently been widened to take two-way traffic. Sometimes there were two cars visible on it at the same time. This lack of traffic didn’t bode too well for another bright idea I had – a garage sale. It was the only way to get rid of everything we owned. We couldn’t afford to ship it overseas and desperately needed all the funds we could get.

Garage sales are a very unusual event in Japan. My two-metre roadside sign created sufficient bemusement for a fair percentage of the valley traffic to stop, reverse and then find out what this English man was doing. It took me two weeks to sell almost everything in the house.

  • I gave away all my books.
  • I sold my treasured 450 albums for peanuts.
  • My children watched other children take away their toys.
  • We uprooted and sold the plants and trees we had taken such pride in growing in our garden.
  • I gave away my kayak.
  • I parted with my chainsaw.
  • We put our house up for sale at a price far less than what we still owed on it.

The morning we left Japan we got rid of the last items we owned that weren’t in out four suitcases. The futons we slept on the previous night, the heater, and the kettle and cups we would use for a last cup of coffee.

I tried hard, but couldn’t stop the tears flowing as I left my beloved house and valley. I desperately wanted to stay.

Moving on three years and eleven months.

Coming to the UAE was one of the best decisions of my life. Life is good. I’ve learnt so much here. I work with amazing teachers. My students are awesome. Life savings are now something to raise a small smile.

Both risks were worth it.

Next post: Using sound files in the classroom.

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The Horror. The Horror.

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

In March 2005 I quit my well-paying job in Japan and stepped into the unknown. I’d never really been there before. Trekking in the jungles of Papua New Guinea was the closest, perhaps. I believed I could make a go of an ESL materials website and support my family. I wholeheartedly, and even wholer-naively, believed there to be gold in them there online lessons. All I had to do was make lots of them and tell thousands of people. Easy!

Making and taking the decision to risk the family life savings, the house and the little blue scooter on a bright idea was the craziest and most irresponsible thing I’ve ever done. By far.

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
Robert F. Kennedy

He who dares, wins.
SAS Motto

You’ve got to go out on a limb sometimes because that’s where the fruit is.
Will Rogers

You have to risk going too far to discover just how far you can really go.
T.S. Eliot

I woke up on the first morning of my new life as a budding webtrepreneur feeling exhilarated. I had followed my heart. My head was fuelled by motivational quotes that became mantras for my bold voyage into cyber-success.

The fuel ran out pretty quickly. Life soon spluttered into a hope-guzzling nightmare. Within a few short months I was to clutch ever more desperately at these inspiring words, willing them with all my all to be truer.

Real life crashed on top of me with a harsh and horrible reality. No… harsh and horrible would have been very nice in comparison to the crushing, soul-terrifying realization that I had steered my family into a horror story

Our savings were vanishing fast, even though we were redefining austerity to new thrift-defying levels. My site was earning us 26 cents a day.

The horror. The horror.
Joseph Conrad – ‘The Heart of Darkness’

That’s where I arrived six months after quitting my job. Chilling anxiety hounded my every waking thought. Nightmares of my children’s future destroyed because Daddy couldn’t pay the school fees tormented my sleep. Every day. Every night. No respite. I couldn’t question why life was being so cruel because it had been my decision to risk everything we had.

You got a dream… You gotta protect it. People can’t do somethin’ themselves, they wanna tell you you can’t do it. If you want somethin’, go get it. Period.
Will Smith in ‘The Pursuit of Happyness’

With enough to survive on for another few months, I wondered how I would pay for my $180,000 housing loan, the kids’ education, food. I became haunted by self-recrimination. Years later, I saw the movie ‘The Pursuit of Happyness’. Will Smith’s character so reminded me of the horrors, my horrors, of 2005.

I desperately went in search of work. A daunting task in a Japanese valley with no language schools or universities. Particularly difficult in a biting recession. My options and my future looked bleak.

Then suddenly, perhaps while on my little blue scooter trundling along through the rice fields (not quite sure), another bright idea popped up. It was another risky one. Again, I prepared myself to break my new plan to my wife. Again, she trusted and supported me.

And this time the two risks together proved to be worth taking and will be elaborated on in the final part of my introductory posts.

Moral of this story – Two big risks are better than one if you have a bee in your bonnet and a bright idea under it.

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Life Savings, Bright Ideas, and Milk

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

And I was so tempted to call this “My Second Ever Blog Post”.

So, where do bright ideas come from and are they always so bright? I had one back in mid-2004 as I was riding my little blue scooter home from the train station after work, through the greener-than-verdant rice paddies to my home in a perfectly idyllic Japanese valley.

Riding little blue scooters though Japanese rice paddies is a perfect setting for the stimulation of bright ideas and I thoroughly recommend it.

Anyway, there I was, as happy as anything, tootling along the narrow path where the wild boar ran free to scare the living daylights out of me and the frogs croaked happily (millions of them), when suddenly it hit me. A bright idea of gargantuan, life-changing dimensions.

Now… before I explain further, I must just add that tootling along said path through before-said rice paddies approaching before-that-said valley always made me feel I was going on holiday. I wasn’t. I was just going home. But every day, the little blue scooter journey filled me with wonderful and happy thoughts… and bright ideas. So that’s where a lot of my bright ideas came from.

But this one wasn’t just bright. It was so dazzling that I nearly ended up in a rice paddy as it obscured the sharp bend in the track ahead of me.

And here it is… was…

The whole grand, couldn’t-ever-fail-not-ever-not-in-a-million-years design appeared before me in a quarter of a split second. Everything was worked out even before I got to that bend, in something like this order:

  1. Become a millionaire.
  2. Start a website based on freshly breaking news stories for learners of English.
  3. Learn how to make a website before I start making one.
  4. Quit my quite well paying job to do it.
  5. Retire.
  6. That bend is getting mighty close – Don’t want to jeopardize the bright idea, do we? Easy does it.
  7. Trade the little blue scooter in for a Lamborghini.
  8. Hmmm… Money to buy stuff like food, pay for kids’ education… live, etc?
  9. Find out what html means.
  10. Aha! – Pour life savings into it. A fine investment it’ll be.
  11. Make a new news lesson every day.
  12. No one else does that.
  13. Keep the house in the idyllic valley, but buy the valley.
  14. Call it TeachEasy … dot com.
  15. What to tell the wife? (quit job… pouring of savings… go on a diet…)
  16. Aha! Yes… Become a millionaire.

And then I turned left, and with my heartwarming smile-inducing valley in full view ahead and the bright idea filling me with as much adrenalin as the beautiful landscape, I journeyed home to enbrighten the wife with my revelation.

She was cooking in the kitchen. It seemed the most logical place to do that.

Wife: “Had a good day, darling?”
Me: “Have I had a good day” HAVE – I – HAD – A – GOOD – DAY????
Wife: “OK, so what’s today’s idea?”
Me: explained story in full.
Wife: “We’ve run out of milk. Can you go and get some from the store?”

I was unperturbed, nay ecstatic. She didn’t flinch at the life savings part. She must have thought it was another one of those ideas I kept on having.

Back on to the little blue scooter and down the small track where the freshwater crabs walk sideways free, filled with thoughts of Lamborghinis and html and must, must, must not forget the milk.

Are bright ideas always so bright? Well this one varied between blacker-than-coal brightness to full-volume incandescence.

The life savings had a whoppingly huge part to play in this variety and will probably be the subject of My Fourth Ever Blog Post, titled, “What became of the little blue scooter?”

That really was her reply.

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My First Ever Blog Post

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

My first ever blog post… in history… ever… hmm… what to write?

Ermm… Hmmm… Lovely weather we’re having.

So after five years of making websites and five months of tweeting on Twitter, I have decided to enter the blogosphere. This first post is perhaps the most difficult.

Do I welcome everyone and outline grand plans, thoughts and ideas that will change the world of English language teaching?

The first part, yes (welcome everyone); the second part, not on your Nellie.

Do I tell the story of how I became an English teacher? It all started way back in 1989 when I was backpacking around South-East Asia and ran out of money. I met…

No, that won’t do. That’s all been done before.

OK… so do I write about my very first observed lesson on my CTEFLA (now CELTA) course in Izmir, Turkey. I could describe in great detail how I lost total control of my lips, voice, thoughts, lesson plan and heartbeat in the first second and wanted the floor to swallow me up so I could go home.

Nope. The shame of it all :-O.

How about a potted history of my teaching career? OK. OK. I know the feeling. We won’t go there.

Well… the story of how I used up my life savings to start an Internet site which I thought would make me millions but only made me 26 cents a day after six months?

Uh-Uh – Way too embarrassing.

Now. What I could do is talk about why I’m starting a blog. Logical enough.

Oh… OK then. I’ll do that. I never really read blogs until I joined Twitter and then came across some incredible, inspiring and thought-provoking sites written by extremely dedicated bloggers. To name but more than a few: Shelly Terrell’s Teacher Reboot Camp, Karenne Sylvester’s KalinagoEnglish, MarxistELF, Alex Case’s TEFLTastic, Burcu Akyol’s blog, Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day, TEFL Matters by Marisa Constantinides, Ozge Karaoglu’s blog, ESOL Courses from Sue Lyons-Jones, Jason Renshaw’s English Raven, Steven Anderson’s Web20Classroom… The list is long.

I now love reading the thoughts and ideas contained in these blogs. I have learnt so much from these superb professionals. They keep me on my toes and my fingertips busy.

Of course, they also make me think a lot more about teaching, what it means to be a teacher, technology and how political an issue making a lesson on red squirrels can be.

They all got me thinking about blogging and contributing. So here I am.

They do say the second blog post is the most difficult…

We’ll see.

I heard it’ll rain tomorrow.

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