What is Important? Core Values of a Global Village Vagabond

It is a luxury to have time to pause and re-evaluate what is really important. After over a decade of teaching English in the Far and Middle East, I value the prospect of a hiatus to regroup what really matters to me as I look to a future beyond this field. 

Just about a year ago I formulated five key values (pictured above) that have been in evolution since. (This was guided by The Passion Test, which is worth exploring for anyone contemplating a more meaningful life/career/destiny convergence.) These are highly individual, and of course they would be unique for each person, but they do formulate the core principles that guide my past, present and future work.

As my sabbatical draws near, content of the blog may evolve beyond mere learning, but the fundamentals will become ever clearer. Here they are, in a nutshell:

     - Sharing my creations in diverse media to promote collective and individual human potential

     - Nourishing bodies with lush, natural, whole foods (yes, this is an increasing priority!)

     - Supporting the planet's wellbeing with transcendent solutions

     - Establishing spaces for exuberant self-expression

     - Affirming abundance in thought, word and deed

Why spell this out? Explicitly naming my principles not only makes them clear, but also confirms my commitment to what matters to me, and where my work is headed. 

It always is a work in progress. 

Pass!

This week my students took their final exams. It was a chilling prospect, since students started this semester "weak" and missed many classes due to the protests in late March. Progress Test results had been catastrophic. Regardless of the students' marks, I had a nagging sense that perhaps I had failed. 

Image: A student truly USING English. as a tool:
www.gossipgirl990.blogspot.com

Yet somehow, between the student protests, the football match, a surreptitious after-hours field trip and the uncontainable exuberance of this group, and group-based essay writing contests, something happened. 

The penny dropped. These students, even despite their lack of a foundation in the language, grasped the fact that English is not a subject, but a tool. They started joking among each other in English, occasionally even when they were unaware of my presence. They taught each other how to structure an essay, even though they couldn't spell and some still forgot to capitalize and punctuate. Still, their earlier test results seemed dooming. As the finals loomed, I hoped against hope that after the explosive learning of the past month, these young men would not be discouraged by the seeming inevitability of repeating the course. 

When the first marker handed over my group's exam papers, he warned that the marks were low. No surprise. Yet it transpired that his "low" was a huge leap forward from students' earlier performance. Every single student submitted a well-structured essay - the paragon of their work in this level. (Their paragraphs, a review of past levels appearing in the exam, were not nearly as good!) 

Almost universally, students' performance increased significantly in the final exam, in contrast to the usual trend. There is little classroom-based justification for this, and I certainly can't claim the credit, since the magic happened among the students. 

I can only hope that in the last short term that remains for me at this college, I can bring some of the ingredients to let students cast that magic spell again. 

Salalah College of Technology English Language Centre Journal Live at Last!

Bookplate of Willard S Morse.
From the California State University Library. 

Ages back I blogged about my research on continuous assessment in Oman's General Foundation Programs. The final article was submitted just about a year ago. Academic journals are notorious for taking time to peer review, edit and publish articles, so it is not unusual that the journal only hit the virtual press this Wednesday. 

What is unusual is that this journal was about to be abandoned and left for dead. My respected colleagues JonLee Joseph (Viking warrioress who made it happen), Alasdair Lord (Editor-in-Chief), Jeremy Thorpe (I-Mage of note) and Karen Stimpson (benign style icon) brought the publication back from the dead with all the ferocity of a zombie infestation. (The infestation in question being a comparison to the journal, not the team.) Without them, there would be no journal. Other colleagues provided images, contributions, online listing and moral support that has made this so much more than just a piece of paper. 

Writing an academic article was a valuable experience. Being part of this unique, team-driven paper has made it so much more than that. A big, warm thank you to a stellar team!

Find the Illustrated and Text-Only versions here or see below. And if you are involved in the Oman Higher Education, English Language Teaching or accreditation sector, please use it and spread it around!

P.S. Just a week before the final draft was published, the Dean of our College assigned a new assessment policy design to a task team. Many of the principles mentioned in the article will be incorporated. A luta continua!

Open publication - Free publishing - More dhofar