10 things we have learned in the last 10 years - Part 2
Plus, the Saturday Scholar and Music Highlight
First of all, a huge THANK YOU to a good friend and amazing educator from Canada - Doug Peterson - who included Part 1 of this series in his This Week in Ontario Edublogs post last week! Follow him everywhere on social media and subscribe to his blog - he is one of the best people to learn from and I am so grateful I have been connected with him since 2009!
This has been such a great reflective activity. I have been thinking and thinking and I have come up with lots of things I have learned in the past ten years. And I can’t wait to learn more!
How to interview people. Back in 2012, I was invited to a conference in Turkey to be a roving reporter. I had never heard of the term before, nor had I known that they do this at conferences. I was so nervous at first, asked people who had done it before on advice but couldn’t find many. What did I do? I watched talk shows! I also did a lot of homework and read the bios and work of the speakers at the conferences - and then made a list of potential questions to ask the attendees.
I did it again in 2013 and 2014, at different conferences, one again in Turkey and one on Greece - and this skill helped me so much to continue developing this skill; I interviewed educators for my blog; I later on started the podcasts too (which are both on a small hiatus now, but I’ll pick them up again!) and I’m still learning new things about how to interview people.
I can adapt. I am generally a person who doesn’t do well with change, no matter what that is. During the pandemic, my sister and I closed our language school in order to continue with private lessons online, so we would keep ourselves and our students safe. Most of my students decided to continue online with us, some didn’t feel so warm to the idea so decided to go on a hiatus.
The schools I worked at part-time also decided to have us all online, so that meant learning A LOT of new technology only - a lot of extra training, a lot of personal practice, a lot of frustration intially when something didn’t work (up until then I had sporadically taught with Skype to students who were travelling or when I was visiting my family in Greece). I managed to learn, I got new ideas, both my own and from others who had been doing it. And it’s all I do now, as I teach 100% online! And I love all that is has to offer.
Stay tuned for Part 3 - and in the meantime, let me know what you have learned in the last 10 years!
The Saturday Scholar
The Scholar for this week’s newsletter is Daniel Schreier!
He is my co-supervisor on my PhD and an amazing linguist - he researches varieties of English, better- and lesser-known, sociolinguistics and dialects of English. and I have learned so much from him! He has also researched the English that they speak on Tristan da Cunha, which is a remote group of volcanic islands in the South Atlantic Ocean.
You can see all the books he has written here.
The Music Highlight
A band of the 80s that I really love (but have never seen live in concert) is Tears for Fears. They are one of the bands whose music I can listen to, album after album, without skipping a track! They broke up in the 90s, but I am so glad they are back together again and making new music.
Here is my absolute favourite song of theirs - and the video has been shot at the Emmanuel College Library in Toronto!