This is the second half of a 2-part post about my experience with year 7 students in Selby. I worked in collaboration with nybep to deliver workshops on the following themes – Self-Awareness through Breath-Control and Learning New Languages (the fun way). I have yet to come up with a decent title for either workshop. If you have any suggestions please do leave a comment.
The idea for the language workshop came about after some reflection on my status as a linguistic mongrel. Growing up in India, which has around 26 official languages, it is next to impossible to remain a monoglot. As a child I lived in cities across the length and breadth of the country. Therefore, I was taught – Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Hindi and Sanskrit alongside English. Having spent eight years in Delhi I was exposed to Urdu and Punjabi. I picked up a bit of Japanese as I travelled there for work, and recently I have been tinkering with Dutch. I would like to emphasize that I am fluent only in English and Hindi, for the rest my skill-level varies from beginner/intermediate to just a few words.
22
Jul 10
Pillows are for sleeping…
Earlier this week I had a chance to work with year 7 students at a school in Selby. The wonderful folk at nybep had arranged for me to deliver workshops on two themes – Self-Awareness through Breath-Control and Learning New Languages (the fun way). Both themes elicited some interesting and unexpected reactions from students and I will cover them in separate blog-posts.
Delivering the self-awareness session was a challenge simply because these students had never been in a situation before where they had to reflect on their physical/emotional state and that too in the presence of their peers. Whilst I was glad that there wasn’t a wholesale rejection of the various tasks, it was quite a challenge to keep them engaged. And to be honest, when the entire class had to work as a group I was certain the session would descend into chaos. Fortunately my little repertoire of breath-games kept them interested.
Continue reading →