Excerpt from Frazier’s Book

I’ve finished reading Jan Frazier’s book When Fear Falls Away: The Story of a Sudden Awakening.

I would like to share a passage with you before I pass the book on to someone else.

I told myself enlightenment was possible, because Gurumayi had said it was possible to attain heaven during a human life. But though I said I believed it could potentially happen to a person, and I could force myself to acknowledge it might happen for me in some life, I surely never allowed that it could happen in this one.

I was, after all, far from sainthood. My ego was as busy as anyone’s. Wouldn’t a person approaching realization come to be gradually closer, in observable increments? My absence of faith that it was possible for me in this very lifetime probably is a big part of why it took me a long time to figure out what was going on. 

I wish very deeply that I could bring about a widespread acceptance of realization as a fact, as possible for anyone who would value it. I suppose if a person lives entirely on the surface of things, deriving all satisfaction from the material plane, it is not likely that person would value inner transformation. But I am talking about getting through to people who are concerned with the inner life. Not necessarily those who have a spiritual practice or faith. But those who value peacefulness, who want their lives to be guided more by virtue and compassion than by greed and anger. These people often spend large sums of money on therapy or medical care for physical pain or chronic illness, or they medicate themselves with too many glasses of Scotch. They can’t seem to shake depression once and for all. They might be people who have been abused, or are in awful relationships they can’t get out of, or who are overwhelmed by the mess the world seems to be in, or who are poor or disabled or lonely.

It is these people I wish I could get through to, to say, Look, it is possible to have all the same hard stuff in your life and yet not have it devastate you. And once you figure that out, what do you know; some of the stuff leaves. Maybe all of it, at least for great chunks of time. Or maybe all of it stays, but somehow you swim below it. When the big waves come rolling in to shore, if you can just dive below, they won’t tumble and crush you. You’ll even be having a really good time–in fact, the time of your life.

Sainthood isn’t gotten to by great sacrifices, by mortification of the flesh, by a string of good deeds the likes of what Mother Teresa did. All it is–this sounds so simple–is plainly recognizing what your fundamental condition is. Getting rid of all the other stuff in some way to make it possible to see that.  ”Getting rid of it in some way”: that used to mean taking vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Artificially enforced getting-rid-of. Or it meant living in a cave with little to wear and little to eat, and that little-to-eat was stale and not very nourishing, and the same day after day.

Getting ride of it can happen by other means, though. The Bhagavad Gita talks about this–that it isn’t desire that’s so bad; it’s when it ruins your day–your life–if the desired thing doesn’t come to pass. Or when the Bible talks about money being the root of all evil: it isn’t money that’s the problem; it’s the power over us. We say, I am my job or If I can afford this house, I will be happy or If I get cancer my life will be ruined or If my son drops out of school, it will kill me. Whatever it is. We take this fundamental delight that is our nature and we blind ourselves to the unassailable fact of that condition by believing in the greater reality of all the other stuff.

Of course the other stuff (some of it) matters. But we think it matters so much–we think of our joy, our sense of life having worth, as being so provisional, so conditional–that we manage to lose touch with that quiet pool at the center that is vastly more…everything…than whatever we can conjure, for however long we can trick it into lasting: the job, the house, the relationship.

But hardly anyone believes this. I can see what an uphill battle it will be, to get through on this.

It brings me back, again and again, to this idea–that it might in the end matter very much to believe in the possibility of realization, if we call realization nothing more than a profound letting go into the original condition. It is not an achievement. It is an exhale without end. That is all, really. Only you don’t run out of wind. You really don’t. It’s just that you come to a point where you and the wind are the same thing. If you know what I mean. There is nothing left to be afraid of. You have all the time in the world. Or, more truly, no time at all. You don’t need any.

Pearl

The lobby of the hotel is gleaming and spacious. People are milling about everywhere I look. Five of us are seated at the free terminals to check email or, in my case, blog.

The woman to my left is desperate for help. She’s gotten halfway through an online plane ticket purchase but can’t go further. The screen seems unresponsive. She turns to me and asks if I know what she is doing wrong.

“It looks like there should be more to that screen. I suggest she click the maximize icon, but nothing changes. The window doesn’t expand. We click a few other links, but nothing happens.

She calls her son to walk her through it. He can’t help, either. She asks me to watch her seat while she goes to ask the concierge for help. He suggests a refresh. It doesn’t work.  Finally she gives up, deciding to try again in an hour. “It’s probably a problem with their site; that’s what everyone is telling me.”

I take a last stab at it. “You know, sometimes when you can’t find the scroll bar on the screen, you can use this scroll wheel on the mouse instead.” I had said that before when she was on the phone with her son, but she’d not understood. This time she hears what I mean. She tries again.

“It’s working! That worked!” Soon she is printing out her boarding pass, thanking me.

Moments like these, one after another like pearls on a string, are all I ask from life.

The Big Misconception re Detachment

Many times during our year of meeting to work the 365 lessons of the workbook at the back of A Course in Miracles text, we got stuck on one concept in particular.

One member of the group–the one who struggled the most with ACIM and most often couldn’t understand what the heck the lessons were getting at–spent a lot of time fretting about the state of the world.

She asked us again and again, “When you read about what is happening in X country, doesn’t it break your heart? How can you close yourself to their suffering?”

I see this a lot. I see that the people most resistant to looking inward to discover the locus of control over their own mental state are the same ones who spend a lot of time focusing on outside causes for their distress. And they are in distress much of the time.

Over and over we tried to tell her, using one set of metaphors and then another, “You are where you are needed.”

“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Why spend nights worrying about those people when you are not the one the Universe has put THERE. You have been put HERE. There is plenty of stewardship needed right in this city. Be here now, not lost in a hologram created by your mind.

There are a zillion other ways of saying it, but none reached her.

Today I am reading When Fear Falls Away: the Story of a Sudden Awakening by Jan Frazier. This passage jumped out at me since it speaks to that very idea that we batted around on so many Sunday evenings in this room.

It is even easier to read the newspaper. Now that I’m unmoved over the daily horrors. I cried over the Russian children who were taken hostage in their school, the image of their running bodies, and the bullets they took into their backs. It broke my heart. I have not grown heartless; if anything, because of being rid of useless encumbrances like fear, I am freer to feel for those children, for their parents (at least, the ones who survived to bury the little bodies). I felt grief sharp like a knife run into my chest–but then I was done with it. It did not consume me. This is not heartlessness. I don’t think I always would have understood that, but I understand it now. I understand that being able to let go of hurting does not constitute a lack of compassion.

Grace in Small Things 187

Just being here is the miracle.

• I am watching black-eyed peas start to jump and tumble in a pot of water that is starting to boil and roil.
• I am sitting in a camp chair next to my lover in Point Pelee National Park while John rearranges the sticks and logs to encourage the fire. Our hair and clothes will smell of wood smoke tomorrow. A young man sits on a blanket on the ground holding a guitar.  The children teach us Down by the Bay; we teach them Yellow Submarine.
• The cocoa is hot, the marshmallows toasty on the outside, gooey on the inside.
• Randy points out the summer triangle with his green laser beam. We look at the Andromeda galaxy, whose light has been travelling for 2.5 million years to reach our eyes.
• I am not the only one who is in awe

In the funny papers yesterday

Grace in Small Things 186

Next week I have a break from teaching (but not from working or getting paid) while we all head to Toronto for an annual professional conference. Last year my out-of-pocket expenses were metro tokens and tips. This year the budget will cover both of those, leaving me with no out-of-pocket expense.  I can’t wait to see my beloved Toronto again.

The air is cool and the earth wet. Maple leaves leave toothy imprints on the pavement.

I have a plan to befriend a couple of the squirrels I see every morning on my way to work. I keep nuts in my jacket pocket. I’ll drop them in the same place every day until the squirrels catch on. By the time there’s snow on the ground, I think I’ll have them trained to expect me at 7:55.

Chatham is planning a Crow Festival.

A student, on learning that I have an interest in Persian, loaned me some CDs of the poetry of Ferdowsi and Hafez.

Sylvain took me out for all-you-can-eat sushi and a movie tonight. We saw 50/50 and really liked it. Good movies are coming out now that it’s getting closer to Oscars season. It feels good to snuggle up in the cinema while watching the credits roll and whispering to each other about how good the sound track is.

Are My Colours Showing?

I am so glad I visited Violet’s blog today and saw the e-card from Someecards, which has got to be the best e-card company in the world. I hadn’t been on their site in a while, so I hopped over there to check out their current tongue-in-cheek offerings.

I couldn’t believe the timeliness of finding a certain e-card.

Yesterday, you see, I got to take another instructor’s students to the Windsor Workers’ Action Centre so the students could learn more about what they do. This was to cap off a week of studying “Your Rights in the Workplace.”  Their real teacher stayed behind to take care of a monthly chore, so I asked her to give walking directions to any stragglers who came in after we’d left.  That’s when I realized she didn’t know where we were headed; she thought we were going to a government sponsored office that helps with job searches and so on.

“No, no, not there,” I corrected.

No, we were headed to a grungy little hole in the wall where students in the university’s labour studies program sprawl out on the floor until the wee hours painting protest signs.

Having been alerted to our plans, Paul  was holding down the fort when we arrived. If he looked a bit rough around the edges, it was probably because he’d camped out in City Hall Square the night before.

The ten or so students pulled the ragtag assortment of chairs into a semi-circle to listen to Paul give an overview of what the WWAC does. Students were able to ask questions to their hearts’ content, and I interjected now and then when Paul used one of the vocabulary words from last week: union steward, seniority. And we learned some new words: exploitation, rally.

One student is actually among those who have filed claims against Global Fibre Recovery. Little did this student know that WWAC was the entity to coordinate the exposé in this city.

Before we left, we also got to ask about the sit-in taking place in front of our City Hall in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement. Often the concept of oligarchies and unfair distribution of wealth comes up during classroom discussions (at least when I’m teaching), so this tied in nicely.

After an hour of peppering Paul with questions, we headed back to school clutching our informational leaflets, leaving him to close up shop.  As we neared the school, one student came up to me and expressed interest in transferring to my class.

“You’re too young, sorry,” I said with a laugh, appreciative of the compliment.

When I saw this e-card, I couldn’t resist sending it to Paul with my thanks for the time and knowledge he gave the students yesterday.

Isn’t that awesome?

(For those of you who can’t get graphics: it’s a picture of a school teacher in front of a blackboard. The text reads: I believe in fighting corporate greed with properly spelled protest signs.)

I Used Gendlin’s Focusing Technique

One of our ACIM group leaders mentioned it in passing one night. Curious, I asked her for details as I reached for a pen and paper.  As soon as I read through the steps, I had to try it out.  Immediately (after only about ten minutes of following the steps), I got a big shift in a bad feeling that had been plaguing me for weeks, maybe months.

Actually that day I used the six steps outlined on this site. For me the big shift came when I got to the step where you put a handle on the felt sense…like come up with a metaphor or something.

After that day, other than mentioning it briefly to a friend or two, I pretty much forgot about it.  Then today something happened at work that left me feeling really crummy.  For the rest of the day I worried about this funny feeling. Olivia and I spoke recently about how you sometimes have to do the uncomfortable until it becomes comfortable. I thought my ego was just being an ego, that’s all. I thought, “there is nothing I can do about it. I just have to allow the icky feeling to be there.”

Still, I was a little perturbed. After all, I meditate. I practice mindfulness. I have a lot of tools! I should be able to avail myself of one of those tools in order to get that yucky feeling to leave me alone. But it wouldn’t go away.

Then I remembered that weird technique I’d used back in August and immediately wanted to try it out again to see if it would help me.  I couldn’t even remember the name of it anymore! Thank goodness I still had the email in my SENT items folder from when I’d asked Olivia if she’d ever heard about it. That’s it: Gendlin’s Focusing.

So I tried it again. Wow, what a neat tool! I was able to move from something that was nothing more than a vague, nagging sense of uneasiness (and squeezing pressure in my throat) to an image of someone holding me back by the neck, preventing me from helping someone else. The felt sense told me, “I feel squelched, silenced, disenfranchised, disempowered by proxy.”

I can see that this is an area of shenpa for me: when I see what I PERCEIVE to be an injustice of any sort and my attempts to right that injustice do not pan out exactly in accordance with my highest ideals, I am snagged on the thorns of a complex in my psyche.

I can’t say that I know where to go from here, but it feels A LOT better just knowing a bit more about what message my body was trying to send me. For now it is enough just to have acknowledged that message, sat with it and thanked my body for sending it to me.

We Gathered

Yesterday was the memorial service for my neighbour, the woman with whom I had only recently begun to become closer friends.  Relatives had driven and flown in from several states for the modest gathering in the party room of this building. It was just family, three building staff, one other neighbour and the two of us.

We watched a slide show of photos from K’s life, then listened as one after another family member shared memories, poems and goodbyes. Her father shook our hands, pointed out the food and wine, thanked us for coming.

“Thank you for being cool with my sister,” said the one who looked most like K, choking the words out through sobs. “Thank you for seeing through the white noise that surrounded her.”

I walked over to a window to admire the view of the marina from the top floor.  K’s granddaughter, age three or so, walked over to me and held up her hands, the universal toddler sign for “pick me up.”

I lifted her onto my hip and turned so she could see the boats, but it wasn’t the boats she wanted to look at. She was captivated by my earrings and reached out to gingerly touch the left one.

“Just like yours,” I said as I touched her earring on the same side.

She touched her own earlobe.

Then she touched my earring on the other side, silent, eyes wide. I flipped it a few times so she could watch it swing.

She touched her other earring, too.  She stared and the faintest smile graced her lips for just a moment.  Satisfied, she gestured toward the floor.

I set her down, and she walked away.

Friday

After a hectic day at work, it felt so nice to be taken out to the movies. We saw Ides of March, which we both liked.

I know I am blessed. This is driven home for me when I realize that for me a stressful or hectic day is simply one in which I had a tad more on my plate than usual: two classes to teach instead of one; some monthly paperwork to complete; two students in my face at break wanting to file a complaint against another student for creating a toxic environment for them and others of their religion; a student shoving a cookie dough order form under my nose in case I want to help with her son’s school fundraising. Then, after three o’clock: a rushed meeting about starting up the newsletter again; sorting, stacking and putting away the Monopoly money that we used for the game; marking papers and finishing up the job of creating a filing system for the teacher who returns on Monday.

Yes, the two students and I did get the grievance form filled out. I’m glad there is a process for this situation.

Whew! It felt so good to just climb into the passenger seat and be whisked away to movie land.

Deciding Which Idioms to Study Using Google Fight

Three weeks of teaching for the advanced instructor is coming to a close tomorrow. I like to do something lighter on Fridays, and I think I’ve hit on a fun idea.

Teachers seem to love to fall back on idioms almost as an easy time-filler. For example, if we’ve been talking about food all week, we can always throw in a lesson on food-related idioms.  Ex: My goose is cooked. Or: She’s the apple of my eye.

Although students beg us to teach them, idioms are not as common as we native speakers think they are. We know we use them all the time, but what we don’t realize when we plunk a list of them down in front of the ESL learner is that the learner may not come across one particular idiom often enough to warrant the time it will take to study and memorize it.

So which ones should we teach? Research indicates that our intuition is no good at all at telling us which ones are actually used a lot and which ones are not. You have to go to a corpus if you want your teaching to be grounded in fact.

I could teach the students how to use COCA, and in fact I’ve tried. But far easier and more fun than that is Google Fight.

So what I’ve done is put a list of food-related idioms, proverbs and slang on a sheet. First we will learn what each means. Then we will turn our sheets over where I have printed a diagram of 16-team elimination brackets.

I will let the students pick the sixteen idioms they want to duke it out. Then we’ll put the idioms up against each other on Google Fight and record the winners on our elimination charts.

What I thought might make it even more exciting would be if I let the students bet on the outcome of each fight. I can pass out one dollar of Monopoly money to each student who correctly guesses the outcome of a fight. The student with the most money at the end can come up and choose a prize from the prize table.

Not only will they remember some of the idioms through talking about them and writing them down, but they will have factual evidence for which ones merit taking the time to learn them.  Best of all is that the winner of each round is the idiom the students have to write down again on the next elimination level. So students are automatically getting more exposure to the more important idioms. Genius!

See You at the Ball!

I am going out the door in this dress…

With this evening bag:

And these earrings dangling from my pretty little earlobes:

I’m wearing this dragonfly around my right ring finger.

And here are my shoes:

I’ve thrown on this long string of pink pearls.

My first choice for a date was Vincent van Gogh, but he said he doesn’t do parties, as he can’t stand to see so much money wasted on extravagance when their are families sitting around a table with only a few potatoes tonight.

My second choice for a date was Tom Waits, but he refused to comply with the dress code for this Black Tie affair.

Finally Sylvain agreed to be my date. He said he didn’t mind playing third fiddle considering how many choices I had in Cyberspace.  He chose our car, but you’ll have to go to his blog to see it.

The Ball

I was quite jealous of Suki last year as she made her plans to attend The Willow Manor Ball.  This year I think I’ll attend!

You are invited, too.  So far I have decided on a dress and shoes but still need jewellery, a date and a ride.  Hmmmm.  Suki is taking William Butler Yeats and Carl Jung as her dates!

Grace in Small Things 185

• gathering with loved ones to share home cooked food
• days and days with the bedroom window and balcony doors open
• going barefoot
• the little black squirrel that stands on her hind legs when she sees Sylvain
• walking with my best friend through wild areas where layers of autumn colours make me sigh

My Choice for Sushi in Windsor, ON

Until last month, my favourite sushi place in Windsor was The Sushi California Japanese Restaurant on University Avenue West in downtown Windsor (close to Phog Lounge).  I still think the quality of their sushi, tempura and sashimi is top notch, but the new TenKa Sushi at 6415 Tecumseh East is our new sushi destination.  (It’s next to Red Lobster and close to A&W Rootbeer and Starbucks, if that helps.)

Occupying a large stand-alone building that was once a pet store, Tenka offers an all-you-can-eat option at lunch and again at dinner.  I am sold on this concept since I like to mix and match appetizers (edamame, miso soup, seaweed salad), sushi, hand rolls, sashimi, skewers of teriyaki chicken, soba, tempura, red bean ice cream and whatever else I feel like savouring without having to wonder how fast the bill is adding up.

The best part is that I no longer have to dream about our next trip through Waterloo and the opportunity it offers for us to stop at Ye’s Sushi. The experience at TenKa is very much like the one you get at Ye’s.

Everything we ordered was fresh, delicious and authentic–which I feel qualified to judge since living in Japan for a year. The sashimi melts in your mouth, which it should. I can’t say that about all the sashimi in Windsor.

The only caveat I would offer prospective diners is that the wait staff seemed a tad inexperienced and lacking in the ability to anticipate diners’ needs.  I am fully capable of flagging them down as they whiz around the room, though, so that isn’t a deterrent for me.

Do One Thing Each Day That Scares You

Two thirds of the way up, I remembered that I have a slight fear of heights. 

Putting back up the birdhouses

Pumpkin Pie All Around

I was with the afternoon class every day this week, so we had a chance to bond and shape the sequence of lessons together.  We covered the English article system (the, a/an) as well as Canadian Thanksgiving.

The article lesson had been prompted by the fact that they all had so many errors with them in their essays they’d written for me the previous week. I decided we would spend half of each class on articles all week, ending with their writing me new essays to see if any discernible progress would be made.

Believe it or not, I DID see improvements in article use in just one week of steadily hammering home the rules.

The best part, though, were the essays themselves.

The sample texts we’d used for practicing articles had been a fable called The Fox and the Crow and a short narrative about Niagara Falls. Therefore for their composition assignments, I asked them to write either a fable from their culture or tell me about a time when they visited one of the world’s great wonders.

I got to read about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Great Wall of China, The Story of the Tortoise and the Hare as well as the one about Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.

But the one that got to me the most I have to share here:

I like to write about two of the wondrous things which are located in Iran in the city of Isfahan. Actually, Isfahan has a lot of places for visitors but these two buildings are something unique.

First one was a bath which work with a light like candle. It was working since Safavieh till about 50 years ago. The Americans wanted to find out how it worked but not only couldn’t they find out how it worked but they turned the light off and couldn’t turn it on again and now it is not working.

Another small building which is called Menar Jonban it means rocking tower. It is a building with two towers, if you go with one of each tower and start to move each tower, the building and other tower will start to move and shake.

Unfortunately the Americans, about 50 years ago, came to Iran and wanted to find out how it worked. But not only couldn’t they find out how it worked, they damaged one of those towers. Fortunately still one of them and the building still rocking.

My comment at the end of his paper was: Fascinating! Is this a true story or are you pulling my leg?

In class today he swore it was true and gave everyone a great laugh when he told it in his deadpan way.  Later I Googled it and found that it was the English who had tried to reverse-engineer and ended up (according to popular belief) detroying the heating mechanism for the Sheikh Bahai bath.

I’ve yet to find anything to back up the story that the Swinging Minarets of Isfahan have been damaged in any way by outsiders, American or not.

It sure made for an entertaining story, though!

At break time I went upstairs to turn the oven on. We all enjoyed pumpkin pie with whipped cream that was every bit as good as homemade, if you ask me.

Score!

The morning class, the one that is hard to please and bores easily, got very wrapped up in the task I designed for them today. After a week of learning about the food industry and GMO products with supply teacher J, I gave them a lesson on how to decipher the nutrients table on a food package. After the break I passed out actual empty food packages.  I put the students into groups of two, three or four. The members of each group received food packages for the same category of item: desserts, snacks, beverages or main courses.

Each student was then given a list of questions to fill out about his or her food item. The first twelve question had to be answered individually. They were questions such as:

• What is the name of the product?
• Does the name make it sound healthful?
• How big is a serving size?
• What is the main ingredient?
• How many calories are there in one serving?
• How much fat?
• Fibre?
• Protein?
• Sodium?
• Would you eat this product? Explain your answer.

The next four questions required the student to compare his product with that of a member of her group. The group with breakfast items, for example, compared three brands of cereal and a box of waffles.  The beverage team compared cow’s milk to rice milk.  The bread team had whole wheat bread and gluten-free rice bread.  The entree team had salmon burgers, breaded chicken breasts, pizza and kibbeh.  The snack group had granola bars, probiotic bars, and a box of raisins.

Everybody got right into it.

In the plenary they all shared the results with the whole class. I was tickled to see one student writing down the name of the winning breakfast item.

I hope their regular instructor comes back after Thanksgiving because I created for myself a hard act to follow.  It sure was fun while it was happening, though!

Grace in Small Things 184

• Ginger tisane! Its’ soooo soothing on upset tummies.
• I finished Wolf Totem last night and today passed the book on to someone I know will cherish it.
• The rescued geranium is starting to bloom.
• My place of employment is under such GOOD new management.
• I’ve almost survived a whole week of teaching someone else’s class in addition to my own. One day to go!

Like a Buffet Table

Today was one of those teaching days that makes me want to jump up and click my heels together.

My morning class has been coming to the computer lab weekly for a few months now. Most of them now have the hang of it. They know to log onto the internet and go directly to my web log first thing. They know that they will find a post there welcoming them to the lab and listing some suggestions that are hyperlinked to other websites and resources.

At the end I often have other suggestions, such as software they can use if they do not wish to use the web-based resources. I try to vary the choices enough so that there is something accessible for the one who cannot type or hold a mouse, and something visual for the one who is deaf.

I love that they no longer have to rely on me for passwords or web addresses. They know the drill! The content is always topical and thus changes from week to week, but the framework is always the same. This is fostering so much independence in them!

Today as I paced slowly up and down the long aisle, peeking over shoulders to ensure they were not stuck or struggling with anything, this is what I saw:

S is playing hangman with the list of ten Thanksgiving-related words I loaded into SpellingCity.com, having finished the “teach me” and “test me” modules.

H is doing the spelling test on that site, as well.

L has finished reading about Canadian Thanksgiving on a site called ESL Free Press and has clicked related resources in the sidebar of that website. Now he’s reading up on Canadian elections.

M has finished spelling practice and has stumbled upon the Vowel Song in my sidebar. He seems to be enjoying it.

A is watching VOA (Voice of America) news, special English broadcast covering this morning’s tragedy in his homeland.

M, who cannot use mouse or keyboard easily, is watching a YouTube video on how to cook a turkey.

S is doing an interactive word search of Thanksgiving words.

The more I use this smorgasbord approach, the more I believe in it.

My Job Is So Fun, and Other Miracles

I can’t believe what a fun job I have.

We just finished a unit on emergency services and are now turning to education and using the library. Oh, wait! First we have to cover Canadian Thanksgiving, which is this coming Monday. One student specifically requested that I teach them what the heck that holiday is all about. He’s been here a couple of years and still doesn’t get it.  I’ll do my best!

I’m getting so excited as I plan the education and libraries unit. I’m hoping they’ll learn how to use the online catalog to find out if the library carries a particular book. We’ll learn to search by title, keyword, author, etc.  We will learn how the books are arranged on the shelves, how to register for a library card and how to check out materials.

After that we’ll segue into the Canadian education system. I have already located an actual report card template for this province. I love realia!

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This afternoon was computer lab day for the advanced class, which I am teaching for the next week.  As always, I directed them to enter the URL of my private web log in the address field at the top of the search engine screen.  I find the blog platform to be very suitable for my classroom purposes. Each post begins, “Hello, class!” From there I offer them topical links to extend that week’s lesson. Along the sidebar I have all my favourite ESL links grouped by topic: settlement help, passing the citizenship test, English practice, pronunciation, literacy, just for fun, etc.

Today a new student asked if she could access my website from her home computer. I said she could, just to remember not to enter the address in the Google search field since the site is private and invisible to search engines. She was tickled with all the resources I had gathered together. At one point I saw her using a bilingual resource in Hindi and English.

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This past week I struggled a lot with a situation at work in which I felt students were disrespected.  The core values of our organization include honesty, integrity and respect. What transpired flew in the face of all of those, I thought. So I was having fits and trying to figure out how to subdue my ego before attempting to raise my concerns with the powers that be.

I prayed about it.  I am a very strong believer in the power of prayer because it has a 100% track record with me. I don’t think you have to believe in G_d for prayer to work. I think you can pray to your own subconscious or Inner Wise One, to the Universe at large, or just sit and meditate. Carl Jung talked about holding the tension to allow for the transcendent function to arise.  For me, all these are different handles for the same phenomenon.

This week a colleague from a different department stopped me in a stairwell as I was ascending and he was descending. “Do you write?” he blurted out.

“I do. Why?” I answered.

He is thinking of starting up a newsletter for our organization, he said. He wondered if I would like to contribute.  I said I would, and later emailed to add that I’d be interested in writing a regular very short column about when things go better than one could ever imagine. You know…like magic moments.  I did not tell him that I have a web log and already chronicle those things here for you guys!

A few nights later I had another thought. Why not let students have a voice? In fact, what about a student council? Heck, if students had a way to bring concerns to the attention of management, I could stop agonizing over needing to advocate for them!  Instead I could empower them to speak for themselves!

My colleague said that giving students a voice is exactly what he had in mind.

I’ll bet he doesn’t even know he has just become the vehicle for an answered prayer.