Christmas "in the English-speaking world" at Studieskolen

The Christmas event at Studieskolen was a success! I was assigned to a classroom with another member of the English team, Wynn Stewart. We were two perspectives in the sprawling category referred to as "The English-speaking world." In other classrooms, the German, Italian , Spanish , French and Polish teachers had set up their displays. On my end of the classroom, I talked about how Christmas is celebrated in the Philippines, and Wynn talked about Scotland. People wandered in, mostly Studieskolen enrolees and employees, some with their kids in tow. Throughout the two hours of the event, I kept talking, and sang "Kasadya Ning Taknaa" at least four times. Got videoed doing it, too!

I had set up one of the desks with a selection of goodies, including some hand-made pastillas de leche, some of which I rolled up in cut-out wrappers, Bulacan-style. I'm not from Bulacan, but the biko and budbud and tablea-chocolate I associate with Neg. Oriental are simply impossible to find in Denmark , not even among the shops that sell Asian products (I could have ordered them from someone in the Filipino community, but that would have taken time, and would have required a large and costly quantity). To make them I'd have had to have a supply of banana leaves, as well as sticky rice, muscovado sugar, etc. There was no guarantee they'd get eaten, either.  

I made model parols -- the classic five-point star shape with the paper tails, and the Pampanga Capiz parol : a laminated printout that I stuck on the walls. These are impossible to find around here, and cost a fortune, so a model was the best I could come up with ... maybe next year, I can stick the two identical sides and wire them up with LED lights. I definitely want to do this again next year... with more information about why English is widely understood, and spoken, in the Philippines.

Jump-starting my drawing skills

I’d been so occupied with teaching English and working at an online networking company for children that I’d found little time for my visual art. Throughout my teens, 20s and early 30s I’d been an enthusiastic sketcher and pastellist, working primarily with pen-and-ink, pencil and oil pastels, eventually graduating to soft pastels, the more difficult medium. I’d been affiliated with Manila’s Saturday Group, which was founded by the painter Malang, an organization of veteran artists from whom I learned so much just by watching them work. I’d drawn illustrations for the lifestyle/literature sections of various newspapers where I’d been an editor.  

But with the move to Denmark, there was a new language to study, a master’s degree to complete, and then the business of chalking up a minimum number of work hours a week as a requirement for permanent residency.

Whenever I travel, I make it a point to pick up some small, useful souvenir – a bottle of perfume, a lipstick. In Assisi last year I entered a stationery shop and found a clutch of pretty notebooks with marble-patterned covers, and I just had to have one. On the train rides between one city and the next I would take it out and make a quick sketch, from memory, of what I’d just seen from the window. Or I just sat absorbing everything – seeing the pattern of light on the trunks of trees, the dark spires of a row of cypress in a distant field.  

A few months later, in Thessaloniki, I found myself at a stationary store, the kind that sells notebooks in packs of five for school kids. On one of the shelves was a box of soft pastels, the cheap kind, in garish primary colors. I had a full set of oil pastels from Caran d’Ache, but no soft ones at the time. My hand hovered longingly over the brilliant sticks of red, blue and green, then I remembered the mess they would make (on snowy white restaurant linen!) and pragmatically chose a set of watercolor pencils. 

It was on that trip to Greece that I started to work with color again. It started with tiny, diffident renditions of the view from restaurant balconies as we waited for our food: mountains and store fronts and boats that took an eternity to complete. My drawing skills were shot, I thought, but I kept at it, perhaps out of a perverse need to torture myself. The more I drew, the easier it became, and the more I wanted.  It took quite a few more hours of practicing, but I did eventually regain the ground I’d lost.

- 💕 Bing

***

The soft pastel above, completed December 2018, is based on a photo I took of the Grand Canal in Venice, from the Rialto Bridge, in March 2009. Below is a sketch of the Parthenon over breakfast from the top floor of our hotel, 2018.

Teaching Academic Writing anew

I'm pleased to be teaching the Academic Writing course at Studieskolen once again.

The course has been redesigned to address the needs of students in Denmark, and is intended to help them over the hurdles of writing the formal essays in English required in their field of study. At the same time it will also benefit those who are already in the work force but whose jobs require them to write in formal English.

This Fall (2016), we're doing things a bit differently than before. Instead of presenting the students with various forms of academic writing which they must then emulate (a time-consuming and often frustrating task for those who have a ton of theory to read and digest), the course will guide them writing only those essays that are relevant to their field of study.  The focus is entirely on the student and what he/she produces, and the goal is to get them to write, and write. And write.

But because English is most likely a second, if not foreign, language, to those who enrol at Studieskolen, the material I've prepared will also include a review of grammar and an opportunity to build vocabulary. This time I'm dropping the course book I used in the past, in favour of a compendium, which contains several pages of exercises. The aim is to get everyone to develop a succinct and accurate style, devoid of ornamentation.

Moreover, each student will have the opportunity to work on, or show off, their presentation skills, by means of a mini-lecture centering on their projects or field of study, around the mid-point of the course.  And each will have the opportunity to receive feedback on current or earlier work.

The change in direction reflects Studieskolen's policy of eschewing the classic PPP (Presentation-Practice-Production) approach, and embracing the communicative aspect of teaching (kommunikativ undervisning). 

The admittedly labour-intensive approach I plan to take is made possibly by the relatively few students in each class. Maximum number of enrolees is 12, although the classes I've handled so far have contained between seven and nine persons.

I've taught this course three times in the past, and each batch of students has been unique, and individually memorable. My previous students have included a biochemist from Brazil (who, incidentally, was crowned Miss Earth in 2009), a 16-year old competitive ballroom dancer from Russia, and a Danish policeman who recorded his own rap albums.