The choice is yours
This whole post is very different from what it should have been. First of all, it should have been published on Sunday. Today is Thursday. I was planning to write about attending the 2020 Celebration Conference organized by ILC, which was supposed to take place this past Saturday. It didn’t happen. The conference was postponed until May. I was preparing to teach as usual. Instead, the government declared the state of emergency here in the Czech Republic and, later on, restricted free movement. The reality has changed drastically for many people, including English teachers and their students.
Many of us are now facing serious financial stress and many problems of practical nature. We can’t go out and teach our students the way we were used to. The schools are closed and pupils and students of all ages are forced to stay at home. There’s already been a massive increase in the promotion of online teaching resources. Many freelance English teachers now offer online lessons via Skype or other tools and I’m one of them, despite the fact that I’ve never been a huge fan of computer assisted teaching and learning as the sole method. I still do think that the face-to-face contact between the teacher and the student(s) is a necessary part of the learning experience. However, the times are changing. The current situation poses a challenge that I decided to accept. I’m firmly convinced that if we approach what’s happening right now as the proverbial blessing in disguise, there’s much we can learn and benefit from in the end.
True to my belief that a good teacher simply can’t stop learning, I’ve already attended two webinars on online teaching. I learnt many new things (well, maybe they’re old for many of my colleagues but they were definitely new for me) and I’ve started implementing them into my new teaching practice. I have yet to see what the new normal will look like, but I’m determined to do my best to keep on passing my knowledge using whatever tools I have at hand. I found out that having a Skype lesson can be just as enjoyable as the one where my student and I both share the same physical space. I’m experimenting with Google Classroom, exploring online whiteboards and I even started thinking about hosting my own webinars.
If you’re forced to stay at home, you most likely have more free time than usual. More free time in general can also mean more time for reading. Reading – as is already well known – is a great way of improving your (foreign) language. If you are like me, you probably have a pile of books to read waiting on your bedside table. Still, I’d like to recommend one great book that seems to be relevant to our circumstances. The book is called The Choice and it was written by Edith Eger. Dr. Eger’s life story is truly extraordinary.
As a 16-year old Jewish girl, she was sent from her home in Košice to the concentration camp in Auschwitz. She managed to survive this horrendous experience, recovered from serious health problems, got married and started a new life only to face further persecution from the communist regime shortly after the war. She and her husband managed to flee Slovakia and settled down in the USA. She started studying psychology and later on obtained her Ph.D. degree. Drawing on her own experience of the Holocaust survivor, she’s been working mostly with patients suffering from PTSD.
The book deals with many different topics – happiness, suffering, trauma, recovery, resilience, strength. But most of all it is a book about freedom. You may be wondering what freedom there can be when you find yourself facing such impossible, unimaginable, terrible ordeal. And that’s exactly Dr. Eger’s message – you can always choose. You can choose to be a victim or take the responsibility and set yourself free. The book is an amazing, kind and inspiring account of how she found her way to freedom no matter how terribly she had suffered. Of course, I’ll leave it up to you if you decide to give the book a try, but before I leave, I’d like to quote a short bit from it:
If I had to to name my therapy, I’d probably call it Choice Therapy, as freedom is about CHOICE – about choosing compassion, humor, optimism, intuition, curiosity, and self-expression. And to be free is to live in the present. If we are stuck in the past, saying, “If only I had gone there instead of here…“ or “If only I had married someone else…,“ we are living in a prison of our own making. Likewise if we spend our time in the future, saying, “I won’t be happy until I graduate…“ or „I won’t be happy until I find the right person.“ The only place where we can exercise our freedom of choice is in the present.
I can’t possibly find a better survival guide for now than this. Are we afraid? Yes. Do we know what will happen? Of course not. Can we forsee the consequences? Hardly at the moment. But maybe the most important question is, “Does it matter right now?“ For me the question is no. The only constant in life is change and our lives will be changed after this experience, no matter what your profession is. The important thing is how we behave at this very moment. Do we care about the other people around us? Are we helping the others? Are we trying to make the most of this situation with what we have at hand? Are we looking for the best possible outcome?
I’m trying to and I’d like to send good vibes to everybody. Stay safe and healthy and please, focus on the bright side and spread positive news, no matter the language.
The photo taken by myself.