Speaking at conference in Karaganda

In Kazakhstan, it pays to be flexible. I was scheduled to give a talk the second day of the conference, and planned to refine my talk and PowerPoint slides that first night in my hotel room. But when I arrived today at 10am, having gotten up at 3:30 that morning to catch my flight, the people at the registration desk rushed up to me, threw my ID badge at me, and asked if I could present right then and there, or at least in an hour or so.

I panicked a bit, since this has been my lifelong recurring nightmare – I arrive at the theater and don’t even know what play I’m in let, let alone have my costume or remember any lines. I drew in a big breath and told myself I could do this. But the next problem cropped up – they didn’t have any ability to project my PowerPoint, so now I was faced with redoing my whole talk without having to rely on the slides that would walk the audience through my arguments. So that was out the window. Now I really had to punt. As if that weren’t bad enough, I THEN found out that most of the 200 or so people don’t speak very good or even any English so I needed to have my talk translated, sentence by sentence, even phrase by phrase. This would eat up about half the time. Now I had a grand total of 7 minutes to give a talk. The speakers who preceded me that morning had taken more than their share of the time. So I was under pressure to keep it short and sweet and yet make a point – without slides and while being translated. Oh yeah, this is the stuff nightmares are made of.

But I pulled it off! I actually think it was a pretty good talk. I didn’t cover very much, and I repeated my main point – that students don’t need more grammar to learn how to write better; they need to learn how to think. And that goes for any student, anywhere, writing in any language. I allowed as how they would probably write more in their native language, but it would not necessarily be better organized. Most teachers don’t think about that.

Afterwards one teacher came up to me to ask if I thought that by asking students to listen to a story and then recording it from memory would help them do critical thinking. I had to state unequivocally no, that it would not because they need to be generating their own ideas and then weighing the arguments. Copying someone’s ideas doesn’t have anything to do with critical thinking. I hate to say it, but that’s pretty typical Kazakhstani thinking that by copying someone’s ideas you are actually teaching someone how to write. I said that it probably helped with sentence structure – because they had a model, and perhaps vocabulary, but it was not encouraging any kind of higher level thinking. She looked totally bemused about how to even approach such a task, and asked if I ever traveled to Karaganda to give seminars.