Field of the Gods

Learning to Teach

Hello everyone,

Sorry I haven't written anything for a couple of weeks, but I've been pretty busy with my CELTA (teacher training) course - and the Cambridge Film Festival! I'm now just over halfway through the CELTA course, and it's going very well. I'm learning a lot, enjoying the process very much and getting good feedback on my teaching. They get you teaching real students from Day 2 of the course, and the structure is basically that you get theoretical input in the morning and then you're either teaching or observing other students teach in the afternoons. All our teaching is observed by the trainers and we get detailed written feedback on every lesson we do, which is really helpful. The other students are lovely, and there's a really nice atmosphere on the course. I've even been doing a bit of meditation teaching at lunchtimes by popular demand, which I've been enjoying.

But neither hell, high water nor CELTA courses could keep me away from the Cambridge Film Festival, and I got to 8 films over the 10 days of the festival. Almost all the films I saw were really excellent, so it's hard to pick a favourite - but if I had to choose, it'd probably be The Science of Sleep, the new film from Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) starring Gael Garcia Bernal and Charlotte Gainsburg. Like Eternal Sunshine, The Science of Sleep is an exploration of romantic love and the nature of consciousness, and the plot weaves effortlessly between the main character's dreams and his reality, delicately blurring the edges as it goes. I imagine it'll be at an arts cinema near you in the not-too-distant future, so make sure you don't miss it. Last year, I ended up seeing a lot of Japanese anime at the festival, and spent several months afterwards exploring the genre more deeply. This year, half of the films I ended up seeing were Chinese, and I have a sense I'll be exploring Chinese cinema in the coming months. I'm already a big fan of the Hong Kongese director Wong Kar-Wai, but I now have several other excellent Chinese directors I need to investigate...

Whenever I watch a few films in a certain language, I enevitably start wanting to learn that language - so unsurprisingly my enthusiasm for Chinese has been building up over the last couple of weeks... As many of you will know, I want to become a Buddhist translator, and translate Buddhist texts into English and Norwegian. The four main Buddhist scriptural languages are Sanskrit, Pali (basically a dialect of Sanskrit), Tibetan and Chinese, so I decided a while ago that one of my main projects for the next few years would be to learn these four (well, three and a half, really) languages. I'm hoping to start a BA in Chinese with Sanskrit as my minor next autumn at the University of Oslo, so I'm focussing on Pali and Tibetan at the moment. That's quite enough to be getting on with really, but I've still had to restrain myself in the bookshops from getting Chinese textbooks... (I've ordered a big fat history of China from Amazon though, which should keep me going for a while!)

Hopefully I'll be able to find a Tibetan in Oslo who wants to improve their English and can help me with my Tibetan in exchange for some free English lessons. Pali's a bit more straightforward as it's a literary language (ie I'm only learning how to read it, not speak or write) and I've already gone through the basics over the last six months with a couple of Buddhist friends in Cambridge who are learning it as well.

I can hardly believe that it's just over two weeks until I move to Oslo. I'm so focussed on the CELTA course and living in Oslo still seems so unreal that I can't really look forward to it... But anyway, I have a feeling that the next couple of weeks are going to pass pretty quickly and I'm sure it'll start sinking in once I actually get there.

Well, I've got a lesson to prepare for tomorrow so I'd better go...

Peace and Love,

David

posted by David @ 12:28 PM