SPEAKING 17h

D.I.Y. Book Club

Tue 18.10. Planning the book club 1h

After the ALMS group meeting we had an hour meeting in which we planned our bookclub. We chose the book at Akateeminen and decided the place and the date for our first meeting. We also agreed how we'll approach the book and what topics we'll discuss on the first meeting.
The group seemed to be nice and easygoing, I was very excited. I was a little bit suspicious how we'd manage to communicate in English.
I started to read straight away at home. I found the language quite easy but long lists of exotic animals were very slow to translate. First chapters I was picking up all the words I didn't know. After that I figured out I couldn't do that very long, even if I would only mark the words and translate them after reading the hole chapter the marking was stopping the thoughts and the reading became soon very upsetting. I had to read the chapters again.

Tue 1.10. The first meeting. 2h

We met at Saara's home at 16.oo. We had agreed to read the book until page 68 but all of us had read it further. We discussed about the book and handled several topics:

  - what kind of character is Pi?
  - the prologue and it's meaning?
  - the author, his works and what kind of picture we had of him?
  - what other topics we could raise now after starting to get the idea of the book?
  - how we felt about the book and it's structure?
  - why do the religions have such a big role but emotions so little?
  - why is the author's voice hearable every now and then between the chapters?

The meeting was nice. My earlier doubts about our ability to stuck on English as communication language seemed to be empty: we were talking in English all the time and we all had enough time to bring up our ideas, opinions and views. We are different in our rhytmes and characters but it seemed to get well along. I found it good that it was a small group and none of us was extremely silent or loud, but still we are enough different to have many-sided conversation.
I enjoyed my stay and didn't feel myself stupid or not being good enough. Usually in bigger classes there are always kind of  "super-people" who know everything, can everything and aren't hiding it, in such a situation I'm being silent because I'm afraid to make myself ridicolous or saying wrong things that the others would laugh at. I think I have had such situations, especially when being young but also at the university when I was studying German.
It was visible that I hadn't spoken English regurarly lately; every now and then words were lost and I had to use other ways to express myself.
For the next time we shared the topics we're supposed to pay attention to. I was still feeling good about this way of working.

Tue 15.10. The second meeting. 2h

We met again at Saara's house. We had read the book at least until page 253 and we discussed the topics we had been thinking about.

  - the role of religion in Life of Pi

  - Indian culture is not obvious in the book, how comes? Would it be even possible to have a family like that in India?

  - Pi's relationship to other people and his emotionless, why? Caused by a trauma or is Pi extraordinary? How the author is bringing it to us?

  - author's relationship to Pi, is the turn-taking story telling useful and necessary?

The more we discussed the more we had questions. The discussion was very interesting and sharing ideas and points of views was very enlightning. I really enjoyed myself. The second meeting went smoothly and our roles were pretty much the same. I noticed that my way to speak is quite fast and wordy, especially when I get excited. I had to remind myself to give some space to the others too. My behaviour seemed that if I didn't say everything now and then I would lose the opportunity to speak.

Is it because of my family in childhood? Later on I was thinking about my role as a speaker in general. I'm sometimes very talkative, especially when my spirits are up and I'm feeling good in the situation. But on the other hand I feel like I don't meet my friends enough (without kids!) so I'm all the time in an urgent need of speaking. If I meet people when my kids are around I get nothing said, they're supertalkative as well and they're stealing all the attention by speaking, messing, running away, asking, needing help for this and that. My husbands likes to talk too. So I'm basically surrounded by talkative people all the time and that makes me sometimes almost numb, the stress of many voices and responsibility to listen to all of them makes me sometimes very tired.
My biggest wish after being able to sleep a whole weekend would be a relaxed evening with friends talking about something totally different. Last time I had an evening off alone with my friends was a year ago and I have no idea when I'm going to have the next one, when the baby is 6 months? Why is it so difficult to make space for myself? Once when I was still living in Tampere I had a 2 years and 53 days break between free-evenings. And that wasn't anything spectacular anyway what I then did, I went out to a restaurant with my friends to eat. I was away for maybe 2-3 hours.
Probably I should just go and take my time, but it seems that every time I try it something chaotic happens: husband's is on a work journey and my daughter gets an ear-infection, and next moment she's having allergic reaction for the medicine and we need to rush to hospital and take the 2-years old, very wild little fella with me because I don't know how long we need to stay in there and next day again because the symptoms come back and it's weekend and the hospital is very busy and the whole mess takes one week to get it stable again and then it's time to move and the whole episode is a nightmare.

Well, it all leads to that I'm enjoying my book club a lot. They're my freetime, my speaking time -and I have to watch out that I'm not talking too much. At the end of the second meeting we decided that for the last meeting we'll continue observing the same topics but also gather some ready written reviews and talk about the book utilizing them and analyze if we have missed something and do other readers have same kind of ideas and feelings like we do. Also new ideas and ways of observation are considered as the story goes on.

Tue 05.11. The third and the last meeting. 2h

Again at Saara's cosy and beautiful home. We had finished the book and our feelings were mixed. On the other hand the story was good and on the other hand it was a big disappointment. I didn't like Yann Martel's way of writing, as if he wasn't serious. Why is he including so much himself in the book? The ending was interesting though and that gave us a good amount topics we could talk. Pi didn't seem to be normal in all ways, he was so emotionless, or was it Yann Martel himself?

We had all taken a ready review along about the book. But they're were disappointing too: no-one had really analysed the book like really. The reviews were more like summaries about the story and we didnt's find any ready ideas for our questions. On disturbing point was the claim that the book would be a copy of Max and the Cats by Moacyr Scliar. The best about the Life of Pi was the idea of the story and it seemed to be stolen. I was disappointed and it didn't make my dissatisfaction with Martel grew bigger. I can't understand why the book was so popular, it was badly written. Some parts were messy, some parts boring and the meaning of religions was vague. A very talented writer would had made a real masterpiece of the book.

But our discussion was good and we got a good humour out of hating Martel and the Life of Pi so much, I think we were more or less disappointed. Though we tried to think about the good sides as well. My speaking in English was clearly smoother than at the first meeting, I thought it was a good sign. We were excited about the movie we're going to watch next.


Short stories, Tu 10.12. 3h 
After finishing Life of Pi we decided to read next a little bit different texts. We ended up everyone choosing a short story and sending it with some questions to each other. I found a story called "Gloria" by David Sartof. Two other stories discussed were "Snow" by Tove Jansson and "Samsa in love" by Haruki Murakami. I'll write more about the stories and how I experienced them in the reading part.

We met at Saara's home and it was going to be our last meeting with ALMS. It felt good and sad at the same time. :) We were supposed to meet only two hours like usual but at some point we realised it's not going to be enough. This time we had a lot of things to check on internet. During our DIY-clubs we've been always chechking things and gathered more information about the authors, war years, statistics etc during the conversation.

We started talking about Samsa in Love, which was a reversal of Kafka’s "The Metamorphosis". At the beginning Saara had a little presentation about Kafka's novel which was very useful, otherwise I wouldn't had understood the meaning of Samsas name, metamorphosis and many other parts. The story itself was interesting and we checked e.g. when Kafka was born and died and if he was a jewish. We had a good time conversation about Kafka, this story, why it was written, that author was japanese, which was surprising and the great quality of the text, the language was smooth, satisfying and well describing, it was enjoyable to read it.
The text was published in New Yorker and I found many other interesting stories on their webpage, most likely I'll be reading in future reguralry stories there. Without this course I'd probably never come up the idea of reading short stories on New Yorker. This story made me want to travel to New York, even though the happening in the story took place in wartime Prague.

Rebecca had an interesting choice of Tove Jansson's translated story "Snow".That gave us a good conversation about relationship between a mother and a child. We were speculating during our talk where might the child's father be, whether the child was a girl or a boy, which year this could be happening, how old the child was and was the mother or the child Tove herself. We were quite pleased to find out that we had had quite right guesses when we checked out Tove Jansson's bibliography, she was the child herself. The only thing we got wrong was the age of the child: she was only about 4-5 years old, we had estimated the child to be 8-10 years old.
The story was a beautiful story and fitted well in winter, even though it was sad and again it had war there at the background. It seems quite many stories and films we're discussing has war present in them. Is it just a co-incidence or is it so big part of the happenings in the world that it's normal? Anyway, gathering some special knowledge and vocabulary about that subject can't harm us. This course is bringing us a huge amount of knowledge about other subjects too: famous people, remarkable sights, habits in different cultures etc. Sometimes the line between learning language through cultural things and learning about cultures through learning a language are getting mixed up. Interesting. That topic inspired me reading this text about the subject later on:
http://billzart.wordpress.com/2012/03/04/the-importance-of-culture-in-language-learning/

My pick for the short story was "Gloria" by David Sartof. I liked the structure, even though some parts could had been more coherent and on the other hand the writer could had left more to the reader to figure out. We discussed these parts and came to the conclusion that this story was more like a moviescript. The other stories were more lingering and concentrating on the atmosphere and description. This story had nice language but it was a mix of CSI-series, the movie "Beautiful mind" and other stories so it wasn't too difficult to guess either what was going to happen next. Later on I was sorry that I hadn't been smart enough to pick something from a British writer. I try to learn from this and in future remember to concentrate on the British culture instead. The american culture is really pushing into our lives from every direction and I'm not very happy about it. Yesterday I watched a little piece of a tv-show that had an american family in it and their English was far away from attractive.


D.I.Y. Movie Club

Tue 15.10. Planning the movie club 1h

We decided that we'll start the movie club with short movies on Indieflix which the library of Helsinki is offering. Each of us picks up a movie, watches it, think about it and prepare questions for the other book clubbers. Then we'll watch the movies the other clubbers have picked and we answer the questions. We'll have a conversation about them on Tu 29.10. At the same time we're testing the computer-mediated communication and have discussion about that too. For this we'll study about the cmc beforehand.
I attended a apeech course this autumn and there cmc was one theme as challenge for the spoken communication, so I was curious to test it. It's been also from the technical point of view also a theme in my classes of Language Technology so it'd be really useful for me to test these tools from different point of views, not just talking to granny in Finnish.

Movie Club, the first meeting. 2h
Well the movie club.. We started the movie club meeting handelling a movie that Rebecca had picked in Indieflix, it was called Losing the elephants and it was a very emotion awakening documentary. I had had no idea that still today the situation of elephants can be so cruel. She was herself going to travel to Thailand and it was interesting to hear her plans for the journey. Saara had already been there and she described her own experiences.

Saara had picked up a movie called Trimming the fat. It was about two men that had been school mates and meet after years both being in very different working situations. It was hilarious but gave us many thoughts; especially where are all our own old school friends. The movie was interesting, it was british and the men were talking different ways, they were now in different social positions and even the non-verbal communication let show that.The different dialects and accents of British English and very fascinating. I have still problems to understand them all but I noticed that this time I had a lot less difficulties to follow the dialog, my ears seem to have got used to that a little. That's quite amazing. I decided I'm going to concentrate more on British English when I'm picking up movies etc. This is certainly something I need to develope further now when the process has started.

My pick for the first movien on Indieflix wasn't that easy, I watched several movies, all of them seemed to be for a reason or another too weird, finally I ended up to make the questions about "6 women". http://indieflix.com/indie-films/6-women-32893/

My questions for the movie were:
- At the beginning there are two poems, why are they there?
- What kind of role does light have on the movie?
- What's the point about women's chins?

This movie was a little bit weird too and the other students agreed with me. :D But we got a good conversation about amateurmovies. And we were laughing a lot when talking about them. The good sense of humour has been a great motivator in our group. Now I'm not nervous at all anymore before our meetings and I know whatever opinions or ideas I have, they'll be fine for our clubs. I also like that we have the same group every time, it brings more secure feeling, of course it's good to get to know different people but sometimes a little bit stability is good as well.

Movie Club, the second meeting on Skype. 2h
After a huge amount of e-mails we were ready to go online. (I describe the e-mail case in writing part.)

We started with Rebecca's movie "Living on one dollar". It was about american guys making a documentary in Guatemala and they were living like the locals, on one dollar a day. Somehow the boys seemed to be selfish and childish, but the parts that showed the people thre in Quatemala were interesting.

The meeting started well, we could talk nicely and everybody could get say something, I was a little bit worried if I was taking too much space, it was difficult because you couldn't see each other (the video-connection wasnt's working) but only hear the voices. So you couldn't know beforehand if somebody was going to say something and non-verbal communication was missing which demanded twice as much concentration. Quite often it happened that two people started to talk at the same time.
And we were only three! Imagine if we had been more people. That wouldn't had working at all unless we had had some kind of systems of divided turns of talking. Or someone should had been a chairman dividing the speaking turns. Speaking in English online wasn't as difficult as I had thought it'd be. I had picture in my mind that speaking on phone in foreign language would be very challenging but it was okay. Maybe because we had a clear topic and we were prepared for that.

We finished talking about the first movie and were going to move to the next one when the problems started. Suddenly we couldn't hear one of the students anymore even though she seemed to be online. We tried to reboot the system and call her again several times and we waited and waited until she went offline and then online and voilá, we could get her on line again. But just for a while -and she dropped off again. Then we decided to postpone speaking about the two other movies on weekend and try to figure out what went wrong.
Unless it was something about Skype we could think about only two options: the dropped off- student was using the Skype via cell-phone. We others via computers. Maybe that was too complicated for the system, which doesn't make sense, because the Skype is working online. The other option was that line for internet was too busy for the one who was calling by cell-phone. Agreeing the new time required a lot of new e-mails. :) At least we're learning a lot about agreeing things using the e-mail.

... second try..
On weekend the connection was fine, this time we had computers or i-pad in use.

Saara's movie was called Parallax and it was about a soldier in Afghanistan that becomes friends with a local man and his son. That gave us a lot different thoughts, my brother is a soldiers and thinking about him or my husband or my son at war made me sick. War is probably the most horrible thing I know. There's been lots of documentaries about the soldiers in Afghanistan and I personally know some of them too, and for sure they come back being different a way or another. It's not normal, healthy and the whole idea humanbeings killing each other is sick. Not to mention about all the side-effects war brings along.

The suffering civils, hunger, robberies etc. If I could choose one gift for my children it'd be never have to face violence in their lives. Though I understand that it's not that simple and all the wars should be over-idea requires a lot more complex proceeds. What makes people so greedy and violent? Are all the leaders in those countries sick people? Like in Europe were some totally sick leaders 70 years back. Which makes me even more sick.
I can't even think about the nazi-Germany. After having children I couldn't watch any german warmovie anymore. Because of studies I know a lot about the history in there and I've visited the concentration camps. Now I couldn't go there anymore. I try to forget to most horrible views, especially about children. I don't want to talk about that with anyone because I don't want anyone else to know the awful things that are haunting me. Last year it turned out that Finland had handed over jewish residents to Germany as well. It's a shame! It's a totally brutal and terrible. Even though the germans today are not quilty for the happenings I have started to be ashamed that I've been studying such language that has that kind of background. I shouldn't blame the language but still it feels like a shame too. I wish my parents would never let me study german at all. Now the language is in my head and I can't get it out of there.

Everyone had a lot to say to this theme and it was a good conversation, even though the subject was difficult. 

The third and the last movie was my pick, a lot lighter movie than the previous ones, it was british comedy called: Lost&Found.

The aspects I asked them to observe were:

• the accent
• which category would you place this movie
• how would you describe the famous british humour?
  
  • have you ever lost your car and what happened?
   

I was glad I had found something that had the British humour in it. It's been a thing that I've been thinking for a longer time. It's so paradoxal, on the other hand the British are seen as old-fashioned and conservative, on the other hand they're joking a lot. Even the royal members. I personally am not a big fan of Mr Bean, Fawlty Towers or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy but I love Keeping up appearances (my husband calls me Hyacinth in certain situations) and the Office. Where the humour comes from and why some characters are funny and some not? I'm going to observe this aspect further and write about it more when I start to figure it out.

So this was the end of our try with Skype, the system was okay but the time it took as whole including the e-mails, was way too much. Face to face conversation would have been lot easier and more effective.


Movie Club, the third meeting. 2h

For this last Movie Club-meeting (at Saara's home) we had watched the movie "Life of Pi".  I had learned at ALMS councelling session that it's actually pronounced /pai/ instead of /pii/, which actually makes sense when one thinks about it more carefully.



The movie was a lot more beautiful and entertaining than the book. Seldom it goes this way around, usually the books are always better. Of course there were several things that were different than in the book but it made the story clearer. Those elements we found awkward in the book were different in the movie, eg. Pi's lack of emotions, and the lack of indian culture. The meaning of religion became more obvious as well and I started to figure out the whole idea of the religion in the book, at least I think so.
In the movieclub we were talking about these observations and about the movie, the characters and again about Yann Martel as an author.
Also the cultural aspects had a bigger role and we were looking up information for example why the indians are shaking their heads vertical every now and then. We can't even do it like they do it. I found a funny name for that shake: head bobble! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_bobble

We all had at least some knowledge and experience of indian culture and of indian people so we had quite much to say to these topics. The conversation was quite smooth and quick and we could handle several topics in two hours. It was nice to analyze a movie later on: you get a lot more out of it this way. Usually I talk about the movie a little bit straight away after the movie but that's it. Now this way I had time to go over the movie and prepare myself to discuss it. I like when I can prepare my ideas and thoughts properly before I present them. Otherwise something goes wrong and feel simply stupid and can't express myself clearly. I don't like the way we usually did it in school: we watched a movie and we were supposed to have ready ideas straight away after watching it, no time for analysing and considering, figuring out the big picture.