It was Sunday and the fifth day of the heat wave. My house was like an oven, and the radio warned that all roads leading to the seaside were jammed with cars crawling bumper to bumper. As it appeared quite useless even to attempt leaving the city, I decided to spend the day in the park.
Outside the air was shimmering from the heat and the streets seemed deserted. Without the usual crowds and traffic, everything was strangely quiet. The tar on the roads was even beginning to sizzle in places, I noticed. Wiping the sweat from the back of my neck, I walked as quickly as I could towards the park, all the time hugging the shade of the buildings.
By the time I had arrived at the park, my clothes were wet through with perspiration and my shirt was sticking to my back in a most uncomfortable manner. Many other people seemed to have had the same idea as myself and the park was full. There were bodies everywhere.
Some people was lying on the grass under the trees attempting to get cool, while others were actually sprawling in the sun rubbing suntan oil on themselves in order to promote a tan. Yet another group was clustered around the pond in the center of the park. They were dangling their legs in the water and one rather fat old lady was actually sitting in the pond much to the surprise of the ducks which could not understand why their home had suddenly become so popular.
After resting under the trees for some time observing a family having a picnic, I decided to walk in the direction of the park restaurant. It was air-conditioned, so I had a leisurely lunch there, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
When I left the restaurant, the sun was still scorching hot. Over by the pond, children licking ice creams were splashing noisily in the water. The fat lady had gone by now, but the ducks looked as though they had already become quite used to their constant stream of visitors.
The heat was finally dying down as I reached home; the sun sinking in a fiery red ball on the horizon. Would it be as hot tomorrow, I wondered. When would this dreadful heat wave end?

The faces look a little nervous and the words are spoken a bit timidly — all rather normal for a group of French students learning to speak English. But the hesitant responses aren't coming in a classroom where foreign-language instruction is another obligatory grind in a long day of courses. Instead, these 18-to-25-year-olds are paying up to $6,000 annually to master a language they all took for six years in high school before earning their baccalaureate degrees and entering the job market.
"A lot of things in France have changed under globalization in order to keep us competitive, but teaching people English here has remained old-fashioned and inefficient," says Julien Petitpas, one of the 10 young adults who gather for 12 hours a week to improve their English at the Berlitz language school near the Paris Opera. "In school it's all structure, grammar and getting it right on paper and in your head before you ever speak — and even then, you don't do much of that. It just doesn't work."
He's not the only person who thinks so. Earlier this month, French President Nicolas Sarkozy unveiled an "emergency plan" for teaching foreign languages in the nation's schools with the lofty objective that "all our high school students must become bilingual, and some should be trilingual." Why the panic? Because as Sarkozy noted, a nation that spends 5.8% of its annual GDP on education — the fifth-highest percentage in the world — simply must do better than its current rank of 69th among 109 countries on the standardized Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). To that end, Sarkozy has proposed exposing students to more native-speaking English instructors, increasing contacts between French and foreign high schools and shifting the focus in schools from written foreign-language instruction to the more practical oral.
"A modern foreign language is meant to be spoken," Sarkozy said in his latest assault on the kinds of tradition-bound practices that he believes are holding the country back economically. "Pointing something that obvious out isn't futile in a country where Latin is an oral exam on the baccalaureate, while the leading modern language is evaluated in written form."
Compelling teachers in France's notoriously rigid education system to change their ways and encourage students to speak more in foreign-language classes will be one challenge to overcome. Another is confronting the contradiction that comes with promoting foreign-language study among students and continuing France's long-standing policies aimed at protecting and promoting the use of the French language at home. The Academie Française began its mission of purging the French language of impurities — often words taken from other languages — way back in 1635. The key objective of the country's 25-year-old exception culturelle is ensuring that French-language music, film and other cultural products are not dominated by English-language imports. And a law passed in 1994 requires that French translations accompany any foreign phrases in state documents, business contracts and even advertising.
These efforts to trumpet the virtues of the French language may inadvertently decrease the allure of foreign tongues to many in France — especially among students who are made to feel they mustn't attempt to utter a word of what's often called la langue de Shakespeare until they've mastered it on paper. "I think a lot of French people are hesitant to speak another language at what could be considered the expense of French," says Karin Hull, who has taught English at Berlitz for four years. "The legacy of cultural protectionism is one factor, and the way foreign languages are taught in school is another. Students pass language exams only to discover they can't really speak [the language]."
Shifting the focus of foreign-language study from written to oral instruction is only one way of making classes more practical. Berlitz also offers First Jobs, an increasingly popular course in which students are taught business and financial English vocabulary and are given help improving their résumés and job-interviewing skills — in English. "These are students who've wanted to improve their English as part of many things they'll need in their careers," says Alain Nothern, the polyglot director of Berlitz's Opera center. "The focus is English, but it's a wider tool kit for the business world."
Becoming an Anglophone isn't cheap — but that's not stopping students from signing up. Laetitia Marcellesi says she had to get a job to pay for the course, while her classmate, Justine Boussin, took out a loan to finance a study-abroad trip to London. Only time will tell if future French students will start getting this type of practical training for free at school or whether they'll have to keep paying for it once they graduate.

Take any emotion--love for women, or grief for a loved one, or what we're going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If we hold back on the emotions--if we don't allow ourselves to go all the way through them--we can never get to being detached, we're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, we're afraid of the grief. We're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, "All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.""

After having deserted this blog for five years, I accidentally regained the access to it this evening. Everything is possible as long as we don't give up.

Teaching by Principles

After scanning those crucial chapters like "The Four Teaching Skills," I am befuddled by some of its " VAGUE" and "IMPALPABLE" teaching doctrines, for I fail to find enough "CONCRETE METHODS" of teaching listening, speaking, reading, and writing in that book. Some of its teaching principles proposed by that savant are too general and dogmatic. For instance, as reading the chapter on " TEACHING WRITING," I expect that the author would have told me practical ways of teaching students how to indite a well-organized essay made up of "TOPIC SENTENCES," " SUPPORTING SENTENCES," and "CONCLUSIONS." Moreover, I anticipate that he'd have revealed me some tree diagrams, through which students can undergo logical training and learn how to put all the relevant ideas into a coherent essay. Much to my chagrin, nevertheless, this Teaching Bible doesn't come up to my expectations. It only tells us to bear in mind "the differences between composing and writing," "Process and Product," Contrastive Rhetoric," and "the Role of the Teacher," when we are teaching writing. These doctrines, I think, might not be of great use in a virtual writing class, because what I need is not so much the ethereal theories or jargons as the constructive teaching skills or activities. After flicking through part of this book, I am very curious to know why Professor Douglas Brown, who writes that book, is acclaimed by many Taiwanese teachers as a leading authority in English pedagogy.

To go, or not to go; that's a question.

I am confronted with a dilemma of obeying or brushing off my superior's mandate. My superior, the chief leader of the Office of Students' Affairs, asked me to participate in the jobs of Examinations Production Facilities (基測闈場), where I would be imprisioned for 21 days from May 13 to May 27. She told me that it was a good administrative experience that not everyone could enjoy, so she urged me to cherish this chance and take this challenging job. As far as I am concerned, I do desire to have an experience of being incarcerated in the Examinations Production Facilities, for I will not just get handsome emoluments (more than NT$10,000) through this job but also observe the precedures of producing test papers or other administrative tasks. This kind of experience, I believe, might be helpful to my teachers' examinations. However, there are two reasons that make me falter. First, I must ask for a long leave in my tutoring jobs if I do take part in the job of "Basic Competence Test for Junior High School Students." I worry my aunts will be incensed at my absence, and then they will air their grievances to my mother, who will in turn chide me for my negligence. Second, I might lose some chances of taking the teachers' exams provided I do work in that examination facilities. I am now in a quandary over whether I should go or not. This kind of feeling is really annoying.

Indolence

Terribly assailed by several bouts of somnolence this lovely morning whose azure sky could invigorate a man's pensive mood, I found it hard to submerge myself in my GRE vocabulary, Teaching Bible, TIME, or THE ECONOMIST. Giving up my studies, I tried to read Buddha's Scriptures in the dingy office, where the vociferous sounds of those staffs and students were able to engulf the small space. But, again, Morpheus seemed to lay his hand on me, propelling me to take an excursion with him, so I apologized to Buddha for my indolence and switched to do something else. I started to think of that lovely damsel, imagining that she dated with me and that we frolicked in a beautiful meadow. However, this whimsical thought didn't last for a long time because a sense of uncertainty and insecurity intruded into my fragile heart whenever I worried she would harshly reject me. After making several unsuccessful attempts to resist against my somnolence, I rummaged around in my pocket, took out my cell phone, sent a text message to Mary, and asked her if she's willing to have lunch with me next Friday afternoon. I can't ascertain whether she will deign to dine with me, but I'll feel exhilarated if she grants my request. Now, my watch shows me 11:05 a.m., and that means I need to feed something to my stomach.

Teaching "INVERSION"

An affable, convivial, and enthusiastic English teacher at Second High, Ms. Jing-yi Ma, whole-heartedly invited me to observe her teaching a grammatical demon entitled "Inversion," a complicated grammar which sometimes obfuscates students who do not have an excellent command of English. Her exceptional pedagogy, which embodied at least three striking characteristics, was deeply etched in my mind. Well-organized handouts and systematical teaching procedure, first and the foremost, were her sharp teaching ammunition that was able to rout a lot of callow teachers. The ways she lectured the grammar was always transparent and riveting to her students. For example, this creative teacher applied some protagonists derived from Jin-yung's novels to her teaching. She ingeniously classified "Inversion" into three groups, called "Wu-dang Pai (武當派)," "2-may Pai (峨嵋派)," and "Gai-bang Pai (丐幫派)," through which students were not only willing to pay attention to her lecture but also unconsciously mesmerized by these funny terms. No redundancy, I think, was her second teaching weapon. She articulated her MAIN POINTS without hesitancy, clearly conveying the usage of that grammar as a teaching machine. Once she desisted teaching one particular section, she would never reiterate that which she had mentioned. Provided students raised their hands begging her to repeat again, they would be severely reprehended and lambasted for their absent-mindedness. Owing to her strident broadside and sternness, most of her students dare not play chess with Morpheus in class; instead, they would devote all of their energy to their study for fear of being castigated. Cooperative teaching methodology, of which I was deeply appreciative, was her third armament. In lieu of asking students to squeeze grammatical rules into their minds, this English-teaching authority, who has won the accolade of many professors at NTNU, enjoyed encouraging students to generate some sentences spontaneously by using "Inversion." As students made grammatical mistakes ( i.e., Student: Never I saw her again), they would be rectified immediately (i.e., Teacher: Never did I see her again). Moreover, they were assigned to memorize some simple "INVERSION" sentences after school, and they would be given a quizz the next day morning. If they failed to write down the correct sentences, that austere teacher would tell on them to their parents, asking their parents to pay more attention their indolent kids' studies.

A Humdrum Job and Life

I let myself get bogged down in the quagmire! I am in a quandary over whether I ought to jettison the ship, since I am becoming increasingly despondent about the ways many things are going here. As a man who unconsciously delves deeply into the essence of life, I find it grueling and exasperating to acclimatize myself to working in a boring environment where people whose soul and mind seem to be snatched away by fiends take pleasure in producing a slew of meaningless conversation. They are not callous or mean people, but it is not easy to get along with them.