Reader questions and feedback: striking a balance between fun and serious

Plus, how Matthew Perry and Friends can help you with your English eternally, some reminiscing on pumpkins past and a bit of learning guidance

Keene, New Hampshire, October 2009 © author

It’s hard to make everyone happy.

A couple of messages I’ve recently received from readers were along these lines:

1 Are you going to share more learning advice, nice vocabulary words and stuff like that?

2 Are you going to share more of your funny stories and anecdotes?

And here are the thoughts of two of my book reviewers/editors, the first one verbatim, the second one paraphrased:

1 “To tell the truth, I was a bit worried that your book would be boring about your adventures and girls before you got married.”

2 I think you should write more about yourself, share more of your stories, your adventures, and not so much boring study advice, I want to see more of your personality.

Do you see how tricky this is? I have tried to strike a balance in the book, and we shall see how successfully I have done so.

Let me also share these questions from the comments of my last post:

“When is the book supposed to be published? And after this, are you going to post here as well?”

The first question: soon, I hope! Let’s address the second question.

It’s easy: yes, absolutely. I’m hoping to write and post for as long as I’m able to.

My blog(s) from 2009-present were much more on the ‘stories and adventure’ side. There was little connected to actual teaching. Instead, it was more about sharing some of the fun and crazy things that were happening in various countries. Because it started in 2009 when I moved to Kyrgyzstan, it barely included any stories from my first few teaching jobs in Lviv, the Basque Country and Latvia.

In the book I’ve shared a few stories, but I have connected them to something learning or teaching-related, and they are intended to serve as lessons or examples. For instance, in my chapter on ‘Geopolitics in the classroom’, I discuss the challenges I had teaching in Riga with a class of mainly Russian-speaking students who talked about how much they loved Putin and how much of a mess American politics was – this was in 2008 (they were somewhat accurate with their views on American politics though).

The following chapter discusses the ‘role of the English teacher’ and whether my job is merely to teach English or to dispel stereotypes, promote tolerance and open-mindedness, develop critical thinking skills and how to deal with potentially sensitive or taboo topics. I want to share as many stories as I can to illustrate my points and provide context. And it goes without saying that I always aim to make my stories interesting and relevant.

As for whether my stories are interesting or not, I’ll let you be the judge of that. I also have a chapter about humour in the classroom, which features some absolutely hilarious or terrible jokes, depending on how good/bad your sense of humour is.

In a romance-related anecdote, I tell a story about a waitress in Riga that I liked. One day I arrived at the café and realised that it was her birthday and said, “I didn’t know it was your birthday – if I had known, I would’ve got you something. How can I make it up to you?”

Her English level was probably strong Elementary (A1)/weak Pre-Intermediate (A2). You can imagine how confusing the rest of our conversation was. That’s some pretty damn challenging language for a lower-level language learner.

The point of that chapter? How grammar can sometimes get in the way of communicating, and the times when it’s important to keep your language simple.

Going back to that question about continuing to post after my book is published (if my book is ever published!). I started this Substack to tie in with my book and share some of my insights into what the book is about. I’ve tried to balance book details with other, everyday matters related to life, language and learning. As to whether I’ve achieved this so far, once again I’ll let you be the judge of that.

It's also about building anticipation for the book, giving readers a sneak preview and whetting your appetites.

Once the book is done and dusted, I will dedicate most of my posts to the life/learning/language stuff. Vocabulary advice. Learning tips. Thoughts on language. Tricky grammar. How to improve pronunciation. And more. Those topics are covered in my book but trust me when I say I have plenty of material and loads of thoughts to share.

A tribute to Matthew Luke Matthew (and Luke) Perry

I promise you that I am not obsessed with celebrity deaths, even if a couple of recent posts seem to indicate otherwise.

STOP. Time for some learning advice.

As I’ve discussed in earlier posts, there are different ways to approach these missives. If you want to keep your English active, you can just read and relax and perhaps enjoy or find something useful in what I have to say. But if you want to use it as a learning resource, then there are ample opportunities to do so (I think).

Two examples:

1 I promise you that I am not obsessed with celebrity deaths, even if a couple of recent posts seem to indicate otherwise.

Prepositions are a pain in the ass and tricky to remember. A colleague from many years ago said that prepositions (or maybe it was articles?) “aren’t very sexy, but they’re important.” One good way to remember dependent prepositions (apply for, depend on, interested in, etc) is to notice how they are used in context with a verb or adjective. When you learn a word like ‘obsessed’ for the first time, it’s good to learn it along with its preposition. Without the preposition it’s not quite useless, but it’s far more useful when you know the right preposition that goes with it.

2 As I’ve discussed in earlier posts, there are different ways to approach these missives.

How does that sentence sound? Or does this one sound better?

As I’ve discussed in earlier posts, there are different ways to approach these posts.

You really don’t want to be repeating words like this. So I’ve used a synonym – except that it’s not quite a synonym and if you look the second word up in the Cambridge dictionary you’ll get this:

missive (n): an official, formal, or long letter.

Obviously, I am not writing an official, formal, or long letter, but I’m simply trying to spice up my writing and give readers another word to add to their repertoire. And you don’t even need to look it up in a dictionary. The context alone should give you a clear enough idea as to what missive means. You hardly need to focus on it and can move on with your reading. If you like the word and want to try to use it, feel free to make a note of it. If it’s useful, you’ll find a way to use it. And if it’s widely used, the more you read, the higher the chances you’ll see it somewhere else. If you don’t, you might not ever need it.

Okay, back to Matthew and Luke Perry.

Some of my friends and readers will kill me for saying this, but I was/am not a fan of Friends. I have nothing against it, it just wasn’t my type of show. I think I watched a few early episodes when it first came out, and they were amusing, but I never watched it much after that.

That’s why Matthew Perry’s death at age 54, as tragic as it was, didn’t hit me as hard as others, and I know this is a terribly selfish viewpoint. I certainly don’t want to sound insensitive, so I’m weighing my words carefully. It didn’t promote as much introspective thinking as the passing of others because Friends didn’t play as big a role in my life. It’s natural for some of us as we get older to see the deaths of those who played a formative role in our lives as bringing us one step closer to our own mortality.

When Luke Perry, who played Dylan McKay in Beverly Hills 90210, died in 2019 at the age of 52, that hit me hard. I was a big 90210 fan (everyone in the US exclusively calls the show 90210, and it seems that elsewhere people refer to it as Beverly Hills) and my sister and I always had a running joke that whenever our dad had a sore throat, he sounded just like Luke Perry (he really did – watch any clip of Luke Perry and that’s how my old man sounds when he’s ill). But 90210 was a big hit when I was in high school and then into university, I continued [wasting my time] watching it. Friends didn’t start until I got to university, and I barely watched any television, other than sports, while there. I started watching more television once I had graduated in 1998 and by then, Friends was into season 4 or 5 and I felt like I’d missed the boat.

The same week that Luke Perry passed away, Mark Hollis, the lead singer of Talk Talk, also died. Their 1984 hit ‘It’s My Life’ was part of the soundtrack of my youth. It is and was also one of my daughter’s favourite songs. She was only a year old at the time, but that song was one that always soothed her, and we used to bounce around the living room while listening to it. It’s still a song she asks for often (and the video is also good at grabbing kids’ attention).

So the timing hit me at an emotional point: a song from my youth, my young daughter and fatherhood, an icon from my teenage years who left behind two children…there was a lot going through my head, hence the impact these two deaths had on me.

I had no choice but to torture a couple of my teenage classes by sharing my thoughts and getting a bit teary-eyed in the classroom (this happens with both fatherhood and ageing). We then listened to ‘It’s My Life’, despite its lack of profound lyrics and rich vocabulary, which is usually the reason why I play music in the classroom (if you remember from my last post, I’ve had to delete my chapter on using music as a learning tool for copyright reasons, but I will share that at a later date in some form).

This post is already way longer than I anticipated, and I’ve failed to mention a very important point: it hardly matters whether I like(d) Friends or not, but it’s a brilliant show for improving your listening and pronunciation skills. A few colleagues and lots of students over the years have told me how great it was for improving their English. The plot is pretty straightforward, the actors are all easy to understand, the language isn’t too challenging and there is plenty of contemporary, up-to-date, relevant English that you can pick up. In short, Friends is a very accessible learning resource, and this is how I think as a teacher. Matthew Perry and his Friends can teach you a lot about language, in particular the way he emphasised words: “Well, it’s not like I went to Spain…I went to the bathroom…you knew I was coming back…could I be wearing any more clothes? Could you be any more irritating? Could it be any hotter? Could you be any more of a jerk?”

The point: anything is good practice, whether your teachers like it or not. And Friends is particularly good for the range of language and pronunciation features. Try watching it and copying the way Chandler speaks, his emphasis on certain words. It’s a useful technique.

I promise you, obituaries and reflecting on celebrities’ untimely passings are not going to be an ongoing feature of these posts.

RIP Matthew (and Luke) Perry.

In remembrance of pumpkins past

(Don’t forget your prepositions: in remembrance of)

For those of you interested in some of my writing from the past, I’ll share with you an old blog post from 2009. This was after Kyrgyzstan, when I was doing a post-graduate certificate in education to become a high school teacher (I thought my English teaching days were behind me). I found myself in a small New Hampshire town of 20,000 people and there weren’t many exciting adventures to share. So I wrote about pumpkins and since Halloween was just last week, I figured why not share an old story about a pumpkin festival.

When I look at my old blog posts from so long ago, I cringe at some of the language I used. Some of my monologues are painfully overwritten with some unnecessarily difficult language. I’ve written my book and these Substacks in a much more accessible way, but if you’d like to see how bad different my writing was 14 years ago, and see some silly pumpkin pictures, please feel free to read it in its entirety.

Here are a few extracts:

“Last weekend the town of Keene was apoplectic with hysteria: it was the 19th annual Pumpkin Fest, the annual highlight for this bustling metropolis of just over 20,000 souls. The locals had been talking about this event for weeks, getting themselves in a frenzy for the invasion of thousands upon thousands of pumpkins. Their goal is the same every year: to better the previous record of pumpkins that pass through the town gates. And what a success it was! Some 29,068 pumpkins passed through Keene, many of them being smashed and shattered in the Saturday night revelry that followed the day’s events. Before the destruction occurred, Main Street was taken over by food and drink booths, kids in a costume parade, live entertainment and the crowning of Miss Pumpkin 2009. I’d love to say I witnessed all of this, but alas, I couldn’t. After one hour in the morning, and before the crowds had fully descended, I’d had enough and escaped the hustle and bustle for quieter confines. I honestly failed to see what the fuss was about. If this is all the locals have to get excited about…God help them…

Maybe some of the testimonials from the locals will convince you otherwise:

“I just think this exemplifies the New England spirit.”

“It’s a great event. It’s just the hometown spirit. I guess that’s a dying thing these days.”

“I’ve always loved it. I fell in love with the area when we visited for the festival.”

I’m not convinced. But then I’m a cynical old curmudgeon anyway.”

In 2009 I was a cynical old curmudgeon and I’m even more of one now – ha ha, some things never change!

Now look at this, from 2009(!):

“The natives are restless. And paranoid.

There seems to be a general paranoia sweeping the student body. Since early September, people have been panicking about swine flu and if you dare sneeze in public, everyone in the vicinity dives for cover. There are hand sanitizer dispensers every 50 feet and there is often a queue to use them. People avoid touching doors, instead preferring to nudge them open with their shoulders or elbows. The librarians wear rubber gloves (or as my father calls them, asshole gloves) and surgical masks. Okay, I made that last part up, but you get the idea.”

Surgical masks! So preposterous was the idea of ‘surgical masks’ that I made up a joke about people wearing them because of swine flu and then when March 2020 rolled around…it wasn’t a joke anymore. My goodness, we had no idea, did we?

And lastly, it’s no surprise that I never ended up becoming a high school teacher. I should’ve listened to this student and given up immediately. I could’ve saved myself some time and unnecessary stress (my student teaching placement from January-May 2020 was not fun at all).

“Time for a rethink?

I had my first school observation yesterday. This term I have to spend a few hours a week observing in a high school before I start student teaching in January. It was quite an eye-opening, revelatory experience. One of the classes was a bit of a nightmare, with disruptive students talking back to the teacher, kids throwing things, teasing one another, not listening, sleeping on their desks, being disrespectful...general disobedience and insolence really. Just as I was thinking ‘what have I got myself into?’ one girl, the only seemingly serious student in the class, turned to me and said, ‘If you wanna teach high school, this is what you get. Are you sure you wanna do this?’”

The Great Pumpkin Onslaught

Postscript: some learning guidance

Everyone has their favourite vocabulary or the words they learn that they want to use and activate. One teacher can tell you “this word is useful” while another would say “don’t bother with that one.” It’s more up to you what to highlight and focus on. What follows are just a handful of the words and phrases from this post that I think are particularly worth remembering (I’m not including any phrasal verbs here – those are always useful):

* I have tried to strike a balance in the book, and we shall see how successfully I have done so.

* And it goes without saying that…

* As to whether I’ve achieved this so far, once again I’ll let you be the judge of that.

* It's also about building anticipation for the book, giving readers a sneak preview and whetting your appetites.

* Once the book is done and dusted…

* …I’m weighing my words carefully.

* In my family we had a running joke…

* …to better the previous record of pumpkins that pass through the town gates. (a nice use of better as a verb)

* I…escaped the hustle and bustle for quieter confines. I honestly failed to see what the fuss was about.

* It was quite an eye-opening, revelatory experience. (revelatory: adjective; reveal: verb; revealing: another adjective)

I love getting questions and feedback, so don’t be shy about sharing. Perhaps there are some questions or areas you’d like me to address, or you just want to tell me how full of shit I am. I welcome any and all comments, positive or negative.

Surrey, October 2023, © J Puzzo