It went beautifully. I can't explain it. Sitting that long and listening would have put me to sleep. Maybe because the material is so familiar. Not sure. But I am used to mixing the data with the physical application. It works. It makes sense to me.
Andraz said no. "These are tough guys. They train all the time. They don't need more of that. They need to know what they are training for." I wasn't sure, and that was largely because it was a new idea, outside of my comfort zone... which was reason enough to do it.
Sixteen hours. More students the second day than the first as word spread. And all done in a University lecture hall with state of the art AV equipment. None of which could I run by myself, since my Slovene, even after five days is pretty much limited to 'please' 'thank you' 'good' (although I may have accidentally told a waitress she was pretty while trying to say the coffee was good) and 'hello.'
This picture was before the first day's lecture. I definitely should have packed the tweed jacket with the leather elbows.
First day was Violence Dynamics and Context of Violence. Second day was Conflict Communications (including the specialty modules on Crisis Communication with the Mentally Ill and Emotionally Disturbed; and Violence) and "Logic of Violence". The feedback has been excellent.
Who knew using just words could work?
7 comments:
It is the ideas and principles that make what you do a revelation. An untrained monkey can physicaly defenend itself, can a more effecient animal deescalate out of having to go physical.
Who new? You do, or what is the point of confilct communication.
;-)
Words might not always work, but they can add context to physical skills already learned.
Your love of rolling, might clouding your judgment this.
:-)
A) Your voice stood up to sixteen hours of lecturing? Fair play.
B) Maybe consider recording future lectures, I know the DVD is really good but recorded lectures could be valuable/profitable.
Words work well for me as a teaching tool. Not sure why. Physical works too, but I'm always surprised what I can learn from words alone. Maybe it's the relation of the words to my experiences? Like, I hear exactly what I need to hear at exactly the right time?
But as you've said in a previous post, different people need different things.
Was the waitress in fact pretty?
I'll have to remember this post when my students say that I talk too much. (I wonder if they are listening to the words or just waiting for me to finish so they can go back to working out?)
The difference between animals and humans is the words, and our wonderful habit of recording our time here, our thoughts and advice or others and future generations. In the grand scheme of things this is an evolution of progress from the monkey to the mind. It takes the first monkey to start pointing it out to the others. Then, they all begin to describe it. When the description holds long enough it becomes a step in progress.
I think that is where we are, and will be for a while. Its nice to think that maybe we can see some of that coming. I wonder if monkeys of old knew things that we now take for granted as common knowledge, and considered them groundbreaking. But,just didn't have enough time to talk about them for it to matter in their time. I see this in some older teachers.
I think words are really the hard part, not physical stuff. Once you have words, then you have a way to think about the concepts. The physical makes more sense, becomes more useful. Like being a monkey that understands the physics of getting an ant out of a tree trunk. It is a life skill, but it can only share that among others for that one single purpose. We're not supposed to be that limited at this stage of our development. :)
-Billy G.
Interesting to play with the idea of words versus movement. Can something be communicated in movement that we don't have words for? Can you express everything in movement that you can in words? The Sapir-Whorff hypothesis posits that the kind of language we use shapes and limits/defines the things we can communicate--because if you can't express it in the language, you can't communicate it, maybe you can't even *think* it if you don't have the language for it.
That last anon comment was me, about language and the Sapir-Whorff hypothesis. Stupid blogger interface wouldn't log me in.
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