Wisdom is the awareness gained in the process of the actualization of one’s experience through its creative description.
Doesn’t sound as good as the definition of wisdom that I came up with while thinking in Russian, does it? Hell, I’d been thinking in Russian for an entire month. Now, it’s over. Now, I wanna move on; there are so many great things that demand my attention. It’s no longer possible to suppress my curiosity and feed my insatiable mind with Petuchov’s lectures.
During this month, November, I started working on a couple of new projects, one of which was “the big game”. Three weeks ago, I decided to use my old videos in order to engage the members of the English Speaking Club “English 1-2” into a competition. I suggested that the members watch the playlist “Think in English” (56 videos recorded in the summer of 2017) and work on a particular task. Due to the fact that many members of the club do not know English well, I didn’t ask them to try to figure out what I was talking about in these videos. I asked them to focus on a certain category of words such as nouns, verbs, or adjectives and write down as many of these words as they would be able to hear, in the comments. For each video, I asked them to pay attention to only one category of words, so that for the first video, it could be “nouns”; for the second, verbs etc. To make it interesting, I put up a reward saying that the member who’s gonna have more of the secret “keywords” than the others in their comments at the end of a week will get a prize. Out of 10 members who were at the meeting, five found the courage to do that. The keywords for the first week were “make”, “short” and “lesson”. Oksana got more of these words than everybody else did and won a jar of honey. For the next week, I chose different keywords: “have”, “new” and “idea” and Oksana won again. This time, the prize was a notebook and an hour of free training. In this article, I wanna take a look at what we were talking about during the hour and actualize our conversation by “creatively describing” it.
We met at ICC an hour and twenty minutes before the club usually starts out. I prepared a few topics for this training session among which there were personal experience, values, skills and practice. I was ready to discuss each of these topics for an hour, but before getting there, I wanted to ask Oksana about the impact my videos made on her. I began by asking her what she has learned from watching these videos, and when she said that she not only watched them but also tried to do the same, I was surprised to the degree that I totally forgot about all my prepared topics.
I encouraged her to tell me more about why she decided to try it out. She said that after watching a couple of videos where I repeated over and over that I wanna talk to the camera to improve my English, she thought that doing the same may help her with her English too. She said that her English is bad. I interrupted her and started talking about mistakes trying to explain that they are not “bad”. I pointed out the difference between the way I used to speak four years ago and the way I speak English now and said it wouldn’t’ve been possible to get to the current level without making all these mistakes in the past. I also pointed out that I used to complain about my “bad” English a lot at the beginning, which wasn’t actually an accurate description of reality but rather a psychological tool to cope with stress.
I asked Oksana about how much stress does she have while talking to the camera. I wondered whether she felt uncomfortable and to what extent. She said that she had a lot of experience participating in zoom classes, so talking to the camera was almost as natural to her as having real conversations. I asked if she got more confident with practice and she replied that listening to herself after the recording and correcting mistakes was quite useful. I proposed that it makes sense to put off the corrections until she gets more experience.
It’s spectacular how much our language changes just within a year after we start paying attention to how we speak while recording short videos every day aiming at clarity and consistency.
I made a joke that it’s not me who speaks in the playlist “Think in English”, it’s “you”. Then I drew an analogy between a vertically challenged person who decided to lift weights making pictures of themselves every day until they are in excellent shape and my daily “pictures” of my language made over a span of four years.
It was the beginning of our conversation. At this moment, I brought up the idea of personal experience, and we calculated how many hours Oksana spends on various types of activities during a week. We ended up with 86 hours divided into eight categories.
One of the other questions I asked was about her attitude towards formal education and whether it’s too much different from reading original books, watching videos etc. She said that writing essays on particular topics where she had to use certain forms of reasoning starting from a premise, then providing some arguments to support the premise and finally drawing a conclusion, wasn’t her favorite. She said that she usually makes up these essays in Russian and only then translates them into English. I offered to try out Khan Academy. We created an account there, subscribed to the LSAT course and I explained to her how to work with it.
Besides, we discussed “the big game” and the innovation of the last week, which was “sharing notebooks”. Last week, I renamed our club from “English 1-2” to “English 3.0”. The main difference between these two is that the latter has an extra activity outside the club. Everyone has a notebook in which they are supposed to write something every day. One day, one page. At the end of a week, there must be at least seven pages with numbers on top of every page: 1, 2, 3…7 and the name of a person. This is the bare minimum, but then, every one may write whatever they want. No restrictions. Except it must be in English. Every week we exchange these notebooks.
This week was the first in terms of this new activity. I asked Oksana what did she write in her notebook, and then we talked about combining both self-talk and writing to develop various ideas. I persuaded her to find some linguistic features which she would like to work on, e.g., consistency, clarity, different tones of voice, rhythm etc. She mentioned “pronunciation”, and we watched a short video where some of the issues related to pronunciation were considered.
After watching the video, we discussed these issues in more detail until the room started getting filled with people who came to the club “English 3.0”.
Now, I have a desire to make a “creative description” of what was going on at this club, and of what was going on later at our regular ESCK meeting, and of my conversation with Lina whom I met in the evening, and of the discussion which I had before midnight with guys from Minnesota Philosophy Club, and moreover, there is another Philosophical Dialogue which I recorded with Frank on Saturday, but haven’t published yet—
To be honest, “creative descriptions” require even more energy than “the experience” itself. It would probably take me an entire week to make sense out of what has happened just in one day. And every day, there is a whole lot of new experience, most of which I have to ignore simply because 10 hours of writing daily will draw me crazy. Therefore, I have to suppress this desire and tranquilize myself for a while with the trivial.