Notes on using the MYP Phase system of Language Acquisition in the IB

This post is for anyone who teaches foreign languages in an MYP school (Middle Years Programme, the curricular framework for Grades 6 through 10 for the International Baccalaureate). 

Building an MYP curriculum from scratch is a gargantuan task. I sympathise with anyone who is trying to get their professional practice to fit with the MYP, given that it is a framework more than a curriculum itself and given the beautiful openness, but frustrating vagueness, that this can entail. The application of the Phases and their criteria is a constant topic in an MYP school, given that …

•          A school may inherit students from the PYP from three different language levels. There is an argument to be very conservative with placement in Grade 6 if the MYP curriculum of your school is built around a grammar-based scope and sequence. Many Grade 6 students are studying grammar in ways that are new to them if they came from the PYP, and they have a weaker systematic knowledge of the language as a set of rules and patterns than their language level would initially indicate. You could start your most advanced new Grade 6 students in an “Advanced Phase 2” class, even though there is an argument to be made for starting them in Phase 4 or 5, even.
•        The advantages of a conservative use of the Phases – e.g. using the Phase 3 criteria for two years of study, not just one – are that:

o   students’ marks are higher and you can still apply the criteria strictly.

o   You can also flag students whose grammar needs major investment through their scores in Criterion D, whilst still rewarding them for some of their successes elsewhere.

o   One challenge with the MYP criteria is that they grow in intellectual depth across the Phases, seemingly more than they grow in linguistic depth. The intention of this is clear – the MYP wants to tie foreign language learning with the development of critical thinking. However, there exists a disparity between younger students with advanced language skills and their ability to do some of the cognitive heavy lifting of the upper Phases, such as analysis and drawing conclusions.

•         The alternative, a more generous/sequential use of the Phases – e.g. viewing one year as one Phase, with some Grade 10 students in a Phase 5 class – comes itself with problems that are not to be overlooked:

Salome on the Zürisee: An Essay on Desire in Five Parts (Part 5)

V: The Sweet Flesh would turn Sour

Salome was a lucrative success for Strauss. The royalties paid for his vacation home in Garmisch. He wrote it in 1905, early in his career as a composer, barely 40 years old. If today we are left with an opera that is lightly shocking, then it is even more interesting why it was accepted as more or less benign already 110 years ago. There must be any number of stories worth telling about its reception and performance history since its premiere. (The Nazis, who embraced Strauss enthusiastically, simply pretended Salome did not exist.) Somewhat independently of its shock value today, even independent of any questions of Wilde's and Strauss' aesthetic-political ambitions or lack of them, we are faced with the question we are always faced with when exhuming other centuries' art and displaying it for our own benefit: what does it mean and what can we take from it?

Shamefully inaccurate whitewashing of Strauss’ coziness under the Nazis (programme notes from a concert in Finland): here is a fuller picture of Nazi-era Strauss.

Salome on the Zürisee: An Essay on Desire in Five Parts (Part 4)

IV Skandalerfolg

Let me return to an earlier question: why does this opera exist, and, given its existence, why does it have so few if any successors? It is largely a work from the mind and times of Oscar Wilde, who wrote the original play, even if spectators like me are happy to overattribute to the composer and ignore his sources. Wilde must have been enraptured at pairing the bawdiness of his societal clique with the greedy piety of Victorian Bible thumpers. In turn, a Viennese society-Strauss must have been attuned to this same mix as he trafficked in Wilhelmine Berlin. Plus, Strauss-the-Wagnerian must have admired the play's morbidity.

Salome on the Zürisee: An Essay on Desire in Five Parts (Part 3)

III The Arrangement of Desire

The story has five core characters, whose desires all contrast and who are all a product of their competing desires. Beyond these five, there are only a few palace guards and hangers-on, plus five asexual Jewish theologians, nattering and unflatteringly robed amidst palatial splendour. The dissonance and chromatic gnarliness of Strauss’ music doubles its power by its taut sticking to a one-act storyline, stripped of subplot, with characters too crazed to see each other, so busy are they staring. Of the five – Narraboth, John the Baptist, Herod, his wife Herodias, and Salome herself – no one can have what they want, nobody is content with what they have, and each relays desire to the others in hideous ways. It is less like a story and more like a cruising park of dissatisfied id. Salome is likely the horniest opera in the repertory.

Salome on the Zürisee: An Essay on Desire in Five Parts (Part 2)

II The Violent Boredom of Possession

“Every dream must be awoken from – even fulfilled dreams.” (Sam Peckinpah)

If you know the story of Salome – King Herod the Great, having imprisoned John the Baptist, libidinously bids his pubescing step-daughter to dance for him, which she does, because she wants the head of John the Baptist in return, which she is granted, then kisses, as she desired him but could not get him, chaste, to bend alive – you will know that the only awakening for Salome from her dream is death. Her death returns, Greekly, Shakespearianly, order to the world. Her sex is punished, her brazenness is publicly condemned, her singular perversion is destroyed. 

(In 2017 in America, Herod would be the one punished, for desiring an underage teenager; he would be castrated, tarred and twittered, and Salome would triumphantly adorn herself with pierces and tats.)

Salome on the Zürisee: An Essay on Desire in Five Parts (Part 1)

Part 1: The Opera in the House

Sit in the 1100-seat Zürich opera house, ganz oben im zweiten Rang, for 35 or maybe 95 Franks, and bend your neck towards the stage, so that you can see more than just the front. No matter how far you lean in, your view of the orchestra is always better, which, depending on the opera and the production, might be an advantage. If the woman on your left is leaning farther forward than you care to, blocking your view of anything, or if the scene is set too far upstage, then your neck will after a while naturally revert to perpendicular to the opera, you’ll lean back into your seat, and you’ll look up to the ceiling of the house. It is mere meters away.

Sight vs. Sound: notes on the most successful opera staging I've yet seen

Of all the problems with opera, the art form to end all art forms, the conflict between the many sources of stimulation is the hardest to resolve. The feast of the senses can leave you with gout. First is the singing, which is solo, where one human voice has to hold up a house. The singing can be doubled, tripled, multiplied up to eight, and then these single voices sing different things in unison, with or without a choir behind it; and you, the listener, the seer, the audience goer, who is not satisfied with a recording of the opera, or for that matter with refraining from the potential tedium altogether, are supposed to either sort it all out, or somehow let it all in.

The other music is orchestral, and huge, but cannot be bigger than the voices, so it is hidden in a literal pit. The theatre of the thing is embedded in the singing, which is embedded in the score, and the source of the score, the thing in the pit, is meant not to be seen, but to be heard and felt. And there's no point of seeing opera in person if the theatricality makes no sense. If they try to tell the story with unsung words, as in a play, they are no longer purely operatic, so every single dramatic occurrence is sung, or sung about, on average for three hours. But they let you out, sometimes twice, to drink some alcohol, eat some canapés, and talk to your friends, if you have them, and if you do most of them are probably about seventy years old; alcohol drunk and bladders emptied if you made it through the line, they bring you back in for an hour more. Add that the sets are often still paintings with sculpture, and are expected to change a few times in four hours if you are to get your money's worth (opera is a preposterously expensive art form), and that certain operas call for ballet, and you've wrought the makings of a grand mess. No other ritual has the potential to be so exhausting, so numbing, except perhaps a Catholic mass. And should the whole thing somehow hold together, it has something of the divine.

Having been yanked around with opera for at least twenty years, I've concluded separately, indeed after each visit to the opera house afresh, that opera is incoherent, or nice, or worthwhile, only understood live, only understood in recordings, for other people, for me and only me, dead, bland, hit or miss, indulgent, difficult, a status symbol, life-changing, consummate, supersaturated, ennobling, or irrelevant. But I've never left an opera house feeling about opera the way I did upon seeing Verdi's Macbeth, staged by Barrie Kosky at the Operhaus Zürich.

The production probably isn't revolutionary, it might not even be particularly original (see the Orson Welles film), but more than any other opera staging I've yet seen, it uses the stage to show the music. Even more, it hears the music it wants to hear, and instead of settling for Verdi's imperfect musical telling, instead of yielding to Verdi's sometime inability to use music to depict drama, the staging manipulates it, brings to the fore what works, and distorts what otherwise wouldn't. The result is not somehow the perfect marriage between drama and music; instead, it's a magnificent instance of using the dramatic telling of ossified music to renew it and enhance it. It shows the full potential of the stage to keep opera alive.

Mindfulness and "the folklore of common sense"

There are a couple of ideas I've been churning through at a slow and unfocused rate the last few months and I thought I would post them here. 

Students in schools may be taught about mindfulness these days. Define that term for yourself first, before you keep reading, as it's a broad and vague topic. 

Mindfulness, in its manifestation as DIY psychological life-coaching, is often linked to a panoply of ideas that (as I understand them) urge an individual to re-stylise, retract, expand and revamp his or her ideas about inherent capabilities, stress levels, focuses, personal conceptions of limits, etc. The sales pitch can often be reduced to "don't convince yourself you can't" and "find quiet amidst stress" and "learn from your challenges". Mindfulness and its cousin mindset are currently hot topics amongst educators -- the wisdom of its truisms is infectiously inviting -- so be prepared to see quotes, anecdotes, and stats that tie into this trend everywhere around you.

It occurs to me that there's a link between this fascination with mindfulness and the topic of lying/self-deception.  Culturally, we are paying increased attention to the importance of our narratives that we have with ourselves, our explaining things to ourselves in terms of benefits, costs, justifications, and outright lying. Books abound about popular behavioural psychology. The chief specialist on lying, Dan Ariely, is invited to consult on tv shows, and his books sell very well.

Here are my thoughts linking mindfulness and self-deception: we lie to ourselves when we take on more than we can handle, and we lie to ourselves about why we're suffering once the handling turns to mishandling. We act out in various ways, referred pain from the root cause. So the optimism of the mindfulness movement is that although you lie to yourself when you think you can do it all, paradoxically, being mindful can help you do ever more. What narratives of deception are at play here?

Then I came across this article on the social science that has gone into studying sports fans, and the reviewer of this literature made a couple of observations that really gave me pause. 

The critic (Louis Menand) begins with a summary of the book he is reviewing, This is Your Brain on Sports (in gorgeous New Yorker style, of course; emphasis mine):

"Wertheim and Sommers’s [the authors'] basic conceit is that although people seem to behave irrationally when it comes to sports, they’re acting no differently from the way they do in the rest of their lives. If cheering on the underdog, loving perennial losers, and risking life and limb to snag a cheesy T-shirt fired out of a cannon are, objectively, absurd things to do, then it’s natural to be irrational. 'Your brain on sports,' they conclude, 'is really just your regular brain acting as it does in other contexts.'

"The authors nail their points down with the mighty hammer of cognitive science. 'As outlandish as sports conduct might seem,' they explain, 'it is rooted in basic human psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive tendency.' Their procedure is therefore to find for the various sports-related attitudes and behaviors they discuss (Wertheim is an editor at Sports Illustrated) scientific findings (Sommers is a psychologist at Tufts) that ground them in biology."

Menand continues with his critical view of this kind of scientific commentary as it is used for a mass audience:

"It is good to know that these assertions have been proved in a laboratory, because they have been part of the folklore of common sense for pretty much ever. This Is Your Brain on Sports is a book for people who think that if, instead of saying that people are happy when their team wins, you say 'Activity increased in a region called the ventral striatum,' or, instead of talking about stress, you talk about 'a surge of cortisol,' then you are on to something.

"What you’re on to is physicalism, which (leaving the metaphysics aside) is simply a method of redescription. We’re conscious of our thoughts and feelings; what we’re not conscious of is their physical correlates, the chemical states in our bodies that constitute them and without which nothing could be felt or thought. 'The experience of rooting for your favorite team can actually be captured at a neural level,' Wertheim and Sommers say. This is true, because so can the experience of everything.

"The fallacy to watch out for is the assumption that brain states tell us something about what an experience means to the person having it. Brain states of the kind that Wertheim and Sommers describe—that is, things like hormonal increases and changes in the ventral striatum—are indifferent to meaning. On that level, the brain of someone whose team has just lost the Super Bowl is indistinguishable from the brain of someone who is grieving for the death of a loved one. No one would say that those experiences are equivalent."

Back to mindfulness: 

Without painting with too broad a brush (are hormonal increases really indifferent to meaning??) I merely wanted to submit to you my fascination with the phrase "the folklore of common sense," given the ubiquity of mindfulness and mindset pep talks. I absolutely don't have a clear picture for myself when thinking about what the significance is of knowing scientifically what you're feeling emotionally, or whether seeing evidence of irrationality is a meaningful armament against irrationality. That is to say, these broad issues, against which popular fascination with behaviouralism quite directly abuts, are too important to ignore, but also too vast for me to proffer easy answers.

Here is the link to the book review: 

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/the-professional-sports-bubble

Translating Ingeborg Bachmann's "The Thirtieth Year" (Das dreißigste Jahr)

The Austrian post-War poet and author Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is not as famous outside of the German-speaking world (and even within the German-speaking world) as some of her later counterparts, such as Elfriede Jelinek, who won the Nobel prize, or Peter Handke, who according to Jelinek should have won the Nobel prize. Bachmann's work is read less often in English than that of Swiss author Max Frisch, with whom Bachmann was romantically linked. When W.G. Sebald issued a book of essays on Austrian literature (Unheimliche Heimat), he wrote about Handke at length without mentioning Bachmann once. When I tell my English-speaking friends I'm reading Bachmann, their stares are blank. "Never heard of her." "Sounds interesting."

Photo credit: Bayerischer Rundfunk

This is not to say she is some obscure figure. She was part of the Gruppe 47 -- the most meaningful literary project of German authors in response to the crimes of World War II -- and there is a major prize named after her -- the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis. Her poetry is highly regarded and as widely read as poetry can be. Her poetry collection Die gestundete Zeit is required reading in Austrian and German schools. Her legacy is one of immense moral authority and highly critical assessments of her too-complacent post-Nazi society.

But there's no shaking the impression that Bachmann lurks in the background of the prominent voices of 20th century German literature, fairly or unfairly, likely a result of her gender, her relatively short life (she died in a fire in Rome, probably addicted to barbiturates), and her overwhelming moroseness. Her most famous poem begins with the line "Es kommen härtere Tage" -- harder days are coming. Her major story "Das dreißigste Jahr" (1961) opens with an anonymous character who awakens, Samsa-like, "an einem Tag, den er vergessen wird, und liegt plötzlich da, ohne sich erheben zu können" (on a day he will forget, and lies there, unable to lift himself). The critic Reich-Ranicki describes a Bachmann so sheepish and sombre that her poetry reading was barely audible, even after achieving acclaim.

So when my husband turned 30 this month, and my colleague Michael Redeker referred me to her story about turning 30, I returned to Bachmann's language for the first time since college, when I read her in Thomas DiNapoli's class on 20th century German women authors and was awestruck by her poetic power. I imagined giving the story to my husband as a birthday present, though its darkness hardly suits the occasion of his good fortune and cheer. I realized his German skills wouldn't get him through a story of this length, which at 44 pages is no whopper but with its highly poetic, trance-like prose still demands close attention. I sought a translation from here in Zürich, where I live, and found nothing, so I ordered one, but it's out of print. I sat down and started translating myself.