Watching this space, if anyone has done so in recent weeks, has been very restful, writes Luke Meddings. No new posts, what with the holidays. No new comments either. Virtual tumbleweed.
Now I don't know if anyone has been trying to comment. I did a number of times - I had a rather witty rejoinder to MissTwister's Chi-ting gag in fact, and once I had opened a second account after forgetting my password for the first, I tried posting it. No deal.
At first I wondered if I had been banned from posting on my own blog, but the truth, as I subsequently learned after more abortive attempts, is that comment can only be posted for three days after the initial blog goes up. So you'll need to be quick!
Combined with the move to ensure that readers have to log in before commenting, this must have an impact on the balance between moderation and expression.
What do you think? Part of me regrets the sheer volume of comment - particularly when things got a bit lairy - while part of me is relieved that rancour and personal attack are on the wane.
I know anonymity is a divisive issue in the blogosphere, but I don't think it helps. It can leave the blogger feeling beleaguered, as if cornered by hidden assailants. One feels like crying: "Come out, whoever you are, and fight like a man!" One of us should fight like a man, after all, and it isn't going to be me.
And it makes one defensive, so that ideas offered in a spirit of play, as a sketch or cartoon, get turned into a kind of official portrait, smothered with paint in case the cracks (in the subject, in the execution, in the whole enterprise) show.
It more or less turns art into politics, and I start to understand why those interviews one sees with politicians snag so quickly in a loop of accusation and denial, challenge and repetition. I think certain aspects of T-ching have been exaggerated and others downplayed as a result.
So it hasn't been a bad thing to have a break. We left things on pause with the idea that there is an opportunity for ELT teachers to make more of the freedom their profession allows, and I'd like to do the same with my autumn manifesto for T-ching: a candidate standing in your borough soon.
T-ching advocates a pedagogy that is intuitive, that is shaped and constantly reshaped by the lives and language needs of the people in the room.
It acknowledges the fluidity of language itself - in its essence, in its usage by fluent speakers, and as it unfurls, curls up and unfurls to learners.
It writes in a pompous style using the third person!
T-ching seeks to allow language to emerge from conversation where possible. It thinks coursebooks can be counter-productive.
It uses fuzzy logic.
It demands some experience within the current training paradigm, but might need less if training were recalibrated to privilege the learner rather than the syllabus.
It sees the syllabus not as a fixed menu, but as a smorgasbord: something to be dipped into as the need (and the fancy) takes one. You can still try everything in time for the exams.
It advocates the use of minimal input.
It takes a holistic view of language systems and language skills: it aims to tease out as much as possible from the briefest stimulus, and to promote the use of all four skills at every opportunity to discuss, personalise, understand and develop it. (Are there four skills? Aren't reading and writing one skill, and listening and speaking the same?)
It doesn't need electricity. Apart from the lights. And the heating. And the background music.
It is romantic, not classicist.
It is no more pretentious than the next man, provided that man is wearing a velvet suit and a seersucker hat, dining on absinthe-infused sponge fingers and reading La Comédie Humaine backwards on an iPod.
It demands an interest in and affection for one's students, both as people and as language learners.
Although born in the peeling upper rooms of variously chaotic private language schools, it humbly envisages (and would love to identify) common ground with teachers in any system who feel that teaching is increasingly about generating tests and more tests, scores and more scores, for the benefits of government institutions rather than learners - driving teachers and students over the cliff like so many gabardine swine, whose waterproof clothing did them no good in the end.
I suppose what I'm talking about is a holistic view of language and language teaching; of language teachers and language learners.
Anyway, that's the T-ching manifesto for autumn and the local elections. But I'd like to get away from manifestos, especially if the campaign goes badly and I have to change sides.
I'd like to ask teachers from all school environments how they nurture and maintain the human element inside their classes; how they resist uniformity; how they allow everyone in the room to be themselves and not the shadow of their reductive roles as teacher or student, adult or child. Come on - we've got three days!
