There had to be something before the blog, and here it is.
This morning I got a lovely email from the guy I did my exchange with on the birth of his son. I value our friendship all the more as I have in this folder his letters and those of the other friends I made on my exchange … and yes, courtesy of the Internet, we have got back in touch.
His written English is excellent and hers is good; I have it fluently as a spoken language and can read it too. No thanks to ANY system of learning. I gathered in my teens that only total immersion would do.
(Months and then years working in France did the rest)
And it did.
Not a word of English while I was there, less when I returned for an extended 7 week stay in the summer and especially not when I hitched across France with a bunch of French lads.
This is how to learn on the fly, vicariously. I witness it online with my teenage son as he ‘educates’ folk on the skills to do x, y or z online in various games. Everyone speaks English, even the French and German guys he speaks to for whom it must be an immersive, engaging and free lesson in colloquial UK English (or should that be English English?)
I have not looked at the above file in all this time.
The emphera is amusing, a burger for 42p, a bus ticket for 3p. Really!
What I find extraordinary is how so much of this, even though I gathered it together, took notes, aggregated content and kept a record, how much of it must have washed over me at the time as if the teenage mind is in such a hurry that little sticks unless it slaps you in the face or trips you up.
There’s a great American film, ’17 Again’. If I were to be 17 again I would do it all so very differently – it would be dull, because I’d not do anything. This is why teenagers get away with it, there’s a try everything curiosity and attitude.
The learning experience or value of this journal?
The learning value therefore of a blog?
None at all unless you return to the content, reflect on your actions and feelings, and behave the same or differently as a result. We have to stop treating learning as a series of exotic meals that we consume over a period of months never to taste again, and rather think of all learning, formal and informal, as something that helps aggregate knowledge, experience and even wisdom which is the word I would look for in anyone seeking election to the House of Lords: wisdom.
What blogs lack is a trip mechanism that puts in front of you on a regular basis not the words of others, but your own words, on a theme, or a year ago, or five years ago … or a decade ago.
I can’t learn from what I did and saw 33 years ago. I should have gone through this 32 1/2 years ago and considered what and how mattered.
So, the learning blog should be turned, like compost. Every six months or a year you spread the stuff on the garden.
Given the immediacy and vaporization of short messages into a digital ocean are the letters I have kept from the 70s and 80s now a passing record where none otherwise would exist? I pulled out three of the letters enclosed in the above folder from in turn my French Exchange, my french girlfriend from then … and a dear female friend who after a year would become distant. Though sent to me I felt as if by reading them I was invading their privacy; which it certainly would be to share them in any form.
Lovely people with the wonders of life ahead of them.
Perhaps, as I thought twenty years ago, this lot should get the Blue Peter treatment and be buried in a time capsule for readers 100 or even 1000 years hence.
I wrote a screenplay based on HIS visit to Tyneside, a Gaulist, Catholic young Frenchman dropped into the Grote Market on a Saturday night. Looking at this folder the script ought to be the other way around – the enduring love for France and the French that came from the 10 weeks I manage to get in the country in 1979.
