Help YoSelf

When teaching an English class in Taiwan, my main goal is to get the students to speak and listen as much as possible. For this reason, I open each class by writing a question on the board and having every student in the room answer it. I generally go with typical “Getting to know you” questions, for example:
*If you were stuck on a deserted island, what three items would you want with you?
*What was the best gift you ever received? Why?
Sometimes I have to get a bit more creative when I run out of normal questions. For example, I recently asked-
*If there was a zombie apocalypse, and you had three anti-zombie vaccines that you could give to anyone you wanted, who would you give them to, and why?
For some reason my students didn’t like that question much, and the explanation for “zombie apocalypse’ effectively took up half of the class time.

When I posed the zombie apocalypse dilemma, roughly half of the students said that they would give the vaccine to no one, as a world filled with zombies would suck anyways and they wouldn’t want to be alive in that. One guy even went so far as to say he would give the zombie vaccines to his worst enemies. I let them know that I didn’t appreciate this defeatist attitude and that when the real thing comes, I wasn’t going to give any of them any of my vaccines.
Anyways, after asking such questions five nights a week for over a year and a half, I’m really scraping the bottom of the barrel for questions.
The opening question sets the tone for the entire class, and the wrong opening question sets the wrong tone. Then, for the remainder of our two hours together, I have to stare out into a sea of vacant eyes, behind which I imagine my students are sobbing in bored agony.
The most common look a boring teacher gets is the dead fish stare:

Grumpy panda is also common, particularly in Asia:

then there's sleepy bunny. Cute, but it's the kiss of death to teachers everywhere:

and finally angry aardvark. This is when you just want to duck under the table to escape:

Here is the human version of these looks. Tell me, if you were teaching, and this was staring back at you, would you be afraid?

Sometimes I find myself rambling, trying to find something, ANYTHING, to catch their attention. A boring class sends me flailing about into the abyss, trying to steer the class out of the waters of tedium.
This happened on New Year’s Eve, when I asked my students about their New Years resolutions. It turns out that New Years resolutions aren’t very common in Taiwan and therefore nobody really had an answer to my question. The silence was deafening. Finally, one of my students who is particularly awesome when it comes to saving me from the abyss, asked me how I come up with my own New Years Resi’s. I jumped at the chance to answer a question, and, as is common when I’m teaching, I started spouting off before I even thought about what I was going to say. What followed was a synopsis of every goal/purpose seeking activity that I’ve ever heard of or read about. During my formative years, I was fed a steady diet of self-help books, motivational seminars, wildly experimental behavioral modification programs and therapy, things which your average Taiwanese person has never had the fortune of experiencing.
Here is a scientific chart detailing my meteoric rise in self-help knowledge:

Because of my extensive experience, I felt that I could authoritatively share this part of American culture with my students.
I kicked it off by telling them about a meditation technique I’d read about, oh so many years ago, on StevePavlina.com. (you may remember from the chart that I became familiar with Pavlina’s work during my post-graduation/break up with crazy dude crisis.) I explained that, according to Steve, when you are faced with a conundrum and do not know what to do, you can meditate to gain an interview with your future self, who can sometimes give you a clue as to what you ought to do with your life. (see: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/08/my-favorite-meditation/)
The same helpful student asked if I’d ever done this meditation. I have. But only a few times and I didn’t find it too helpful because my future self, instead of candidly answering questions as Steve’s future self does, smiles in a peacefully then proceeded to whisper platitudes and pat my shoulder in a patronizing manner.

I met my future self on the beach. She was older than me but not wrinklier at all. And she was peacefuller. She was wearing a white dress and has a wizardly aura about her.

I think the reason she said nothing specific or even helpful was because my subconscious mind didn’t want my conscious mind to know the whole thing (the meeting on the beach, the beatific smile, the wrinklessness) was a sham.
When my students seemed satisfied that they understood the concept of meditating to meet your future self, I busted out the next self-help technique out of my bag-o-tricks- COLLAGES BABY!
I’m not sure where I even heard about this, but I think I’ve done my own sort of mash-up, combining concepts from the Celestine Prophecy (which I read at age 16 during the seminar madness years) and other self-help style books.
The whole idea behind the collage is that you whip through a pile of magazines, ripping out any picture that catches your interest. Don’t think about it too much, just tear those pics out, then cut them up and arrange them into a collage. I’ve also done this technique, but since I’m a bit on the compulsive side, the resulting collage was about 11 feet long. Here’s a picture. Take that!

BAM!
Anyways the collage thing is supposed to give you a visual representation of your goals, something you can display proudly (if it’s not 11 feet long) to remind you of your purpose and direction in life.

Another technique, and I’m pretty sure this is from Think and Grow Rich Happy, is that if you’ve got a really important goal, write it down every morning. I’m pretty sure they say this in The Secret too (I missed out on the great THE SECRET craze because I was anti-self-help when it came out, but I was unfortunate enough to sit next to someone who was enamored with THE SECRET and spent an entire three hour flight telling me about it)

Anyways, I tried this (writing my goal every morning) once, with surprising results (maybe I’ll write about it in my next post)
Here’s a pic of my journal when I was doing the ‘write your goal every day’ thing. I wrote this in May of 2008 when I had absolutely no means to get myself to Taiwan.

I didn't even write it every day, and it still worked!
Anyways, this is how my last class of 2010 went.
I was careful to end my self-help/goal making chat by warning my students about the dangers of goal-making and self-help in general. I drew them a diagram, similar to this:

Peace be with you my friend, and remember, be not troubled for the future, for I say unto you, everything is going to be just fine…
Happy 2011!!!