Without the comfort of linguistic structure

7/1/13

We are halfway through the first day. I am having a mix of emotions and thoughts. I am not sure how many of our goals are being met due to the language barrier - teaching concepts and using leading questions is infinitely harder when you need a translator for your words. It's like there are two conversations happening - one between me and Verepi, and another between Verepi and the group.

After just a few hours of work, I am noticing slowly that there seems to be very little connection between the body and emotions here. When I ask questions about emotions during the exercises, I get blank stares - maybe it has to do with cultural assumptions about being open with emotions.

I am just concerned that we are not achieving our goals. The "opposite of Jackson" game became more like "Simon says" and it went very quickly. All of the morning exercises went very fast actually, and they weren't maybe so serious as they normally are. There seemed to be a bit of joking around, which is part of what makes me nervous about the kinds of things that are being retained. But I'm not sure how to do this better.

The language barrier is more difficult and more frustrating than I thought it would be. So much of my teaching revolves around gauging responses from the students to my words and body language, but when they don't understand either of those things there is a huge gap to fill.

Questions for today: what is the relationship between student and teacher without language? Without the comfort of linguistic structure? ... Forces you to find other ways of communicating.