One night when we were in China, a friend of ours suggested to me and John that we make English lessons out of the government TV channel, CSPAN. We said, “Are you crazy? Government is boring! People want to learn English from lessons about music and movies and sports!”

We understood on some level that Obama was an excpetion to that rule. We understood that people around the world love Obama and find him very interesting. So we made no fewer than seven lessons about him (all linked in the discussion section of this one).

And our Obama lessons were successful and got lots of comments, but I just learned that a Japanese book and CD that helps you learn English through Obama’s speeches has sold 400,000 copies. Isn’t that amazing? I’d be jealous if we were an ESL publisher. Instead, I’ll just take this as good news that people are happy to spend a little money on creative ways to learn English. Maybe we should add an Obama feature to our Super Membership.

Today, our English lesson with Nicolas Batum of the Portland Trail Blazers goes live on English, baby! I didn’t fully realize how widespread NBA fans are until we were in China and I saw a lot of NBA magazines on the magazine racks and talked to a lot of basketball fans. We’re really excited to have a video interview with an NBA player on the site, especially an international player and one as friendly and likable as Batum. Here’s the lesson video:

You might notice that the dunk doesn’t exactly “crush” like Nicolas says it should. That’s because we had to work with the footage we had after our interview ended suddenly. I’ll let John Canzano of 95.5 the Game explain the full story. Some of this conversation also appears in this English lesson, which our users seemed to find pretty amusing.

But, of course, Nicolas can crush with the best of them when he sets out to do so. The announcer on this video clip even uses the word “crush” to describe this epic dunk.

Image by Bruce Ely from last night’s game. See the rest of the slideshow here.

Technology users come in all shapes and sizes. In my last post, I called myself a tech junkie. That makes me sound a little crazy. What techie type are you? The PEW/Internet Project has a thorough set of tech types. (I am an omnivore. I like that language. I consume it all. I love it all.  In typical internet fashion, PEW updated their site and changed the quiz omnivores no loner exist– they are now called “digital collaborators” I think. )

Read about the different types identified by PEW here (And take the PEW Internet quiz here):

You might have an idea about where you fit, but take the PEW Internet Typology quiz for yourself.  Then, tell me what type you are. Knowing a little more about the relationship you have with technology can help you figure out what learning tools are best for you as a teacher or student of English!

I was recently quoted as a source on teaching abroad in a post on boomster.com by Pam Baker.  It brought back some old memories about the time I spent in Japan and how our company got started. Here’s the full email I sent her for the post.

I taught in Japan right out of college and the experience led me to start a company that now helps a million people learn English.  Unlike many people who find a package deal that provides housing and a visa, I arrived in Tokyo in 1997 with the plan of teaching English until I found a job in business. I was able to switch teaching jobs several times over  six months until I got one I really liked and that paid well.

Shortly after, I began working for Hitachi, but I never forgot how eager all my students were to learn English and know more about American culture. In 2001 I returned to the US and co-founded English, baby! (englishbaby.com), which is now used by 1 million people to learn English through popular culture.

Teaching abroad can be very rewarding, but it can become a dead end after a while. I think it’s good to keep your flexibility so that you can make sure you have the best experience possible, and to always be thinking about how that experience can help you at whatever you do next. When we hire people to write lessons for our site, one of the main qualifications we consider is if the candidate has taught abroad and what they gained from their experience.

I called this post “the confessions of a tech junkie.” But I still have a hard time imagining myself like that because I used to be a real technophobe.  Actually, I was a technophobe when I started using technology in my ESL class. The students got me so excited and now look at me. I am a tech junkie. Look at what I do (outside of teaching):

At home and at work, my computer is always on. Almost all day, I listen to music online or on iTunes. At work, the internet and basic office programs are necessary. They make me more efficient, for one, and I am also an avid learner of new technology. Technology helps me learn. At home, I use the computer to learn and to socialize. I do research online. I am part of several professional social networks through ning, like Classroom 2.0. I monitor other teachers’ delicious accounts (a place to list your favorite sites) to see what sites they like. I join online classes through thinkfinity and other sites. I watch television online.
So maybe I am a tech junkie. But I didn’t always used to be like this. Over the last three years, work has pushed me to be more technological. Now, I find it so exciting.  Maybe the same thing will happen to you. If being an ESL teacher makes you embrace technology, I bet just about every other job will soon too.

Last week, I wrote my New Years Teaching Resolutions. One of them was to “share my lesson plans with other teachers in a consistent and organized way.”  There are so many ways to share links and drinks, but what about our favorite worksheets? Mine usually stay hidden away somewhere on my computer or worse yet in a file cabinet in my office. I hate the idea that I spend hours creating handouts for my class and they rarely get used again. Sometimes, I give them to other teachers. Most of the time, we share hard copies, which is such a pain if you want to edit something.

So this year, my goal is to share more and share better. I want to share the electronic copies of all of my lessons. I have a few ideas of how to go about it. I could start putting them all on my personal website. I could use another website. Something with a community feature would be great so that I can easily get lessons too.

So far, I have two ideas: connexions, or a wiki. The first is something I stumbled upon today, but it might be worth looking into. Wikis, on the other hand, I am familiar with. I have used a wiki to share lessons before. Last time, I used a wiki to share pronunciation lessons with other interested parties. People shared things, but they rarely posted lessons. So I am going to have to give the first one a try and maybe look for something better. Do you have any ideas?

I have had my fair share of teaching revelations over the last year and hopefully I have really learned from each of them. They have made me realize how I can improve. Next year, I have six teaching resolutions:

1.  Integrate students’ personal and work lives into the curriculum.
2.  Increase students’ computer literacy through active use of technology.
3.  Present grammar rules and information deductively. (Let them figure it out.)
4.  Tap into students’ motivation to learn English.
5.  Share my lesson plans with other teachers in a consistent and organized way.
6.  Continue to love what I am doing.

Some of these resolutions aren’t exactly new. I talk about using technology all the time and I have mentioned integrating students’ careers into the classroom. Still, this is my list. My list of resolutions. Keep checking back as I work on each of these resolutions. If anyone has any advice, please tell me. Especially with sharing lesson plans and connecting with other teachers!

I watched this video interview with Joey Keithley before I talked to him for today’s English lesson on Ebaby!, so I knew the guy could talk. Which is great. I always edit the interviews for the lessons, and the more someone has to say, the more there is to work with.

So what I’m getting at here is that there’s a lot of material that didn’t make into the lesson from our 15-minute conversation. In addition to explaining how his band name can be used in a conversation, Keithley talks about playing Poland in the ’80s, how D.O.A. got booked for a tour of China that starts this week, his philosphy on political music and a longer-term view of the singing-in-English phenomenon I discussed with Hutch Harris. Full text below, but first, D.O.A.’s tour dates, which are also available on their MySpace.

Jan. 9th Beijing, China at Mao Live House
Jan. 10th Wuhan, China at Vox Bar
Jan. 11th Shanghai, China at Yuyintang
Jan. 12th Nanjing, China at Castle Bar
Jan. 13th Beijing, China at D-22
Jan. 29th Oak Harbor, USA at Oak Harbor Tavern
Jan. 30th Seattle, USA at El Corazon
Jan. 31st Portland, USA at Satyricon
April 1st Valence, France at Mistral Place
April 2nd Barcelona Spain at Estraperio Club
April 3rd Zaragoza, Spain
April 4th Arrasate, Spain at 360 Arretoa
April 5th Limoges, France at CCM John Lennon
April 7th Torino, Italy at United Club
April 8th Milano, Italy at All Blacks Pub
April 9th La Spezia, Italy at La Spezia, Italy
April 10th Roma, Italy at Forte Prenestino
April 11th Firenze, Italy at CSA Ex Emerson
April 12th Cremona, Italy at CSA Dordoni
April 13th Gorizia, Italy at Pieffe Factory
April 15th Vienna, Austria at Arena
April 17th Kerkade, Netherlands at The Rock Temple
April 18th Diksmuide, Belgium at Muziekclub 4AD
April 19th Cologne, Germany at Sonic Ballroom

Jason: Have you guys ever been to China before?

Joey: No we have not. This will be a first.

Jason: And what do you expect the punk climate in China to be like?

Joey: I guess I’m going there to find out. I’m also going there to find out what China’s like in general. It’s fun to go play shows and entertain people and get them to sing and stuff like that, which is what D.O.A. always does. It will be an eyeopener culturally, politically and musically. You know what? I’m hoping to stumble across some great Chinese band and sign them up to my record label. Who knows, there might be something there that’s really great. Now, sure, there will be a million bands we won’t see, but who knows, there could be something that’s really unique, right? Something with a different twist. There’s got to be Chinese punk rock that people have heard but maybe there’s something over there that nobody has yet. So that’s one thing, and we’re pretty fascinated by it. D.O.A. has been about trying to go to places that we’ve never been before. New vistas, I suppose.

Jason: How did you end up getting booked in China?

Joey: It always involves somebody saying, “Hey, I think I can put on a couple of shows, or a mini tour or a whole tour.” We had to go find people in Europe when we started going there in ‘82 and ‘84, and we went some unusual places like Poland and Yugoslavia that, you know, punk bands hadn’t been to before. So it’s a similar kind of thing. You just have to find somebody to say, “OK, I can get it together, you’ll play here, here, here and here.” Because it’s too hard to do it from here. So finally a promoter approached us last September, and said, “How about D.O.A. coming over? There seems to be some interest.”

Jason: You guys have been touring internationally for a really long time and i wondered if you guys have seen the number of bands that sing in English increase over the years.

Joey: I would say so. Take an early German band like Die Toten Hosen all their early records were all in German. A lot of punk bands we played with there sang in German, but I find a lot of bands now will sing in English. But I think it’s kind of cool if they mix it up and appeal to different people that way because I guess English is the language of music around the world, that’s how it turned out. There’s this great record from when we played Japan in 2001. It’s called, We Still Keep on Running with D.O.A. and it’s all Japanese bands covering D.O.A. It’s pretty hard to find. You can find it on my label. It’s not exactly a well-known record. But they did some really great, incredible versions of a bunch of D.O.A. classic songs. And they sang in English too, and the inflection makes it pretty interesting, right?

Jason: I wanted to ask you about the band’s slogan, “Talk – Action = 0.” I wondered if singing a protest song is talk or action.

Joey: I guess in a sense you’re trying to inspire people to action. It’s both, I suppose. You can change the world to a far greater degree by convincing people that you have a good idea and getting that idea to spread around as opposed to taking a violent method, which I’m not backing. At the same time, sometimes people really get backed into a corner, right? It does take sometimes protest to really change things. You just have to look at Eastern Europe for example with the fall of the Warsaw Pact. Or Suharto in Indonesia or Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia is another example. It’s kind of the people power sort of thing, right? That’s why I think it’s interesting that D.O.A. is going [to China] because we have something of a reputation, but we’ll see what happens, right? I’m pretty excited about it.

Jason: You’ve been involved with a lot of different causes doing benefits and things. What are some that are on your mind right now?

Joey: The usual things we’ve done the last few years are ecological or environmental-type causes. We’ve been involved in a bunch of concerts and rallies opposed to the Iraq war. There’s a big one we did a couple of years ago, we were the warm-up act for Noam Chomsky. That was pretty interesting, about 20,000 people on the beach in Vancouver. And “free trade” versus what I like to call “fair trade”.

Jason: You guys have been around for so long that there are a lot of bands that have been influenced by you. Have you also been influenced by some newer bands? Or are you still drawing on some of the same influences from 30 years ago.

Joey: No, you know, I really write songs and get my view of the world from talking to people, watching TV, reading newspapers or websites. I don’t think D.O.A. is really influenced by any younger bands, some of them certainly we admire. They’re doing good work, like Anti-Flag. Musically and politically, I was influenced by people years and years ago. I’m talking like Woody Guthrie and Jimi Hendrix and stuff I heard in my formative youth. That kind of spirit stuck with me even though the stuff we do doesn’t sound anything like that.

Jason: We always have people define a slang term so our members can learn a new term and I figured an obvious choice is the name of your band.

Joe: We took the idea from an old movie starring Edmund O’Brien. It was Dead on Arrival. It’s like a toe-tag. So when an ambulance picks up a body and they’re not quite dead when they arrive at the hospital, they stick a tag, I think on their right toe and it says, “D.O.A.” on it, because they arrived dead. So the most famous D.O.A. is John F Kennedy. Dead on Arrival. You could make up all sorts of things for that. There was a pretty funny thing with this English band called Dead or Alive for a while. We’ve kind of outlasted them, I would say. This older lady was booking us into a hotel one time and she’s really straight and she goes, “What’s D.O.A. stand for?” And our base player in a rare moment of brilliance goes, “Disciples of the Apostles.” She went, “Oh, you sound like really nice young fellows.” She thought we were a religious group or something like that.

Jason: What are some ways that “D.O.A.” might come up in conversation outside of a morgue?

Joe: It’s a common thing in the band practice. “If you don’t get this part right, you’re going to be D.O.A.” We don’t threaten each other quite that much. But it’s something like that, like, “You’re D.O.A.” It’s gonna be curtains in some way or another.

Photo by Bev Davies.

If you spend some time on English, baby! you start to notice some recurring types of characters among the users. We keep some of these archetypes in mind when we plan changes to the site and write lessons and we meet them in person when we travel. I just discovered a new documentary called Mad About English that does a wonderful job of capturing some different types of English students.

The film focuses on six Chinese people of different ages and occupations who are learning English. You can see them all in the preview and read a little bit about them on the film’s website.

What makes these people such good choices for subjects is that they are both archetypal and very unique. I bet almost every American who has traveled abroad has encountered someone who is very overeager to practice English, so the example of the older man who just randomly starts talking to strangers is familiar, but a particularly outrageous case. Same goes for the police officer with a New York accent. I can identify–I learned Spanish in the south of Spain, which would be kind of like coming to Texas to learn English.

Anyway, Mad About English seems to be gaining some momentum. According this article, it was the number one documentary in Singapore for 6 weeks and it just had its debut on the Discovery Channel.  It reminds me a lot of the videos we made in China in terms of content, but the look is very cinematic (as opposed to our more television-type style) and some of the shots are downright beautiful.