In Dalan

Sky Hopinka wraps up the summer trip to China and discusses topics that have come up regarding WAYK, language revitalization, and decolonization.  Sky also wants to say that he is not speaking on behalf of Where Are Your Keys? These are just some of his thoughts about some stuff.

Part One of Two…or Three.

So it’s been quite a while since I last wrote a blog.  I’ll try to be quick.  I have returned from China.  Months ago, in fact.  The rest of the trip went well enough.  We continued working on the POW curriculum after returning from Dalan; David stayed in Beijing for another three weeks after that, where we wandered, loitered, navigated the internet and filmed some stuff for the project.  We also made it to the Peking Opera, which was rad.

After David left, I stayed in Beijing for another three weeks.  I got a job being a private tutor, and I got to teach one on one using WAYK five days a week, twice a day; an hour an a half each go.  It was scary, we blew through the USC we worked out for POW within the first three days, after that it was a lot of mad science and really realizing how interesting English is as a language.  I’m still working on getting everything down on paper, but basically it came down to setting up the prepositions and function words and all the weird times that you’re supposed to say one thing and not the other.  It was fun.  We also started doing TQ: The Walk during the last week of the sessions.  Since the heat was atrocious, we did a short, quick walk in the student’s living room.  It was semi spacious, but a really nice set up with a long couch, a short couch, four chairs around the table, seven chairs total in the house, a tall lamp and a short lamp, and a nice little route around the room.  We got a lot of mileage out of it and would repeat the walk three times each session, reviewing and adding on more and more language as the student learned.

Also, here is the POW video that I made about the partnership between WAYK, BEAM, and the project this past summer:

Since getting back to the States, I’ve been fortunate enough to travel with Evan to many different communities and help out however I can.  It’s really encouraging to see so many people passionate about their languages and doing whatever it takes to ensure its survival.  Yet there are a lot of things that keep coming up; namely politics, identity, race, and colonization.  Yes, those are pretty weighty and heavy, and substantial topics and issues.  But I think that the more that we talk about them and work through them, the sooner action is bound to happen.  To be completely honest, there have been many times while I’ve been working with indigenous languages that I just want to quit.  And I haven’t even been doing this for that long.  But I didn’t, and still haven’t.

I’d rather not go into the political part of this, as it is a little too personal.  But I do want to note that by “political” I am referring to both the governmental, sovereignty based issues and the more individual “politicking” aspects of language revitalization.  It’s a pain in the ass, but it’s there and something that needs to be worked through, for everyone involved.  Teamwork.  Yeah.  We’ve been working on Techniques (TQ) for this.  Not yet contracted, though.

The big concepts that seem to cover all of those issues are:

Colonization.  Decolonization.  <=Those guys.

I became aware of decolonization as an academic term five or six years ago, and mainly through terms of decolonizing pedagogical methodologies.  (There is a collection of essays called Decolonizing Methodologies that I recommend, among many others.) In the past few years I’ve really noticed a surge of voices who are taking this idea to the next level.  It’s great.  Right on.  However, in terms of WAYK, it’s recently become a topic of conversation as far as how can we improve the system to accommodate decolonization efforts.  The discussion involves really making clear what these Techniques can do, and in the next post I’ll share more ideas that I have about decolonization.

But first,

I’ll start with the USC.  The good ol’ Universal Speed Curriculum.  Old reliable.  One thing that needs to be clarified is that the road map that is the USC, is only a suggestion, a conversation starter.  It’s the linguistic equivalent of small talk at a cocktail party: boring and not something that your language particularly wants to be wooed by.  I’ve never been to a cocktail party, but I can imagine.  I can say with almost a lot of certainty that no language will follow the English USC exactly.  And that’s a beautiful thing.  Take the USC, look at it once, put it away, and hunt those fuzzy concepts that the USC represents, not the words.  If there are concepts in the USC that don’t exist in your language, then it’s perfectly fine to change the USC.  That’s when it stops being the universal speed curriculum and starts becoming the Your-Language-Here Speed Curriculum.  Concepts such as want/have/give/take, mine/yours, etc, that are part of the foundation of the USC are still just concepts.  If politeness, norms, or mores occur in your culture that are opposite that of what is in the USC, by all rights, make adjustments to the USC and change it, adapt it, and run with it.

Another issue is intonation.  It is very tempting to impose English intonation when asking and answering questions in the target language, and honestly it’s a hard habit to break, but it’s part of the process, and it can always be fixed with TQ: Accent and explained by TQ: Mumble.  So as you hunt, keep an ear out for intonation, run through the conversation with the fluent speaker and try and copycat along as best you can.  But I suggest not letting it be main focus of your first hunt, or second, or third.  You’ve got to TQ: Limit somewhere, and best to get some language under your belt.  A more advanced hunting TQ is purposefully testing a question with an English inflection to prompt the speaker to 1) confirm or correct what was being hunted and 2) to correct you improper inflection.  It’s easy to get everyone confused by doing this, so be careful.

Really, when you start packaging rides and teaching them off is when you want to go over intonation and make any accent adjustments.  Even if the realization of proper intonation comes when you’re halfway fluent it’s still okay to make that adjustment, and go back and download your brand new accent to everyone you taught.  It’s okay to unlearn.

Intonation and the malleability of the USC are a few issues that come up when discussing language revitalization and the process of active revitalization.  It’s a rational fear that occurs when we start objectively examining the language(s) that we’re trying to save, and are taking into account the obstacles that we face and how the influence that English and the dominant culture we live in affect that process.

Still, remember, that there are some conversations that you need to have about your language that you can only have in your language.  I’m of the Davidedwardsian school of thought that nothing translates.  Ever!  So get fluent.  It’ll be fun.  Then take Grandma to that coffee shop in Spain we’re always talking about.

As in language-learning, studying math involves plenty of rigorous proofs–you take what knowledge you know, and then you use it to find new knowledge. Luckily, language acquisition doesn’t have to be as complicated as this blackboard. (Credit: Clay Shonkwiler, Flickr, Creative Commons)

This post is fifth in a series of entries about WAYK techniques as they occur in everyday life, beyond language-learning.

How do you show someone you’ve learned something? Naturally, you repeat that knowledge to that person rather than simply stating “Yes, I’ve learned it.” You impress that person even more when you apply your newly-acquired knowledge in new, unforeseen situations; rather than simply blindly following instructions in preset environments–which are very convenient, but very rare in life–you show that your brain is flexible and that you’re truly aware of what you’re doing. The WAYK technique “Prove It” takes this element of daily life and applies it to language-learning. You use a bit of language–a word, a phrase, a sentence structure–that you recently learned in a set-up beyond the one in which you learned it. When you “Prove It”, you learn in what situations a piece of language fits and doesn’t fit, and you fix that piece of language more securely in your brain.

Proving your skills is more essential than at first glance. You may receive a diploma from high school or college and claim to have a set of knowledge and skills, but when you are hired, you must show that you, in fact, do possess a given amount of know-how in order to keep your job. You probably wouldn’t want your employers to think you’re a hack, that you got your diploma by achieving the bare minimum for it. If you’ve seen the infamous TV game show Are You Smarter than a 5th-Grader?, you’ve noticed a harsh truth about how grown-ups claim to have learned basic knowledge. Unfortunately for many of the adult contestants–and hilariously for us watching at home–they can’t prove they learned things in elementary school even though they clearly graduated from it. (Maybe they’ve forgotten simple math, science, and grammar, but it’s still basic knowledge.) The ultimate embarrassment is when contestants fail questions that kids answer correctly: the adults must then admit to the world, “I am not smarter than a 5th-grader.”

Life is full of opportunities to “Prove It”. Once, when I was driving a rental car, taking several of my dormmates from our campus to San Francisco, one of my dormmates asked me if I was a safe driver. Of course, I couldn’t rent a car without my license, but of course, that wasn’t enough proof. Many licensed drivers drive unsafely, moving too close to cars and not having both hands on the wheel at all times. I could only show my passengers I was being careful during the trip to SF. At the same time, I was paying attention to my driving as well, so I had to make sure I was, in fact, maneuvering with extra care. The experience helped me improve my future driving as well.

In school, the ways to “Prove It” are obvious: you finish homework, pass tests, and give knowledgeable presentations. They’re usually given with set deadlines. Typically, you can receive outside help on homework, with others “pulling you through it” if you’re having trouble. On the other hand, you’re on your own on tests and presentations.

WAYK is different: you’re tested constantly, but you’re tested only when you think you’re ready, not at pre-determined times. Most of the time in WAYK, your “angels on your shoulder” are “pulling you through it”. However, you’re only tested individually when you need to “Prove It”, whether you want to use just one new word or whether you’re being tested on your fluency on the ACTFL scale; only then will you be on your own. You set your own pace for learning, which makes learning more comfortable and thus a lot more efficient.

I hope you can prove that you know how to “Prove It”! And when you play WAYK with your friends, I hope you prove your knowledge of WAYK techniques and how and when to bring them up “Just in Time”.

-Evan

Manahu (Hello), my name is Qwina West, I am the Inyo County Language Coordinator for the Nüümü Yadoha Program, and this is one of our Paiute Language Classes here in Bishop CA. This video is my second time teaching WAYK in Paiute, four out of the six student is their first time learning this technique. I seen this technique for a couple of years now on the internet, but every time I would see it, I did not understand it right off, so I would not watch them through. So I ran across the site “Where Are Your Keys” and watched this video (“Where Are Your Keys?” is difficult to explain but easy to demonstrate. Check out Evan Gardner, the game’s original developer, in this first-time players’ tutorial.)
The second time I sat down with my Fluent Speaker and told her this is what I want to teach, we sat down together and watched the video, and she loved it! This concept of teaching is similar to our old ways of teaching children. At this time,  I watch the video twice all the way through and made notes and used the Universal Speed Curriculum, and started teaching the first class only two of my students showed up the second class six showed up and they had FUN LEARNING LANGUAGE and that is very important to me.
I videotaped both classes and took up Evans offer about sending in a video. Evan watched them both and gave me advice on what I needed to work on more. If you need a change in your teaching or you see that your students are getting burned out, try this method and have fun with it. As our Elders would say, “Don’t be ashamed” just do it. Watch the video all the way through and copy/mimic everything you see, than watch it again and turn the sound down and do it in your language.

Alina, Stevie, and Melissa enjoy a serious teaching moment at Portland State University.

The best part of summer has to be no school and homework to get in the way of me focusing on Hunting Navajo and gaining fluency in Chinuk Wawa. My journey and first interactions with Where are your keys?, occurred at Portland State University. I was a transfer student from Utah State University the term before. Every day I truly second guessed my decision to transfer to PSU. I went from a school I had always known with friends and family, to a new school where it was grey skies ( the sun didn’t exist) , not a single person knew me , I had just changed my major (again),  and in every way possible was drastically different from Utah and New Mexico where I grew up.

For my new major I just so happened to register for a Native Language Revitalization class that fulfilled my requirement for graduation. I actually planned on dropping the class if I didn’t like it after the first week because 1. I had no idea what language revitalization was and 2. The brief description was boring and I couldn’t fathom why and how was it even important or relevant to my life.  Within the first week of the term one of the requirements for the class was to attend a language class, so I decided to attend the Chinuk Wawa classes everyone was raving about. Having never spoken a second language, learning languages was extremely new. I will always remember walking into the class, immediately greeted by everyone and invited to join a bucket taught by Melissa, the kindness, warmth, passion, knowledge, and techniques I experienced at Chinuk Wawa made learning so fun . That first day when I struggled or got frustrated I learned the technique, “Don’t think don’t suffer” just relax and head over to “the meadow” (where I might add there was free food, Yaay!:D).  The concept of using sign language as a bridge language was so intriguing and made absolute sense, especially when I was given the mouth dropping news, I would be totally immersed in the language.

The next few weeks to come were probably the most life altering and has changed my life forever.  This was when I realized 1. What language revitalization was. Sitting there starring out onto the class, looking at everyone teaching and just having fun.  I Realized I was a part of it and I could see all of us wrapped and surrounded fully immersed in Chinuk Wawa, it was put into action changing our community. 2. It was everything but BORING and yes it was relevant to my life and others. When I was told I could use it to learn my own language the Navajo Language, I can’t lie, I WAS SOLD!:D lol. I could learn my language that I had only dreamed of speaking. A language so close to me while simultaneously so far away because I didn’t’ speak or understand.

I am a firm believer that things happen for a reason.  I know I was supposed to transfer to Portland State University that I was destined to register for that one Native language revitalization class where 3, Where are you Keys? Interns were my classmates.  I was meant to find my passion for teaching and learning languages.  I need to speak Navajo, no longer will it be something I merely wish for. I can’t wait for all my new Navajo experiences and Chinuk adventures because I saw the Native center at PSU change, due to the gathering spaces being filled with students/friends speaking Chinuk Wawa. I have been given the opportunity to go to California for workshops and see how it has changed and impacted lives of communities with only a few fluent speakers. Where are you keys?, changes lives and communities, it changed mine.

Alina, Stevie, and Melissa make WAYK Portland State University

Blog 1: What did WAYK at PSU give you?

I was a Senior at Portland State University in my second to last term when I decided to attend a Chinuk Wawa language class held at the Native Center. There were two passionate teachers, Sky Hopinka and Stevie Lemke that made me feel welcome even though I did not really have an idea of who they were or what this Where Are Your Keys?  was about. They both taught me the basic techniques and would spend extra time outside of class to speak Chinuk Wawa. When attending the Chinuk Wawa class, I noticed it was the first time in a language class where I did not feel pressured to know how to speak or forced to reproduce answers for a test.

I started out playing the game and quickly was told to teach, like many of the people who come at least once. After my first couple of classes I became interested in having an internship with WAYK to learn more about the methodology while receiving required college credits. I was able to witness and be a part of this Chinuk Wawa group that became a community of speakers, not only from PSU but other community members would attend. It evolved into Chinuk being spoken in the Native Center and having a home in the Native center 2 days a week for 2 hours. I learned how to teach a language and work with all different levels of fluency by using the techniques as guidelines. More importantly, I understood how to listen and help other people reach their goal of fluency.

 Initially, I knew nothing about Chinuk culture nor knew anything about the history of their language. I was fortunate to be able to ask people in the Chinuk Wawa group and many other knowledgeable community members about the many influences on Chinuk Wawa and it’s speakers. The most remarkable aspect of the class was how we all learned so much about the history of the Portland area and the people who resided there, even though we were not in a formal college class. Being a part of the Chinuk Wawa group resulted in me getting heavily involved in many of the activities at the Native Center. I ended up enjoying, volunteering, and attending events at PSU and through out the Portland community.

By participating in the Chinuk Wawa group, I was able to attend many workshops and conferences through WAYK. We were able to travel to California and other parts of Oregon to meet other people who were trying to revitalize their language. It was inspiring to hear the stories of language groups who were introducing WAYK to their community and adapting it to their language. The Chinuk Wawa group and WAYK showed me that I was passionate about language revitalization and how I want to pursue this work for my future career. I realized creating language communities is a goal for all groups and the struggle is finding a method that is fast and easy for all ages.

Being Passamaquoddy, I have always wanted to learn my language and the cultural traditions of my people by communicating in our language. Where Are Your Keys? (WAYK) was a teaching method that revitalized my hope and ambition to learn how to build a strong language communities while continuing the path to fluency. The reason why this teaching method works is because it is a game designed for all members of the community. Our philosophy is that we create “language teacher makers”, its the idea that every person must develop teaching skills while learning the language to be able to share the language and build a community of speakers. The game utilizes the strengths of sign language, various techniques, and props. The design is about reaching fluency as quickly as possible and modifying the lessons to achieving this goal. After nearly seven months of being a part of WAYK, I am ready to take this PSU experience and head back home to see how we can continue the movement in other tribes.

Thank you to Evan Gardner, a mentor and friend who encouraged me to take on the world. To Sky Hopinka, Stevie Lemke, and Alina Begay for always teaching me how to be a better human being. And finally, hayi masi pus konaway Chinuk Wawa tilicum uk kumtux pi wawa Chinuk Wawa.

Our next project was to go to a small town south of Shanghai called Dalan, or Dalanzhen, and work with a group of teenage volunteers who were running a three-week English summer camp in three villages surrounding Dalanzhen.  There were two or three volunteers assigned to each of the villages and each had their own way of running things.  We were showing up the last week of the program and not really sure what to expect.

We left for Dalanzhen Sunday morning, taking a cab to the Big Beijing Super Fast Train Station.  I’m not sure if that’s what it’s called, but that place is huge.  It was a five-hour train ride to Shanghai in a pretty nice, super fast train.  Along the way David taught me how to play xiangqi in Mandarin, so that was enjoyable  It’s a lot like western chess, but a few more quirks that make the game a little more interesting.  I didn’t win the first two, or three, times that we played, which I promptly blamed on learning the game in Mandarin, not English, but still it was fun and passed the time.

After we arrived in Shanghai, we transferred trains to one that would take us to Yuyao, which is about three hours by slow train.  On that leg we sat in a sleeper car with four other people.  David and I continued to play xiangqi and noticed this younger dude watching us.  After David beat me, we conversed in chinuk a bit about David asking him if he wanted to play.  After we agreed that it would be all right, David asked him and the competition commenced.  A quarter of the way through the game, David turned to me and, in chinuk, said that the guy was playing really badly and making some big mistakes.  We went back and forth really quick about what to do, and decided on just letting him win, to draw the game out, and to not be insulting.  The game went on for a while longer and both David and the guy were playing pretty horribly. It’s also worth noting that before while David and I were playing, this guy had a rubix cube and looked like one of those competitors who solved them in 20 seconds flat.  So it’s easy to assume he’d have a knack for games.  Then David turned to me again, and in chinuk, said that the guy might be trying to lose, so as to not insult the foreigners.  Seemed plausible, we agreed that might very well be the case, then David went ahead and won.  Or maybe everyone won?  I don’t know, but we maintained the peace.

It wasn’t that much longer before we arrived in Yuyao and were met at the bus station by one of the teenage volunteers.  He took us to a waiting car and we got on our way.  But first we stopped at KFC.

There’s something about KFC in China.  During the weekend after we got back from Fangshan, David and I went out and explored a bit and along the way got pretty hungry.  It was hot; the humidity here is insane, and just said to hell with it and went to KFC.  It was the most awkward experience I’ve had a fast food restaurant ever.  Beside the fact that I didn’t have enough language to order from a menu, it was intimidating.  They yell at you and everyone behind you is cutting in line.  David also had a hard time with it, and after some time we got through the ordeal and sat down and ate our food.  David mentioned how it was a bit of a humbling experience for him, like he didn’t know as much Mandarin as he thought he did, and this was a whole nother kind of language test.  Like a solid Intermediate-mid test.

In Yuyao we got a chance for redemption and stopped in for food.  It was just as bad this time around.  One of the cashiers was laughing at us and I think they hosed me on the fries.  We will be back…

We met up with the rest of the teenage volunteers, got to meet the girl that was organizing the whole project.  They’re doing cool things.  But they wanted to split the three of us up and send each of us to a different village for the week.  That didn’t really fit well into our plans or with what we were expecting before we got there.  It turns out that the volunteers didn’t know that we were coming until the day we arrived, so there was some awkwardness there, and we really didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes the last week of their summer camp.  We had some figurin’ to do.

It was an hour drive from Yuyao to Dalan, and by the time we got to Dalan we had it decided that Irene, David and myself would be staying in a hotel in town and going to the closest village the next morning, Monday, see the lay of the land and plan out the rest of the week from there.

Again, David and I were sharing a room and a bed; a routine we’d grown accustomed to the past week in Fangshan and the two weeks before in Bend.  We settled in and went to sleep.

It is important to know where you are and to be in the moment. You can easily get confused if you don’t practice “Being Here Now”.

The rest of our time at Chuanwei was exciting and interesting in finding ways to implement the game. We got set in our routine and made it through the rest of the week. The classes went great, and the kids really responded to WAYK, and in the end, so did the teachers.

One of the problems that we ran into when we got there was that the teachers weren’t sold on the methodology. It wasn’t a surprise, as most people aren’t on this non-traditional method, but they were willing to hear us out. As David demonstrated the game over the course of the week, the teachers had all of the usual concerns; how to talk about abstract concepts, what do you do if you don’t have a hand sign, etc. Yet their biggest concern was that the students already knew the material we were covering, and that’s why they were responding so well to it to what we were covering in the language. The thing was, they weren’t responding that well. Students in China are more focused on written English and not spoken, so while they can compose comprehensible sentences in written form, they can’t speak it fluidly or fluently. After talking about about that issue they got the gist of what we were going for with fluent oral proficiency.

Sometime during the middle of the week it became clear that what the teachers were concerned with was the students passing standardized tests. From what I understood, it’s a bit more of a complicated issue there than in the States. I remember taking state testing when I was growing up, and the issues surrounding controversies where teachers would just teach what would be on the test. But there, the way for these kids to get into better secondary schools, high schools, universities, whatever, is to do well on these tests early on. So we looked at a copy of their textbook and tried to figure out how to adapt the system to work for that purpose, or at least supplement that purpose.

After looking through the book for a bit, David found that the students we were working with haven’t been introduced to the concept of “can” yet, so we decided to go for that. In the morning on Wednesday, we taught the kids “can” using WAYK, not translating, and they got it. The teachers then asked us to create a more advanced ride that none of the students were exposed to, (we were working with a range of kids from 3rd to 6th grade) and basically teach them how to get to a party, how to plan a party. So we got to throw a party.

It’s a very difficult thing to teach concepts such as “where,” “when,” “who can do what,” “who can bring what,” to a group of kids in a day, but David did an excellent job and we planned our party with the students Wednesday afternoon and had our party Thursday afternoon. The time in between was getting everyone ready and taking part in doing something, with “what can you do at the party?” A group of kids wanted to play basketball, some wanted to sings, two wanted to dance and we asked Luofan (David said that’s the right way to spell Lo Fan’s name) to play guitar and he agreed.

It ended up raining on Thursday, so the kids couldn’t play basketball at the party, but the rest of it went well. There was candy and dancing and singing and guitar playing. Victory!

On Friday, our last day there the teachers treated us to some dumplings for lunch which were pretty damn good, but before that we got the chance to see two of the teachers apply the system to their curriculum. It was good to see them embrace it, and to use the techniques in the way they were teaching. Hopefully they use them more, and use the WAYK manual that David is writing.

We weren’t exactly doing WAYK the way we would have liked to, but we managed to adapt the system enough to incorporate it into the program that the teachers were already using, which really is an important aspect of WAYK: adaptability. And we learned some very important things that we can hopefully refine into proper WAYK Techniques that we can begin teaching off. It really was a lot of fun at Chuanwei, the students were great, the teachers were excited for the method, and next we’ll continue to help them implement the method throughout the upcoming school year.

That evening we got in a bus and headed back into Beijing for a day of rest before we left for our next destination: Dalanzhen.

Everyone has a hand, and everyone is equal. It’s a good day to play.                        Credit: mrwynd, Flickr, Creative Commons

This post is third in a series of entries about WAYK techniques as they occur in everyday life, beyond language-learning. The previous two are on “Craig’s List” and “Full”.

People say “the best way to learn is to teach”, the “natural conclusion” would be that everybody would be teaching all the time. WAYK accelerates this teaching through the technique “Everybody Deals”: everyone in the Inner Circle plays a given role. For instance, the fluent speaker in the Inner Circle might have everyone Copycat what she is saying, then have the person on her left do the same, and so on along the circle until the last person is reached. “Everybody Deals” is therefore an extension of “My Turn/Your Turn” and naturally progresses to “Teach a Teacher”.

“Everybody Deals” takes its name from multiplayer card games, in which the role of the dealer is passed on clockwise for every round of play. The custom was established to make sure every person was playing fair and had the same opportunity to play well. WAYK ensures the same result: if one person is using good techniques more often, then “Everybody Deals” gives a double bonus: everyone else can then copy-cat the same techniques, making the game both faster and fairer, never creating “single points of failure”.

At Stanford, inspired by the gameplay of certain rounds of Mandarin Chinese at the November 2011 workshop, I decided to coin a name for the way we repeated a pair conversation in a circle: “Rotation Conversation”. [1] As I’d later learn, this would be a subset of “Everybody Deals”. I’ve found it’s a powerful reinforcement of learning lines because every person in the circle plays the roles of receiver and giver, one right after the other. Personally, I like “Everybody Deals” a lot more than “Rotation Conversation” because the former encompasses a lot more content and emphasizes the notion that everybody is involved.

Many sports also make use of “Everybody Deals” in having both teams play offense and defense within the same game. This arrangement motivates both teams to be competent in both roles and makes athletes’ brains more flexible; players are generally not stuck in the same role throughout the game. Everyone on a team is shuffled in and out of play; sometimes you’re on the field, other times in the bleachers.

Even around the home, “Everybody Deals” appears. You’ve had to work on your fair share of chores when you were little, but at some point so have your parents and siblings. Most likely, you didn’t have to be stuck with the same chore every day. Most likely, you lent a hand at washing the dishes, doing the laundry, taking out the trash, and mowing the lawn on certain days in the week, and your other family members worked their chores on other days.

“Everybody Deals” teaches you to be alert of what you should say next when you’re in an Inner Circle. It also forces you to be flexible; your brain should be agile and able to switch from role to role as needed, not fixed in a particular role all the time. Finally, “everybody deals” highlights and strengthens the collaborative aspect of WAYK, making sure that everyone has a chance, at some point, to play in the same way.

While we learn languages, we should never forget that languages belong to cultures and that we should embrace both languages and cultures at the same time. When we make sure “Everybody Deals”, we include everyone and build the culture around the language we hunt. This inclusion strengthens the language, the players, and the community.

[1] Alice would be giving something to Bob, sitting to her left. Afterward, Bob would then give something else to Charlie, to his left. Charlie would have the same interaction with Dana, then Dana with Emily, and finally Emily with Alice.

I didn’t have enough Mandarin to be able to speak to anyone but a few people and hunt from the friendliest of players, and I mostly took pictures, took video, and helped David with some table game pointers. The kids were great, really bright, and really sweet.  David had his posse of boys running after him and he’d play basketball with them and the girls would follow Irene around.  They took to WAYK pretty well,

In this Video Sky and Evan demonstrate how the quest for rapid fluency can be measured in a systematic, universal, and accessible way using the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages Oral Proficiency Interview (ACTFL.org OPI).

The WAYK system is based on the notion that fluency can be attained rapidly, passed on easily, and measured scientifically.  Our efforts to promote transparent testing and rating must have a universal scale or calibrated measurement to critically assess our efforts and expenditures in time, human resources, and budget.  If we find  a more efficient route to fluency (both linguistic and cultural) then we must be prepared to discuss, improve, and adapt our approaches to creating vibrant healthy language communities.

We cannot understate the importance of community training in the ACTFL testing system.

Disclaimer: WAYK is not affiliated with, or supported by, ACTFL… We are just HUGE fans!

This video shows what advanced WAYK looks like.  This is no longer the simple “What is That?” game.  Now that Evan and Sky are both seasoned WAYK players, they can push and pull language using a wide range of techniques although the untrained eye may not notice the high level of cooperation they employ.

The advanced stages of WAYK look like a casual conversation.  There isn’t a lot of technique throwing. There is also hardly any sign language. These techniques are still available to the players, but are no longer critical to the flow of information.  Now Sky and Evan just use the techniques on each other without any grand announcement.  They both know what the other is doing.  Sky and Evan have an expectation from each other that they will both do their upmost to   move as much linguistic structure and vocabulary as possible in this short and “casual” conversation.

Now we can really play!

Bad things can happen when something goes Full; worse, when beyond Full. Extremely heavy rains in Tokoroa, New Zealand pushed the local drainage systems well over their Full levels, leading to this dangerous scene here. Stay safe when you’re around WAYK players who are Full, and unfill yourself when you have to! (Credit: Sarah Macmillan, Flickr, Creative Commons)

This is the second in a series of blog posts about how WAYK techniques can be applied to learning in everyday life. The first post is “Craig’s List.”

David Edwards, one of my fellow WAYK interns and Stanford alumni, is notorious for describing “full” in a way like this: “If you eat too much, you puke. If you learn too much, your brain pukes–all over the table, and it gets really sticky and messy and hard to clean up.” No truer words have been said in a game of WAYK. If you’re overwhelmed with foreign words and phrases, they start mixing with each other in your head in very bewildering ways; your vocabulary and syntax may come out garbled (you have a harder time putting phrases together; people have to pull you through every single step). Therefore, you should call Full and excuse yourself from the game to protect yourself–and your teammates–from this confusion.

(And if you’re reading this entry and feel you’re learning too much already, please get up and come back when you’re ready. Do this as often as you’d like and as often as you need to. I’ll be patient; don’t worry.)

In everyday life, one does–and should–call Full. When I jog and run around my neighborhood, I know that I need to catch a breath after about 10 minutes of continuous running (15 on a good day), so I stop occasionally, walk for about 5 to 10 minutes, then run some more once I regain my strength.

Technique “Full” takes this idea from daily life and applies it to learning by inverting a core principle of traditional education: in WAYK, students, rather than teachers, control how long they learn. As much as I’d like to say that Full can be applied everywhere in daily life, it can’t always be so. (Imagine getting up and leaving in the middle of class whenever you felt Full! I don’t think you’d want to ask your teachers for letters of recommendation in that case.) But Full can, of course, can be done in all other non-time-constrained situations. When I’m studying outside of lecture or section, I like to take breaks every so often so that I don’t feel overwhelmed by my work. The breaks help me solidify and secure the information in my head.

Notice that I mentioned that the amount of time I can run continuously without being exhausted isn’t constant. Depending on the task, the environment, and your mood, your Full capacity is very changeable, so it’s important to be able to gauge yourself accurately. More than that, if you’re not sure if you’re Full, you probably are. In that case, it’s better to call Full early and stay sane throughout a task rather than to avoid calling Full to the stage at which you keep doggedly working, go insane, and ruin what you’re working on.

I hope you took enough breaks reading this post! Get out and find some fresh air, go about your life, and come back next time for more WAYK goodness.

The next four days went by quick.  We’d get up, Lo Fan would meet us at Boshi and take us to breakfast a few blocks away.  The breakfast place was literally a hole in the wall.  The hole was round and you’d never know that it was a restaurant if it weren’t for the steady stream of locals going in and out to get their morning meal.  Good, simple food and not a terrible way to start the day.

This whiteboard is busy with Craig’s Lists upon Craig’s Lists–some within other Craig’s Lists, too. Clearly, the student who made all these notes knows what she’s doing to succeed in class. (Denise Chan, Flickr, Creative Commons)

For this post and more in the future, I’ll be writing about how WAYK techniques can be useful in life outside of language-learning contexts. Although just about all WAYK activity focuses on second-language acquisition, we’re also aware that WAYK’s techniques can be–and often already are–useful in learning material in any discipline. No matter how concrete or abstract, academic or practical, rote or conceptual, learning can be accelerated through the techniques WAYK players invent and use. Through this series, I’ll explore how I have noticed and used WAYK techniques in my life. I hope these posts will inspire you to think about using WAYK in your daily life.

One of the techniques that most remarkably and repeatedly appears in my learning outside of WAYK is “Craig’s List,” which organizes information into convenient sequences of related things that help you remember items one after the other. In basic WAYK play, you may have Craig’s Lists for vocabulary items, as simple as “yes/no”, “mine/yours”, and “want/have/give/take”. More than that, Craig’s Lists can be melded with other WAYK techniques and methods, like “Travels with Charlie” (“Tarzan at the Party”/”Getting to the Party”/”What Happened at the Party Last Night?”/”What if Parties Were Illegal?”). Combined with “Copycat”, “My Turn/Your Turn”, and “In Threes”, Craig’s Lists are excellently efficient tools for memorizing language that eliminate the need to pore over long and tedious written vocabulary lists.

If the idea of organizing bits of knowledge into sequences doesn’t sound new to you at all, it shouldn’t. You’ve probably wielded this technique a lot in school before you ever even learned about WAYK. Maybe you’ve memorized mnemonics, like the colors of the rainbow or the names of the planets in our solar system. On more intense fronts, you might have known someone who was dedicated to memorizing the first 100 digits of pi or parts of crucial documents in your country’s history. In my college years, as a Materials Science and Engineering major, I successfully practiced Craig’s Lists to memorize properties of materials. [1]

The magic of Craig’s Lists is that they can start off short and become longer and longer without having to tax your brain. Once you practicing reciting a Craig’s List, as soon as you rattle off one item in the sequence, your brain will instantly recall the next item, and the next item, and on and on all the way to the end. In typical WAYK games, new Craig’s Lists have a maximum of four items (words or phrases). When new items arise, if they are relevant to existing Craig’s Lists, they are tacked on the end, so when you are later asked to recite a Craig’s List with the new item, you can easily remember both the new item and the old items.

For example, in a game of WAYK in English, a list of locative prepositions may start simple, like “above/below”. You practice language using the words in this list first. If you are ready for more language, you may learn a longer Craig’s List, “above/below/in front/behind“, and practice the new prepositions while refreshing the already-taught ones. This Craig’s List can be further extended to “above/below/in front/behind/between/next to“, and so on. Notice also that in each pair of items introduced, the items are very closely related; two of the three pairs are opposites, in fact. Craig’s Lists can pack extra punch when portions of them are in some natural order; the long list above should be easier to recall than a less-ordered sequence like “between/in front/below/next to/above/behind”. An even better bonus comes up when items come in a natural order, as in “one/two/three/four”.

Craig’s Lists may appear to become complicated when you are dealing with networks of things. You can use multiple Craig’s Lists for this purpose, with some of the lists containing the same item. Naturally, you may need to be careful not to mix the lists accidentally, but you may think of these lists like a string of dominoes: you may memorize the connections between two items at a time, and put those connections, rather than simply the items themselves, in the lists. This is how I remembered the independent state variables that the four thermodynamic energy values of a material are dependent upon. [2]

You can solidify the connections between elements in Craig’s Lists by working the items into paragraph form. Separate Craig’s Lists can be woven together to build strong connections between words, even if the words aren’t intrinsically related. For example, if we have the Craig’s Lists “fork, knife, spoon”, “before, now, later”, and “above, below, in front, behind”, we can construct a (strange, yet helpful) string of sentences that reads: “Before, the fork was above the knife. Now, the fork is below the spoon. Later, the fork will be in front of the knife but behind the spoon.”

Outside of language learning, Craig’s Lists can be applied to practical matters from grocery shopping (milk, butter, bread, bagels: notice the dairy/bread segue) to bike check-ups (brakes, gears, tires, tubes: notice the rough front/back, out/in order of this list), and even to fun things like song lyrics. Meanwhile, our education system is shifting focus from rote recall to holistic conceptual understanding, but believe it or not, Craig’s Lists can help even with the latter. The sequential order encoded in Craig’s Lists can help you recall cause-and-effect chains, like the water cycle. [3] Craig’s Lists can help you memorize loads of information, which you can then process to find and analyze the connections between pieces of information. (This processing is encapsulated in another technique, Riddle-Me-This, in which you figure things out on your own.)

It’s always better, on the whole, to have your things and thoughts in order rather than to have them all scattered about, with no rhyme or reason as to where they are. Craig’s Lists conveniently help you learn and recall related items. Perhaps you could make a Craig’s List out of the techniques I’ll be writing about for the rest of this series of posts!

[1] For a basic example: I took a list, from one class, of certain basic crystalline structures (hexagonal close-packed (hcp), face-centered cubic (fcc), body-centered cubic (bcc), diamond cubic) and recalled some of their properties as I went through each item in the list (hexagonal close-packed planes are stacked in an ABABAB… structure, each atom has 12 neighbors, and the unit cell is a rectangular prism and has 4 atom-equivalents in it; face-centered cubic planes are stacked in an ABCABC… structure, and each atom also has 12 neighbors, but the unit cell is a cube and has 4 atom-equivalents in it; and so on).

[2] Internal energy is minimized, at equilibrium, with respect to given entropy and volume values; enthalpy, to given entropy and pressure values; Helmholtz free energy, to given temperature and volume values; and Gibbs free energy, to given temperature and pressure values.

[3] The relevant Craig’s List for the water cycle could go, “ocean water, water vapor, clouds, precipitation, runoff”. Ocean water is evaporated; it changes from a liquid to a gas due to higher temperatures in the air. Water vapor may be blown by wind toward land. When water vapor reaches higher air, which is colder, it will rever to its liquid phase in small droplets and form clouds. As the droplets become heavy enough, they fall as precipitation (rain, snow, and other forms). If precipitation happens over land, water will move downhill as runoff, through rivers or sewer systems. (Naturally, this is a simplified picture of the water cycle; I’m ignoring complications like water seeping into the ground and entering the underground water table.)

We had a day of recovery before we were set to go to Fangshan for the week.  David and I took that opportunity to go jog around the Haidian district in the morning.  Judging by the looks of people on the street, running through Beijing isn’t that common, or we just didn’t look the part. Either way, we had our destination and were just two more vehicles jockeying for position amidst the mash of pedestrians, cyclists, 9 to 5ers, buses and taxis.  It was a bit intense, and David’s advice for crossing the street worked well enough: go when the Chinese go.

Our goal was to design a TQ: Same Conversation by doing a TQ: Walk (or Run) for the coming weeks.  There was a lot of potential for good topics to cover, such as crossing the street, waiting, stopping, yelling at cars cutting you off (Hey! I’m walkin’ here!) and general directional language.

Thinking back, it was definitely a same conversation between David and I.  A few weeks before I had to go to San Francisco to apply for my visa.  I meet David there and we went in together.  I had my trip timed out so that I would only be in the city for a day, but it didn’t work out that way.  We met at the Chinese Embassy in the morning, got in, I found out that I forgot a piece of my application, so we had to go to a UPS store to get it faxed to me.  David and I ended up running about a mile from the UPS store back to the Embassy to get there before they closed for the day, and we were talking in Mandarin the whole way there.

This time, we were trying to get to this park near Beida University, or Peking University, where last year David went and did Tai Chi in this early morning group ran by an older woman.   After a few mistaken parks and wrong directions we ended up there, too late for the group Tai Chi, but still we sat for a bit and watched the park goers.

Evan (left) and I are working on cleaning the spaces between floorboards on the patio. The situation lent itself to a lot of Obviously!-made Set-ups and Same Conversations, while we were Whistling While We Worked throughout.

While I was helping Evan over the past few weeks improve his house to sell, I had some time to learn Spanish from him. We didn’t have to set aside some time for lessons. After all, language is about communication, not classroom exercises. We simply made a deal that if I wanted to help out Evan with his housework, he’d want to speak to me in a foreign language he knew well on the ACTFL scale, Spanish. Of the languages he knew and could teach me, Spanish was the one I saw as most useful and wanted to practice the most.

(Despite my name, I don’t come from a Spanish-speaking culture myself; my family just happens to be from the Philippines, a country where many people were given Spanish names. All spelling errors here, if any, are mine.)

At this point, I should bring up a new name we coined for a new technique: “Whistle While You Work.” Naturally, it takes a cue from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: doing something else while you work helps to make the job lighter on the learner and to give the fluent speaker more time to teach. While we were scraping dirt off the gaps between the floorboards on the patios and wiping down some walls inside the house, Evan brought up a lot of vocabulary words relevant to our tasks. Our conversations used lines like Nosotros limpiamos las paredes con trapos un poquito mojados. Cuantos huecos has encontrado en las paredes? The technique combines a handful of other techniques that connect language to real, live activities:

• “Be Here Now” (we were using words and phrases in their corresponding contexts);
• “Set-up” (the chore environments were laid out and ready for us to work on);
• “Obviously!” (we had concrete objects to work with that weren’t hard to describe);
• “Same Conversation” (though we worked on two separate tasks, we focused on the same grammar structure: has encontrado).

Evan was also bringing up some other topics that weren’t related to our work, but which he hoped I could understand and talk about. He asked me (if I remember correctly) how many years ago my family moved to the United States from the Philippines. I tried to answer using the correct tense and conjugation (which can’t be hunted easily), but Evan must have noticed I was taking more than five seconds to answer. At that point, he called the technique “Sorry, Charlie” (don’t try to speak on a more advanced level than you’re proficient at) on me, which meant that he wasn’t expecting me to continue answering. Sometimes, I felt disappointed that I couldn’t remember a certain verb form, but at other times, I felt relieved that Evan was keeping my mind safe and free from stress. Later, in his “No-grief Debrief”, he explained to me that calling “Sorry, Charlie” was necessary for many WAYK players: people want to try to express themselves, but if they’re taking too long, their brains revert to English as they search for just the right word or phrase that suits what they’d like to say. Once you switch to English, your learning decelerates, and it’s harder to switch back to your target language than it would have been if you had never switched to English.

After asking the complicated question about my family moving to the US, Evan asked a simpler question: how old my parents were. I was able to answer, using the right verb forms–a task that was a lot less taxing on my mind. Then came a question about how many years old I was when I moved to the US. I couldn’t answer the question accurately because I couldn’t express how old I was in years when I moved, but I did know the word dia; to hunt a certain word, I asked, Qué es trenta o trenta-y-un dias? Evan must have seen what I was going for, so instead of just giving me a single word, he provided me with a whole “Craig’s List” of related words: minuto, hora, dia, noche, semana, mes, año, combined with their corresponding American-Sign-Language-based signs.

The magic of the technique “Same Conversation” appeared as well. One day, Evan and I were working on cleaning up floorboards, and he told me he’d found plenty of nails where he was working. As it turned out, it took a long time for me to find my first nail. Evan told me to tell him if I did eventually find one. When I finally did find one, I commented on it. Then came another nail soon afterward, and another, and I remarked on them, too. I was able to practice the lines He encontrado cuatro clavos, He encontrado cinco clavos, He encontrado seis clavos until I made myself fluent in that particular phrase. A few days later, when we were about to wipe the walls, Evan pointed to examples of huecos on the wall and asked me to tell him whenever I found un hueco, just like I did with the clavos. Similar expressions helped pave the way for a “Same Conversation” that would immensely help me remember a certain phrase structure, plus a useful verb form to boot, just by repetition.

The wonder of WAYK is that it acknowledges that language is a tool that helps us accomplish things, not something that stands alone in a book. Through WAYK, people use language combined with the real world so that one person more readily teaches expressions to another. I’m glad to have seen how WAYK works at the Intermediate level while getting tasks done around the house–it’s reinforcing how to push and pull language through WAYK beyond tables of objects and The Walk.

Evan hunts Mandarin from David:

“To serve as a central platform to launch independent service projects that improves the quality of migrant education in China and the quality of life of migrant students. Our vision is to fundamentally revolutionize the philosophy of education and method of teaching in migrant schools to better fit the needs and unique circumstances of these students.”

Together WAYK and BEAM are developing a program called POW (Play On Words) where our goal is to develop an English curriculum. We plan to give this curriculum to teachers at migrant schools so that they can use the WAYK method to teach disadvantaged students English within the limitations of their budget.

Sky has been keeping a personal blog about their experiences on the trip, learning Mandarin, and playing Where Are Your Keys? We’ll be posting their story here during the weeks to come.

Here is Sky’s first entry:

I Remembered to Bring the Medicine

The flight was long enough, but that discomfort was abated by the thought that we were going to China, and agitated again by the thought that we were going to China.  David, who I met last summer working on the WAYK Numu program, was going back for his second visit, and this was my first.

During our flight, and the weeks leading up to the trip that we spent in Bend, David taught me some Mandarin.  Now I hadn’t taken full advantage of the opportunities presented to learn from him.  I kind of assumed that it would just be easier to pick it up when we were actually in Beijing, but the simple culture shock of sitting at the gate in SeaTac had me wishing I took a little more time to learn some before we left.  Ridiculously surprising to me, there were a lot of Chinese people there.  The flight itself didn’t make the regret any easier, the flight attendants barely spoke English and as David ordered his food and drinks in Mandarin I just mumbled what I wanted in simple English and tried to leave the conversations short and quick.

Now, David and I were going to China with two goals: one, to develop a WAYK based English curriculum, and two, to develop a WAYK based Mandarin curriculum and get me as fluent as possible in the language during my time there.  I’m debatably (don’t ask) between an intermediate high and advanced low level of fluency in chinuk wawa on the ACTFL scale.  With chinuk being my second language, Mandarin seems like a good choice for my third.

Eleven hours after we left Seattle, we were in Beijing going through customs and waiting for the train to take us to the city proper.  After a failed attempt to buy a train ticket, all I could think about is that “yeah, this is China.”  I’d gone out of the country a few times; Canada doesn’t count, since I grew up 10 minutes from the border, and New Zealand provided a familiar enough environment (the English thing made it easier,) and the only other time that I felt like an alien was when I went to La Paz, Mexico for friends wedding.  That place was far enough from the border to make communicating in broken English a reprieve.  And like my time in Mexico, I was in China with a friend who new the language and had an idea of the culture.

Leading up to the train ride from the airport to the city, every step of the way felt like a small arrival to a foreign place, or idea.  The days leading up to the drive to Seattle were filled with a fair amount of anxiety.  It wasn’t until a few days before we were set to leave that I started to get nervous.  At the airport, it was just about making it to get gate and getting past the security checkpoints, and being at the gate all I could think about was getting on the plane and hoping my seat wouldn’t be like riding trimet for eleven hour straight.  The plan ride was all about landing and hoping to seeing the country and city from the air (which I couldn’t) and once we landed it was about getting to the house of our host.  But all those short chapters of nerves stopped once we got on the train.  The nature of the place was a force, and I began to respect it more when anxiety used up all the distractions to hide behind.

I’d been told about the humidity, but it was worse than I imagined, as are most weather conditions explained and never experienced, and the smell reminded me of Riverside, CA during summer when the dry heat would mix with the stale, smoggy air.  On the train, leaving the terminal, I caught my first real eyeful of China, and the furthest I could see in that initial sighting was about a half a mile.  That field of view was the norm for the first four days, until we were a few days in teaching WAYK in the outskirts of Beijing in the Fangshan district.

Miguel by the beautiful Molalla River, just in the backyard of Evan’s countryside house.

Oregon’s been treating me well lately, and I’ve been approaching this summer with a lot of wonder. Here’s what I’ve been up to the past several weeks so you can catch up with me to the present.

Late June

David, Sky, and I were in Bend. Evan was accompanying us most of the time, though toward the end of the month, he was hosting a WAYK workshop with Oklahoma Latin teachers, sponsored by the Classics Department of the University of Oklahoma, Norman. The three of us in Bend were working on a consolidated, easy-to-follow manual for new WAYK players, explaining the most essential techniques and how and when to wield them. David and I joined in Hayden’s Mandarin circle on Tuesday, the 26th. We were in awe of how Hai Xing, a 6-year old girl adopted from China, used some of the WAYK techniques on her own while she was having us sit down on certain places on a playground (Set-up, Same Conversation, Same Rotation). She even made a stop/go game for us (Red Light/Green Light)! To us, these were surefire signs she would be an excellent WAYK hunter in the future.

While I was in Bend, I experienced many firsts: my first time eating pansies (in a salad), my first dessert with raw milk, my first WAYK game with someone under 10, my first experience at a dedicated Chinuk-language night at Portland State University (PSU), among so many others. The art of language hunting was alive and well in Bend and in Portland, and I was happy to meet other WAYK devotees around. One night, in Bend, all four of the WAYK crew in Oregon–Evan, Sky, David, and me–joined three Spanish-language learners in the cozy outdoor patio of the Bend Brewing Company. We were all at different levels; Evan was Superior, while our three hosts and David were between Intermediate and Advanced, and Sky and I were Novices. Nevertheless, we made ourselves comfortable in the Spanish circle; to push some Spanish words on both David and me, Evan and the hosts asked us a barrage of questions about our lives, pulling us through the conversation and suggesting possible responses when we looked like we were stalling for answers.

Early July

Evan came back, and the four of us made a trek to a small town on the outskirts of Portland, called Molalla, spending several days and nights in Evan’s nearly-empty house there. Free of distractions just about all throughout each day we spent there, we shot videos of advanced WAYK and made podcasts, which will be uploaded over the next few weeks. It’s about time the world should know how WAYK operates beyond “Want/Have/Give/Take” and “The Walk”! More than that, David improvised on a piano–a talent I never suspected he had–to compose a fresh, frivolous WAYK podcast theme song. I thought it particularly fitting that WAYK should have music that is just as spontaneous, flexible, and simply fun as WAYK is.

Mid-July

I came back to Bend and marveled at the gorgeous scenery all around, as well as the charming used-book stores, the vibrant coffee shops, and the active yet unpretentious atmosphere downtown. Hai Xing’s adoptive mom, Robin, had a niece of hers, Breanne, stay with her for a few weeks. Breanne was very interested in Japanese animation and comics, so she wanted to pick up the language herself. At the same time, a preschool teacher named Yoko, who happened to know Japanese, was visiting Robin’s house. Evan and I were visiting Robin’s house on the usual Tuesday afternoon, expecting to play WAYK in Mandarin. When we saw Yoko, though, saying “Konnichiwa” to us, we immediately saw an opportunity. Evan would be throwing his techniques at everyone, while I would help explain the techniques in Japanese to Yoko while honing my own skill in the language. So we decided to be flexible that night and play in Japanese rather than Mandarin. We were amazed at how readily Yoko picked up on the techniques, like Copycat, Same Conversation, and Everybody Deals. Even though we hadn’t gone into the archetypal first WAYK game, “What is that?”, she took the situation we had–introducing ourselves–and threw in a Bite-Sized Piece of her own, asking us what nationality each of us was.

The Japanese-language hunting followed for the next few weeks while Breanne was around; one night, one of her friends, Michaela, came over to join the fun. Luckily, Yoko was also available on Thursdays, so we established Japanese-language nights twice a week. We played typical games of “What is that?” using typical objects around the house: pens, cups, dollar bills. We threw in some apple slices and water as well, combined with a new ride we collaboratively composed, “Eat/Drink”. (We tried using cell phones for a while, but we limited ourselves away from them because the Japanese word was too long to remember for Novice speakers.) All the while, we were making sure I was pulling Breanne through the target expressions and went all the way to “Want/Have” before it was time for Evan and me to leave Bend for Molalla again. (If I had a chance to stay for just one more night, I would have come up with rides to tackle the complicated way Japanese handles the verb “to give”. But, as it happens, WAYK sometimes has to give way to real life.)

Late July and early August

For the past several days, I’ve been staying with Evan and helping him work on improving his countryside house, which he wants to sell soon, in Molalla, Oregon (about an hour’s drive south of Portland). He made a deal with me that if I wanted to assist him in a task, like wiping the house walls or cleaning the floorboards on the patio, then he’d want to speak in Spanish with me to help me practice and improve. (Believe it or not, I’m not fluent in Spanish, even though I have a Spanish name, which just happens to be an artifact of my Filipino origins. I never took a class in the language, so I’m only at the Novice-Mid level.) I managed to pick up quite a surprising amount of vocabulary over a few hours of talking and working. We even managed to coin a new technique name, “Whistle While You Work”. I’ll cover that technique and my Spanish-language sessions in more detail next week.

At the same time, I’ve been having several deep conversations with him (in English, naturally) about the future of WAYK and what it means to revitalize a language. How do we motivate people to study their own native minority language (like Basque, Yurok, or Irish) if another language is just more useful to them to know and to study (like Spanish or English)? How does a grassroots movement with complicated politics sustain itself, and what kinds of tools, people, and skills are needed? Are certain languages not worth revitalizing, especially if the few remaining speakers can only use the language up to an Advanced level, not reaching Superior?

Later this month, I’ll touch on our answers to these questions on the bigger picture of WAYK. These are important topics that deserve their own essays, not simply things that are worth only a passing mention. I’d encourage you to think about these issues over this month, and I hope you can join the discussion, too.

Until next time!

(by WAYK intern David Edwards)

I had an epiphany yesterday.

This Saturday, Sky and I are flying to China to help an NGO in Beijing run a summer WAYK training for local migrant English teachers. It’s been just over a year since I got back from China, and I’ve been absolutely giddy to get back again. Sky’s excited too, since this will be his first time to Asia.

And since we are WAYK players, Sky is obviously learning Chinese.

We’ve been working at it for about a week and a half, since I’ve been in Oregon. Progress, as usual, comes in fits and starts as Sky and I learn to sync our respective full levels; we’ve covered a ton of ground, and Sky has helped me improve my gameplay immensely. But yesterday, something happened that had never happened before.

We talk a lot about the “songs” of languages. Every language, once you get advanced enough, has a unique song, a one-of-a-kind melody that, if you listen, you can hear in the way Charlie-Rose-Superior speakers talk. For me, in my visual-spatial brain, I feel the song in shapes and edges—Spanish, Chinuk Wawa, Mandarin Chinese all have their own curves, their own matchless dances.

I have a hard time really conveying this idea to monolingual acquaintances. If you’ve been tangoing across a dance floor your entire life, you have no reference point for understanding when someone tries to tell you about the centrifugal thrill of a waltz, the coy pendulum of a jitterbug. You think, “I don’t get it. It’s just a dance floor—you dance on it.” But you don’t know yet that you can tango, or waltz, or swing across exactly the same dance floor, and the rhythm and step and turns all change, and they are all their own flavor of beautiful.

Yesterday, Sky and I were driving from Bend up to Molalla to spend the last few days before our flight to China. As Sky passed a slower van dragging a trailer, a Setup presented itself, and I started talking about it in Chinese. We bounced some Techniques off of each other until Sky had grasped the structure—and then it happened.

He said a sentence from a game we had played a few days prior, while walking in the rain. I started beaming—“Duì, duì, duì!”—because he had glimpsed it. There was a symmetry to the two sentences, a common twist that belied the deeper curve and cadence of Mandarin. And he had caught it. He had stepped in time, and spun on the beat.

I had been waiting for that moment, although I hadn’t known what it would look like until it finally arrived. It was such a small thing, but Sky was starting to see. He was starting to hear the tune of the song, to feel the rhythm of the dance.

I didn’t feel alone anymore.

I am the only advanced Mandarin speaker in the circle of people I interact with on a daily basis. I take every chance I get to talk with native speakers, but those opportunities are far rarer than I would like. I feel like I’m holding this thing—this golden, gleaming secret—that only I can see. I can tell people that it’s there, and they might even believe me. But no one in my daily circle actually knows what it looks like.

Until yesterday, at least.

Sky hasn’t got the whole of it yet. (Neither do I, which is the wonderful part.) He’s just started to glimpse it. But before long, I will finally have someone I can share it with. And that feels absolutely incredible.

But we are WAYK players, so of course, this got me thinking about Native language revitalization. And then I started thinking: What if I was the only one? What if I was the only one left, on the face of the entire planet, who knew what the dance of Mandarin felt like?

I started understanding then, just a little bit more, why some people cry at our revitalization workshops.

We hope you all enjoy!

Hello WAYK-players! Here at Stanford, there have been several exciting WAYK-related developments over the past few weeks.

“We Still Live Here”

At a recent screening of the film “We Still Live Here”, we had informative presentations about language revival from U.C. Berkeley students Maryrose Barrios and Justin Spence, Stanford/Berkeley almnus Kayla Carpenter, and Emeritius Linguist Leanne Hinton.  Then we heard the film-maker, Anne Makepeace, talk about her experiences documenting the Wampanoag tribe’s impressive language revitalization efforts.  With the aid of tribe member Jessie Little Doe Baird, who took initiative by obtaining a linguistics degree from MIT and organizing an immersion school, Wampanoag is making a comeback and even has one native speaker (Jessie’s daughter).  For those who would like to know more about the film, you can find more information here: http://www.makepeaceproductions.com/wampfilm.html.  It is highly recommended!

“First we think, then we speak”: Navajo in WAYK

David, Miguel and I had the pleasure of meeting Professor William Nakai, who teaches Navajo language classes at Stanford, at the “We Still Live Here” screening.  We played a few rounds of Where Are Your Keys? in Navajo, using the magic question “What is that?” to get some nouns and yes/no expressions.  It was a lot of fun, and we started to suspect that Navajo does some really *fascinating* things with its nouns.  Professor Nakai graciously invited us to come demonstrate Where Are Your Keys? at his beginning Navajo class to give the students a chance to work on pronunciation and oral fluency.  We gathered our cups, lanyards, phones, and dollars as props, and had a great time doing everything from “Where?” conversations, to commands, to tenses.  Professor Nakai had an insight into the fundamental idea of Where Are Your Keys?: he told us that in Navajo culture, it is important to remember that “First we think, then we speak”.  Where Are Your Keys? can sync up our mental processes with speech so that we actually understand what we’re saying as we say it.

Multi-Language Thursdays

Every Thursday night, the Stanford Where Are Your Keys? club has been playing WAYK in a variety of languages.  So far we’ve done some Chinese, some Arabic, and a little Japanese, French, Navajo and Hindi! It’s interesting to see how different languages map out, and how to adjust the order of rides to reflect the most natural learning process.

Overview of plans for the summer…

This summer, Where Are Your Keys? will be working with AlterNative Soulutions, a tribal non-profit, to revitalize the Salish and Kootenai languages on the Flathead Reservation in Montana.  Both of these languages are in severe danger, with Kootenai being the most threatened.  However, with the guidance of April Charlo, Salish educator and Where Are Your Keys? player extraordinaire, we hope to give new life to Salish and Kootenai. We will help a group of about ten speakers to build fluency while they themselves become teachers of the language.  Stay tuned for further updates!

Image credits:

https://www.stanford.edu/dept/anthropology/cgi-bin/web/?q=node/1095

http://www.montanatribes.org/links_&_resources/tribes/images/Salish600.jpg

On February 9th, 10th, and 11th, Evan Gardner, April Charlo (Salish), Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk), Paul Cason (Maidu) and his son Marlon traveled to the University of Arizona in Tucson for a workshop hosted by AILDI, the American Indian Language Development Institute.  It was a fantastic experience and we are thankful for everyone that came and participated and everyone that had a hand in bringing us there.

The first night, Evan gave a two and a half hour presentation/workshop to the participants in U of A’s SEED program, which hosts indigenous language speakers from Mexico for a year long stay to learn language revitalization methodologies.  Their English was very limited, so Evan gave the entire presentation in Spanish.  Sky sat in on the lotus and taught some chinuk wawa as an example of how WAYK could be applied to any language.  After the lotus, we did a language hunt with two Maya speakers.  It was a great experience and very interesting for Sky to run a WAYK bucket without having a common shared language.

The next two days of the workshop, we were in the San Xavier Education Building on the  Tohono O’odham San Xavier Reservation.  Which, as Evan put it, was one of the best rooms he’s ever done a WAYK workshop in.  The room was large, and everyone working there were so nice and friendly and helpful.

Over the next two days, we worked with between twenty and thirty participants representing a wide range of tribes and nations.  The first day was focused on showing the techniques and the game through buckets and various other WAYK games and debriefs.

Mad Science! language learners meet language teachers

The second day, we got the opportunity for a little Mad Science and broke the room into two groups: the fluent speakers, and the language learners.  With these two group we took each aside and explained to the speakers how to craft rides, and how hunt language to the learners.  Then we brought everyone back together and paired each speaker with a learner and got to see how far they were able to go in each language.  One of the main reasons for trying this experiment was that we wanted each of these speakers to be able to have the first ride packaged in their language to be able to take home with them, and another was to get practical experience applying WAYK to their language.

It was a great workshop, we got to work with a lot of wonderful people and got a lot of good feedback about what we can do to make this system stronger.  Once again, we want to thank everyone that came and everyone that got us there and took care of us while we were there and made us feel welcome.

Marlon, Paul, April, Evan, and Sky

Here are some links to the AILDI Facebook page with videos and more pictures of the workshop:

https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=904760380897

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.234528039971004.54370.175339285889880&type=1

One last thing, everyone that came to the workshop and who reads this blog and hasn’t done so yet, please post your location on the google map on the right side of the screen.  We’d love to see where everyone who is playing this game is on the world map.

In this blog post, Sky Hopinka tells about his experiences so far with the Chinuk Wawa group at Portland State University.

For the past eight weeks now, the Chinuk Wawa language group has been meeting two nights a week at the Native American Student and Community Center (NASCC) on the Portland State University campus here in Oregon.  The NASCC has been kind enough to donate space for us to have this class so many thanks to the NASCC Specialist Rachel Cushman (Chinook Nation) and everyone else at the Native Center for their support.

This language class isn’t run by any department, student group, or governing body, and for the time being we’d like to keep it that way.  BUT, we welcome and appreciate any and all support.  To have the driving force behind this group be students and community members who are self motivated and have a sincere desire to save languages and build communities is essential in keeping the language living at this location. Having the support from the NASCC and the Native community is amazing, and the support from Native American Studies is great in giving students the academic ability, through internship and independent study credits, to pursue this unconventional, and somewhat underground, approach to language revitalization.  And Where Are Your Keys? is providentially unconventional.

Getting this language class going has been quite the experience.  For the past three terms I’ve been able to get internship and independent study credits through Native American Studies (now Indigenous Nations Studies) to learn Chinuk Wawa to meet my Foreign Language requirement and intern with Evan and “Where Are Your Keys?”  Now this term we are trying to help other students do the same.

WAYK Interns, Jordan Mercier and Stevie Lemke

WAYK has three new interns this quarter, Stevie Lemke (Cherokee), Taija Revels (Tlingit), and Jordan Mercier (Grand Ronde) who are all seniors.  They have been learning the language and learning WAYK since we began in the beginning of October and have really been crucial in keeping the momentum of the CW class going strong thus far.  None of them are interning for credits this quarter, which is definitely a testament to their desire to support this class and the language.  Also, we are actively looking for freshman, sophomores, and juniors to take the reigns over for the next school year and take advantage of the opportunity to meet the B.A. foreign language requirement with an indigenous language.

Now to talk a bit about the class itself…it’s been both challenging and daunting while being exciting and invigorating.  I have not yet not looked forward to a class night and I can honestly say I don’t see that happening. We’ve had about 15-17 people come through the class with about 8 regulars for the Tuesday class and another 8 or so on the Friday class.  Seeing this many people who consistently attend is wonderful.  The main points that are challenging to me and the other interns is finding ways to organize and structure the night to account for the ever varying and fluctuating levels of fluency that the students are at.  Every class is different and we are always looking for ways to keep everyone engaged and progressing in the language and WAYK.  Listening to the WAYK podcasts with Dustin debriefing his language classes has definitely been helpful in figuring out how to navigate similar issues that have emerged.

We’ve begun using the Plus/Delta technique to close our class each night and recap what we’ve covered.  Giving the students that come a voice in this developing community is necessary and the feedback we’ve received has been indispensible in maintaining and helping this language group grow.

WAYK Intern Taija Revels (third from left) teaching the AISES (American Indian Science and Engineering Society) student group

I’d also like to add that it has been great to have fluent Chinuk speakers in the Portland area come to our class and support the new speakers with their presence and their knowledge of the language.  In addition to the Chinuk night at PSU, there is also a class at Portland Community College and the Grand Ronde Tribal Office so basically, there are at least four Chinuk gatherings going on somewhere in Portland and given week.

We will keep this gathering going throughout the school year, with the times changing to accommodate student’s schedules, and we’ll probably keep going through the winter break, too.  We also might have some reflections from the other interns in the group on this blog, so keep a look out for those.

Sky

WAYK was asked by UISHE, the United Indian Students in Higher Education, to come and present at the Native American Student and Community Center on the PSU campus in honor of Native American Heritage Month.  UISHE is one of two Native student groups at PSU and have been very supportive of the Chinuk Wawa class and our efforts in language revitalization.

We will start the day at noon and go until 4pm.  After that, those that wish to stay for the Chinuk class at 5 are more than welcome to do so.  This is a free event and open to everyone.

I am very excited to offer some details of our upcoming event:

Nov. 5th and 6th at the Native American Center, Stanford University, Palo Alto Ca.

Presented by the Stanford Languages Club

The cost for this event is donation based. We are unclear at this moment how the University rules will apply to this type of presentation as it is landing in a strange grey area. This is nothing new for us at Where Are Your Keys? We often find it is a challenge for administrations to categorize what we do. We are working with them to find a solution to this issue but in the meantime please be prepared to bring your own money for food, lodging, and transportation costs. To cover the costs of the presenters, feel free to make a donation of food, food money, or gas cards. Thank you for your understanding and willingness to help us navigate this issue. The last thing we wanted to do was postpone this event. Languages are more precious than lunch money.

The schedule for the event is loose as we are open to a variety of possible language opportunities depending on who shows up. The most effective, interactive method for teaching the techniques of Where Are Your Keys? is to actually learn a language while learning the techniques. We have chosen Mandarin as the vehicle for Saturday’s presentation. On Sunday we will use what we have learned on Saturday to “hunt” or “pull” a different language from a fluent speaker. We will experience how quickly the new language can spread throughout a community of Where Are Your Keys? players who are using specific techniques learned just yesterday.

This weekend will be full of techniques for building strong vibrant healthy language communities as well as specific techniques for learning and teaching languages.

For now the schedule is:

Friday night:

6:00pm – 8:00pm dinner and presentation by the Stanford native student recruiter.

(bring your students)

Saturday: Community Building and WAYK techniques of accelerated learning and teaching.

8:30am – 9:00am light breakfast

9:00am -12:00 Where Are Your Keys? Mandarin!

12:00 – 1:00 lunch

1:00pm – 3:00pm Where Are Your Keys? Mandarin

3:00pm – 4:00pm Debrief and plan for tomorrow

Sunday: Community Language Revitalization!

8:30am – 9:00am light breakfast

9:00am -12:00 Where Are Your Keys? Latin? French? Cherokee? Salish? Cree?

12:00 – 1:00 lunch

1:00pm – 3:00pm Where Are Your Keys?

3:00pm – 4:00pm Debrief and plan for the future

Here is a list of the Stanford area hotels.

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/rde/chs/general/hotel.html

This link is a shuttle schedule for the university to and from area locations.

This may help those of you coming from out of town without a car.

Marguerite shuttle routes:

http://transportation.stanford.edu/marguerite/

Recorded September 18th, 2011

This past September Dustin Rivers and WAYK had the opportunity to present at the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival (AICLS) conference.  AICLS is a great non-profit organization that supports language revitalization through various conferences, workshops and through their Master Apprentice Program.

The conference was held at the Marin Headlands Institute in Sausalito, CA and we presented on both Saturday and Sunday morning.  Before the presentation began, April Charlo was playing a WAYK game with a fluent elder of the Washo language, who she had been picking up language from all morning.  This provided a great Set-Up for the presentation, giving those in attendance a preview of what WAYK has to offer, and really, showing them just how fun this can be.

We had an amazing time at the conference and meet a lot of great people who are passionate about language revitalization.  We got to share what we do and also see and participate in what others are doing as well.  That sort of sharing of ideas and goals is a positive thing to see in the development of this language revitalization community.

We just want to thank everyone that came and everyone we met and AICLS for having us. We hope to continue to work together and foster those relationships we made.

These gatherings are open to everyone and free of charge.  For more info, you can email Sky at skyhopinka@gmail.com

We’ll keep you all posted on how it goes!

Planning the next move.

35 minutes and 41 seconds.

[direct download]

Recorded July 28th, 2011

In this episode, the overarching theme is getting everyone to manage their Full levels and really examine why we are here.  We’ve reached a point in the program where the facilitation techniques and methods of WAYK are being handed off to the students and we all need to reassess our roles and how we can continue to grow and contribute to the group.  Enjoy this episode! And please let us know if there is any part of the post that needs clarifying.

00:50

We begin the podcast talking about an experience with one of the students running a bucket on their own and owning the ride

01:45

The Great Race

In the Afternoon, we had three teams attempt to get through as many of the rides as possible, starting at the beginning, in a half an hour in order to find holes in the language and see who is strongest in which ride.

05:00

Unfilling by running rides

We talk about the way Leanne described becoming unfull by running the rides and the discussion shifts to ways in which they can unfill and return to the language.

07:10

Why are we here?

Earlier in the morning, we had a group activity discussing our reasoning’s for being involved in the program, and here we discuss the outcome of that.  The group was broken into three buckets, with a facilitators bucket for Evan, Sky, and David, while April facilitated the activity.  The main topic we discussed during that activity, was “leave if you don’t want to be here.”

10:30

Perfect timing

Shirley, Verleen, and Gerald come in during the end of the activity and are concerned that something might be wrong.  They join us and each of them goes around and tells the kids how proud they are of them, of the work that they are doing and how far they’ve come in the language.  (We don’t discuss what was said by the three Numu teachers in great detail, but it had a very positive impact on the whole group and was a sort of catalyst for The Great Race that took place in the afternoon.)

15:00

Building the “Full” muscle

We move to the dinner table and Evan brings up difficulties some of the students have with calling full on themselves and after a mid-program assessment on Techiniques, a desire to explore the Techniques further.

16:55

Bringing in guests

A topic during the past few weeks was bringing in guests to learn what we had been doing.  John plans on bringing in his cousin Nick, who knows sign language.

18:35

Y’all are lapping me

Evan talks about how he is being lapped in the language by everyone.  He talks about how that is a good feeling for him because other people are being trained in WAYK and making it work.

19:30

How can I hunt faster?

David asks Evan how can he hunt faster, and Evan answers, “build a pack of hunters.” April then tells of her experiences in hunting and sharing her language with Shirley.

21:10

What’s the lunchroom going to be like?

Sky tells of how earlier in the day, Walter and John were excited to speak Numu at the high school.  Also, there is a change in some of the student’s attitudes towards the program.

23:35

The Con Game

In order to hunt for where/under/above/inside in Numu, David uses the three cups and plays the old street side “Con Game” with Shirley and a dollar bill.  He gets a lot of mileage out of the game and tells how the game went and all the extra language he is getting out of it.

27:35

It’s all rigged

Evan talks about how, really, WAYK is all rigged through the use of Set-Up.

29:35

A little faux pas

David is concerned he made a slight cultural faux pas earlier in the day, but Evan fills us in on the rest of the context, and really, it wasn’t so bad.

32:40

How the day turned out

We talk of the outcome of the day and our hopes for the upcoming weeks and managing Full levels.

Lunch the WAYK presentation at Salish-Kootenai College

Here’s an account of our recent trip to the Flathead Reservation by our very own April Charlo.  Also, expect more podcasts and blog posts to come soon, we’ve been very busy these past few weeks and are just now starting to get caught up on the nitty gritty.

This is my first blog post and I had a really fun time writing, and writing, and writing.  So it is very long and detailed.  If you need to be quick about it, read the synopsis and watch the videos.  Enjoy!

Synopsis of this Blog:

On the drive to Spokane I downloaded a lot of rides to Sky.  We had a great time at a language program in Usk Washington.  Our Salish Social on my Reservation was amazing and my language community enjoyed their experience of seeing how the WAYK system works.

The Gist:

September 7th, 2011 interns Sky Hopinka, David Edwards and April Charlo (that’s me) were all packed waiting on the stoop for Evan Gardner.  Ok, not really.  We aren’t those kinds of interns.  We are the “too busy to pack and do laundry kind” because we are working on podcasts, websites, and bylaws.  So it was a surprise to find out at the breakfast table that we all had to do laundry.  Nevertheless, when Evan arrived we strategically packed all our belongings in the trunk of Sky’s shiny new blue race car.

We left right about 6pm with buzzing excitement for what is about to happen in the upcoming days.

But first, here’s a little of my background: I am from the Flathead Reservation which is located in Northwest Montana.   We have three tribes and two languages, Bitteroot Salish, Pen d’Orielle and Kootenai.  Salish and Pend d’Oreille are pretty much the same, the only differences is a word here or there that is different and Kootenai is completely different.   I have actively been in the trenches working with my language since 2007.  We looked at many programs like TPRS, TPR like the Maori and Hawaiians use, and finally settled on using a new system that was just being developed by the Kalispel Tribe in Washington.  We had decent success, I can hold a conversation pretty well at about intermediate mid level on the ACTFL scale.

When I was introduced to the “Where Are Your Keys?” system that fateful day in Portland, I immediately understood how the methods and techniques could get a person fluent in no time at all and from that moment on I knew I had to bring “Where Are Your Keys?” home.   Then we were in Madras doing our awesome “Where Are Your Keys?” thing and one day the opportunity presented itself to broach the subject of going to Montana with Evan and the team.  Next thing I know Evan is saying something like, “Well of course we are going to Flathead!” Just like that, the date was set, plans were made, and now you are up to speed.

The Car Set Up:

Energy Levels:  High with excitement

Driving:  Sky

Passenger: April (me)

Back Seat: David-driver side, Evan-passenger side

About 8.5 miles out, Sky asks me, “Do you have the want, have, give, take Salish rides down?”

I answer “Yeah”.

Next, Sky says, “Well, run me through them.”

In a scamper I dug through my purse and pulled out a pack of gum and a pen.  I put the pen on his side of the dashboard and the gum on mine and off we went.  That was about 6:37 and in an hour Sky, with having no previous lesson in Salish, was speaking like a pro.  He had the target vocabulary, along with “what is that?” “make me say yes” and “make me say no” and “mine, and yours.”

In an hour Evan stopped us and did a full check.  Sky wasn’t full at all and to my surprise I was pretty close to drowning.  I felt myself becoming full but didn’t want to stop because of how I was once again mesmerized at how amazing the WAYK system works.  Here I was downloading rides in a car to a person who was driving a car and signing at the same time and learning a language faster than I have ever seen anyone learn my language.  And this is a language that has been proclaimed by some to be “unlearnable”.   But also at the same time I hadn’t tested out the rides on anyone and I had to create some pieces on the fly, and not being sure if those pieces were correct was so very filling.  Also, I didn’t want to stop either because I wanted to see Sky get to want, have, give, take.  So I applied the WAYK dirty little secret and TQ: Rise Above and we got into mine, yours, want, have, give, take for the next half hour.

And here is a little video of the car ride:

Sky did an amazing job pulling me through the creations of the rides by stopping me and helping me to create and hone the Criagslists for “want, have, give, take.”  At some point Evan flexed his Bruce Lee muscles and called full on us.  And he was right, we were both super full but still, neither of us wanted to stop.  One of us tried to pacify him by saying “Ok we will stop when we get to the next mile marker.”  But still we couldn’t stop.  Finally he had to say “Ok stop now…ok that’s enough now” in his kind, Bruce Lee voice.  Looking back on it now the only way it makes sense to describe it is you know those vampire movies where the new vampires don’t know when to stop sucking blood before they kill their prey? I think its kind of like that, but instead of blood, its language downloads.   We stopped for a break at Biggs and before we got out of the car Evan said, “Now I mean it, take a break.   No Salish for at least an hour.”

I walked in the store laughing, cracking jokes with Evan and David and even though my head felt like it could explode at any moment, my heart was giddy.  It had been a long time since I have taught my language, but never in my time as a teacher have I been able to create a speaker with whom I could have a solid conversation with in just an hour!

We get back in the car and I gotta tell ya, it was really hard to keep the agreement.  At one point Sky and I were whispering to each other in Salish about wanting candy.  About 40 minutes later one of us asks Evan, “Can we start yet?”  Evan of course laughed and gave us our wishful green light and again we were off and running.  And my novice downloading skills filled Sky up in about half an hour.  I think I was so excited that Sky was learning so fast that I just wanted to download everything I possibly could and so I started throwing more at Sky without a solid set up.  He called limit on me more than a few times and eventually because I kept doing it, called full.  In my defense, HOW FACINATING!

Sky got in the back and David got in the front with me.  David hunted me before and had a pretty good handle on enough language to visit me in Salish.  So I was able to keep rattling Salish off with him, but of course our rattling ended up in a shouting Salish match.  Again, HOW FACINATING!

During operation Plan Flathead Presentation, I suggested we also meet up with JR Bluff, a pretty smart guy who is running a language program in Usk Washington.  The Qelispe (Kalispel) language is also Salish with the same sort of minor differences like with Pend d’Oreille.  I put in a call to JR Bluff to see if he would like us to come through and show him what we were doing and being the cool guy he is, scheduled us to present to his class and my god dad, Johnny Arlee.  So that was added to the itinerary for Thursday morning.

We arrived in Spokane at Zan Azigian’s apartment right about midnight.  Zan is not only one of my Dad’s really good friends but is his co-playwright.  We planned on making the pit stop at her house and getting up super early to get to Usk the next morning.

Sleeping arrangements:  All of us in the living room

Floor: David and Evan

Cot:  Sky

Pull out Bed: April (me)

The gang and Zan

We arrived in Usk Washington about 9:30am with a plan.

Qelispe Agenda:

Observe their class in session

Evan talks about Techniques and ACTFL

Me and Sky run through rides and strategically seat fluent speaker Johnny Arlee next to me so he could verify, fix or tweak as we went along and Evan doing a TQ: Sportscaster during our demonstration.

David puts on a hunting show with Johnny

We have a visit, eat lunch and answer questions

What ended up happening was we got there and they didn’t have class but made a huge impression with their introduction.  They had eight students, JR, Johnny and another elder.  Every single one of them introduced themselves in the language.  And it wasn’t just a, “Hi my name is______”.  Pretty much almost all of them introduced themselves in a paragraph.  The last time I had seen JR was when I met him during his demonstration on our reservation several years back.  Needless to say I was very impressed with the success of the program.

Another important note: Johnny introduced himself and signed through his introduction which blew my group away.  After the introductions and we had a little break Evan asked me, “Does Johnny know sign?!” When I said yes, he almost went into convulsions.  Once I saw Johnny signing, I remembered that he used to teach it back in the day.  If I hadn’t forgot, I would have told Evan a long time ago.  I think it was cooler for Evan to find out the way he did though.  Johnny doesn’t use ASL, but Salish Plains signs and we were able to incorporate the signs he used for “yes” and “no.”

After the introductions, JR took about 20 minutes and talked about what they were doing and it’s pretty intense.  They are getting tribal money to fund the program and pay three tribal members full time and the other students are hired out of another fund.  They are in immersion all morning and then some of the students go to the high school and teach, and the others go to the preschool.  The system they are using has been designed and developed by Chris Parkin and  implemented by JR and Johnny.  JR said that they had a vocabulary of about 2500 words and that the students are blazing through it.  I know the first year curriculum pretty well because that is what our program was modeling our curriculum in the past, but our program ended before we could start to explore the second unit, and the third unit is still being created.

Next Evan did his thing and they of course thought he was entertaining and laughed at all the right moments.  Heck he still cracks me up.  The man puts on a pretty good show.  After he was done we took a little break and me and Sky set up our bucket.

I explained to the group before we started that Sky had only started to learn Salish the night before IN the CAR while DRIVING and this is how far he got.  I also explained to them that I knew a lot of Salish but didn’t realize until I sat down to start creating rides that I didn’t exactly know how to say “What is that?” I knew there were like 4-5 different ways to ask but didn’t know which one to use and realized that even though I rank close to advanced I had some pretty big holes in my language.   I told them that I know with the WAYK system I could quickly be able to determine what the holes are and fix them immediately.

The set up: Small table, me and Sky sitting across from one another with a black pen in front of Sky, and the gum in front of me.  Johnny was flanked on my right and the rest of the class was standing around or sitting lunatic fringe.

We went through the whole ride and to my amazement it only needed minor tweaking.  I was worried about Sky being thrown a curve ball with the fixes but he adapted right there on the spot which was so cool to see.

We knew going in that JR has done a lot with his program and we weren’t aiming to change his curriculum, rather we wanted to share WAYK techniques with the idea of helping him shave off pennies.  From our perspective everyone enjoyed themselves and had a good time including us.

We were told that if we got in the car and left at 1:30pm we would make it on time to Montana by 6:30pm for my presentation at Salish Kootenai College.  This was a non-related WAYK presentation but in hindsight I should have showed them techniques.  It was for the juniors and seniors in the SKC Elementary Education Department.  I have a Healthy Native Community Fellowshiw team member who is still active in using the fellowship tools in our community named Linda Ferris.  Our agenda for our hour included an HNCF ice breaker called Rez Life and an activity called “Deep Listening”.  I hadn’t been able to use this tool in our Numu family because of time constraints and I really wanted the guys to do it, so I used my cleverness and FINALLY, the guys are deep listeners.  Or, kinda…listening is like a muscle, it can’t be learned in one shot, but they got to experience the activity, which is pretty powerful in itself.

The presentation was a success and I walked out of there full as full can be.  Then we went to my mom’s house, which is an hour south of the college.

Sleeping arrangements at Jan Charlo’s house:

April was in the small guest/kids room.

Evan on the couch, Sky on the floor in the living room

David Edwards was given the room downstairs because of his allergies of cats.  Mom said the cat “NEVER” goes downstairs and of course David Edwards woke up with Shere Khan sleeping on his face.  So needless to say, David was miserable with allergies the rest of the weekend.

The next morning we were planning on waking up at 7am.  I woke up at 9:30 staggered out to see Sky still asleep on the floor and my mom making coffee.  “What’s going on?” Was all I could muster out of the nonsense I was seeing.  Turns out, Evan didn’t take into account the time difference.  Not a surprise because we were completely exhausted from not getting very much sleep at Zan’s the night before and blazing across a few states in one day.

We get ready, readjusted our game plan for the day and zoomed up to the College and arrived with a half an hour till go time.  This is where I would like to say, if my mom hadn’t been there we would have been in trouble.

Event: Salish Social with WAYK

Where: Salish Kootenai College

Lunch: Sponsored by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Tobacco Prevention Program (Cristen Two Teeth, you ROCK!”

Time: Noon-4pm (but I scheduled the room until 6pm just in case conversations lingered into the night)

FaceBook Attending Confirmations:  27

How many actually showed up: 21 (Not toooo shabby)

I kept the invites to a minimum and didn’t want to go all crazy.  I knew that I didn’t want this trip to be about selling WAYK, rather I wanted to share it with my language community, how this could be a fast way to learn Salish.

Salish Social Game Plan:

Greeter: April (me)

Get the Party Started: Sky and David running a bucket

Food Prep: Jan and Evan

The bucket...waiting...wanting to play.

The buckets were in party mode with people busting in and out of the inner circle.  When lunch was ready, Evan said he counted the people in the line and there were 25 people.  The after lunch plans included the group watching me and Sky demo, and then they would bust out into three other buckets and run the rides.

Sky and I got the party started in the bucket and were demoing the rides we created.  I had fluent speaker on my right and the party is rocking.  Then all of a sudden, the fluent speaker throws a TQ curve ball into our plans and starts grilling the process.  She is a feisty one but I think she doesn’t want to be at that kind of lower level speaking, where there is a lot of repetition and such.  So after that Sky and I finish the rides out and we take a break.  I became aware that there were buzzing conversations happening around the room and since I couldn’t’ be in every conversation I suggested that we group up and start the Q&A.

I was really hoping that my friends would see how amazing this system is just like I did when Sky ran me through it that one Friday in June, and they did, they got it.  They are still asking questions and one friend is going to try to run through a couple of the rides with her students.    So now all we need to do is find the money to get us there so we can pass off the WAYK system to my ready and waiting community.  I feel that the group was impressed over the process and I think surprised at how much Sky could wield in the language.  On a side note Sky was told by the elder that he had good pronunciation!  Made my day AND proves even more that the WAYK system works.

-April

Under About the Game, you can find a bite sized explanation of this system starting with What is WAYK? Then, read a more detailed overview of the game in The Big Picture, which will help guide you towards understanding an aaaaamazing new page created by David called simply: Techniques.  David has created a detailed technique map that will help guide players through the first stages of play and help you visualize the WAYK process of learning.  Be sure to scroll over each box for a brief explanation of these techniques.

There is also a new Services page that outlines what is possible with a team of experienced WAYK players coming into a community.  From a One-Hour Demonstration to a One-Year Revitalization program, there are plenty of realistic and accessible options for jumpstarting and assisting a living language community

Another new feature is the Community portion of the site.  We’ve added a Player Bios page with the idea in mind to add any and all players that are interested in sharing their story, and their experience with this game.  Our Partners page is dedicated to those organizations that we’d like to support for their ongoing efforts in language and community revitalization.  The WAYK Facebook page and Players Map have been added under this section also.

Those are the main new features added to the site.  Also, if any of you have a recurring WAYK event that you’d like us to include on the site, please email me and we’ll help spread the word.

The Bunker: basement bucket brigades.

62 minutes and 37 seconds.

[direct download]

Recorded July 25th, 2011

Our discussion over dinner involves accents, talk of facilitation issues and how important it is to have a strong healthy community in order for a language to survive.  We question which comes first; the language hunter, or the language teacher.  This question goes hand in hand with, are we saving a language or building a community?  A new TQ is born, the Hunting license, and we talk about how the kids check out during talks and together we brainstorm an alternative to get messages across without the discussions feeling like lectures.

7:16 – Are we saving a language or are we saving a community?

April questions Evan what the group needs to be focusing on, language or community.  Sky follows with, “what comes first, the language hunter or language teacher?”

10:16 – TQ: Teach it Off

Evan shares his vision of how the teaching process should work.

12:06 – Language Hunter vs. Teacher

Sky answers the question of are whether we are training teachers or hunters.

15:06 – Facilitation

Discussion turns back to the idea of pulling the kids into the facilitation part of this program.  April shares her feelings on her disappointment for not having the ORID happen because the kids are having a conflict and it’s not being resolved.  If they were helping with the facilitation they could help with ideas on resolving the issues.

19:38 -Panda Analogy

David Edwards compares saving a dying language to trying to save a dying Panda.

23:03 – Dealing with the conflict

Evan and April talk about how important it is to work out the conflict and get the community/family back on track.  The plan get the kids refocused is eluded too which includes asking them “Why are you here?” and “What are you going to do today to help accelerate the learning of Numu?”

24:10 – Alternative to Lectures

Recognizing that the kids aren’t trained adults who can sit through three hour classes and so we need to devise a plan to get across important information without it feeling like a lecture.

26:40 – Laboratory

April brings up the idea of having clipboards and pencils to observe the hunts.  David discusses what he needs to do during the TQ Sportscaster.

28:11 – Pairing WAYK and Healthy Native Community Fellowship tools

April discusses her idea of combining buckets and the facilitation tool Boldest Idea.

31:04 – Finalized Laboratory Plan

35:45 – Hunting

Sky brings up the point that we are having all the kids learn how to hunt and while some of them are good at it, for others it’s the other way around.  The discussion turns to Evan explaining that the game shifts when someone is hunting and pushing the language.

39:00- TQ: Grandma Hunting License

David is shocked to learn that he is now Chuck Norris.  As Chuck Norris, David would help guide the hunting.  This leads to the contract of the TQ Grandma Hunting License.

47:10 – Next Time

Evan shares what he would do the next time he runs a program in dealing with hunting nouns.  Evan shares how much mileage he was able to get from using a huge glass at the Latin Language Conference.  Realizing that jumping from hunting nouns to hunting glue words was a TQ Sorry Charlie for the kids.

53:26 – Finding the Structure in Languages

David shares that he and Evan know that the goal of hunting is to find the structure in language but the kids don’t know what that means.

55:30 – Extreme Barter!!

David shares his idea of having a huge want, have, give, take, exchange which leads to the Extreme Barter plan.

71 minutes and 56 seconds.

[direct download]

Recorded July 22nd, 2011

In this episode, we introduce the “Where Are Your Keys?” Summer Institute of Play at the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs Indian Reservation, and the interns: April Charlo, David Edwards, and Sky Hopinka. We discuss some of our experiences so far using WAYK with the Numu language, working with seven Warm Springs high school students and working with each other.

5:51 – Extreme Haga

David tells the story of how Warm Springs student Courtney Fasthorse invented a game inspired by her favorite ride.

7:11 – Knives in the Sky

Students invented another game of where they lay on their backs to learn Numu.  Discussion shifts to how learning while laying down was an accelerator.  April was worried that lying on the ground wasn’t WAYK approved.  Evan explains that WAYK promotes anything that accelerates learning languages.

21:00 -TQ: Sportscaster

David defines the new technique and how it was used that day.

21: 45 -TQ: I’m not a Genius, I’m a veteran

Evan and David discuss the invention of the new technique that helps people who feel like language acquisition is beyond their reach.

22:19 – TQ: Extreme TPR/Be Here Now

Sky discusses how using these techniques help save fairies

25:20 – Healthy Native Community Fellowship Tools

Evan discusses how April’s knowledge of the tools helped make an impact on the group.

31:07 – TQ: Party Boat

Evan discusses how he is beginning to notice that people around us want to get involved in what we are doing.

35:18 – Building a Community

April discusses Evan being supportive of her incorporating the Fellowship tools to build a community/family with the group, not just with the students but with the adults in the house.

39:46 – Culture Shock

David shares his experience of working on the Warm Springs Reservation and how he didn’t expect to have culture shock.

45:18 – Needs for next year

Evan shares his thoughts on how this month has affected him and how much he has learned for what could be bigger and better for next year.

52:58 – Questions: What changes have you seen in the students? What stands out the most in this system?

The group answers the questions in the order of Sky, David, Evan and April.

101: 16 – TQ: Wingman

While Evan answers the questions, he and David discuss how the students are confidently using technique Wingman.

107:19 Fellowship Tool: Group Agreements

April shares how the students reacted to the incorporation of the tool.

This summer the WAYK interns and I have been living and breathing “Where Are Your Keys”.  We have been facilitating an 8 week Numu (Northern Paiute) language teacher training on the Warm Springs Reservation in Oregon.

Working in partnership with the Warm Springs Language Department, the Warm Springs WED (youth work force development) program, the Warm Springs Community Action Team, and the Central Oregon non-profit Partnership to end Poverty, we are creating 7 high-school-aged teachers.  These young teachers are learning techniques, hunting language, building “rides”, and teaching other community members how to learn and teach the Numu language.

The Summer Institute of Play 2011 has been head quartered in Madras Oregon just south of Warm Springs.  The house was rented and furnished in true WAYK “OBVIOUSLY!” style.  You can think of it as Amish Kindergarten… sparse, but clear, bright, solid colored objects.

Each of the 3 interns has their own color coded room: Red, Green and Black.  Each room came with corresponding colored sheets, blankets, towels, curtains, desk lamps, laundry basket, clothes hangers and stapler.  The kitchen was populated with color coded dishware to clearly coincide with the room color.   The set-up for conversations is perfect: “You stole my red bowl!”

The shared living room and bathroom are a rainbow of obvious colors.

Now let’s meet the interns:

In the Red Room,

April Charlo is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, located on the Flathead reservation near Missoula, Montana.  April’s commitment to restoring her tribal language motivated her to pursue a master’s degree in Education Leadership from the University of Montana.  April intends to utilize her knowledge and experience to aid in the recovery and revitalization of Native Languages.

After graduating, April was introduced to Evan Gardner and the “Where Are You Keys?” concept.  After only one short demonstration of “Where Are Your Keys?”, she signed up for the Summer Institute of Play internship.  April has also recently graduated from the Healthy Native Communities Fellowship and has been experimenting with combining her new facilitation and community building skills with her understanding of working with Native youth.  April sees the massive potential of incorporating community building methods into the “Where Are You Keys?” language learning techniques.

In the Green Room,

David Edwards is an undergraduate student at Stanford University, working on an interdisciplinary major between the computer science, psychology, linguistics, and philosophy departments. He got interested in languages in middle school when he tried inventing one for fun; that led him to research other world languages, which fostered an interest in language revitalization and Native North American languages in particular. He discovered “Where Are Your Keys?” in March of 2010 and quickly became addicted to “language hunting,” sharing the system with friends in classrooms and workshops in California, Colorado, and Mongolia. Just recently he returned from a study abroad program in China and is looking forward to further expanding his cultural horizons while helping to strengthen the languages of the Warm Springs community.

In the black room,

Sky Hopinka is of the Hochunk Nation and Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians.  He has been interning with Evan and “Where Are Your Keys?” since February, 2011, and learning Chinuk Wawa, which he will apply to his university foreign language requirement.  Sky is graduating in the fall from Portland State University with a BA in English and minor in film studies.  Currently, he is interning with the “Where Are Your Keys?” Summer Institute of Play through the Indigenous Nations Studies department (formerly Native American Studies) at PSU.  After graduating, he plans to work in filmmaking and with WAYK in learning and teaching the Hochunk and Luiseno languages.

This summer has been a fantastic experience and experiment in rapid community language revitalization.  We have shared so many techniques of accelerated learning between the students, interns, and language department staff.  We hope future Institutes will be even more successful as we share ideas with future interns.  If you are interested in participating as an intern please contact WAYK at evan@whereareyourkeys.org.

Keep a look out for the podcast where we discuss our successes and challenges of language revitalization and community revitalization.

Even small gatherings deserve a food table - a spread from a recent WAYK event.

In any fluency hunting environment, whether leading a game, or setting-up for a one on one with a fluent fool, you can acknowledge the human need for nutrition and comfort by feeding your mind.

“Have you eaten?” – a traditional Mayan greeting, traditional Chinese greeting.

Feeding Your Mind [formerly "do food"] is a hallowed human activity, a social lubricant, a biological requirement. Having food present humanizes spaces and attracts attendees to events (“there’ll be food there!”); it allows players to relax, to stay longer and more comfortably. Like its parent technique, Warm/Fed/Rested/Safe/Willing, it is easy to agree with while also easy to neglect. The most powerful techniques are the ones we all know, but don’t use – and everyone knows that feeding your mind works.

Feeding your mind doesn’t stop there however; for an accelerated learning environment, the bar is raised a bit higher than just providing any kind of food. Across the vast landscape of meetings and events is an epidemic of low nutrition foods: muffins, pastries, doughnuts, croissants, cookies, the apparent staples of organizational life, in spite of their well-known soporific effects. Breads, pastas, and sugars slow down mental processes (the infamous “food coma”) and divert physical attention.

After thousands of hours of game play, we’ve come to recognize certain foods as more “clean-burning”, filling stomachs without slowing minds, primarily meat, vegetables, fruits, and nuts. There is no one right answer to the problem of providing healthy food (watch out for players’ food allergies and personal or religious restrictions), but paying attention and experimenting with food that maintains the clearest and most supported mental state is a critical element of creating the set-up for accelerated learning and play.

In addition, remember to include drinks so the players can hydrate themselves. This includes options such as coffee and tea. Many games have been sabotaged because the coffee drinkers did not have their coffee fix! Be realistic and provide what players will need in order to play at their fullest ability.

Introducing the technique in language acquisition
We usually introduce this technique later, after players have led enough games that they are approaching becoming apprentices for running larger events.

Applying the technique in language acquisition

• Lunatic Fringe/the Meadow – place a food table in an outer fringe position, so that players can use it as an excuse to wander about the room and refresh themselves even if they don’t eat anything. Feed your mind is like another Meadow, another way of changing pace and scene before returning to play.

But what about…?
New game leaders may question the relevance of feeding your mind…they may seem skeptical that the extra work that feeding your mind requires is really worth the impact it may have on the learning environment. We run into this objection enough that it may simply be part of modern culture that many people have not made the connection between nutrition and an awake, alert mind – hosting traditions, such as providing a food spread for gatherings, are on the wane and part of an older generation’s culture. The only way that we have found to address this objection is to invoke tq Rules of the Game – master each technique before looking to see how to improve or eliminate them to speed up the game. After mastering this technique, players then tend to have seen enough positive results for themselves, over a period of time, that they no longer need explanations or convincing.

Claude Duhamel (on right).

Join us at WAYK French Camp, in Quebec, for seven days of high-energy fun, music, campfires, good food, and accelerated French language learning on the farm with the “Where Are Your Keys?” learning game design system.

For this event, we will be hosted on Claude Duhamel’s farm-land in Ulverton, Quebec, having conversations with local French speakers.

Register now!

Two of our interns: Sky Hopinka (Hochunk) on left, Norah Zaharakis (Greek) on right.

We’re now filling intern positions at WAYK; we rely on these volunteer interns to help us carry WAYK games deeper into the community, and develop the WAYK system further. Thanks to all our interns: David Edwards (a student at Stanford, helping with our Numu/Paiute language program this summer), Sky Hopinka (Hochunk and a student at PSU, helping with video), Norah Zaharakis (Greek, helping us further explore the connection between theater games and WAYK), and Ariel Margulies (Jewish, helping us develop our Yiddish language program).

Would you like to revitalize your heritage language? Become a language hunter? Help other communities revitalize their languages? Please contact us for more information on becoming an intern at WAYK: info@whereareyourkeys.org.

How do you apply WAYK techniques to building a video curriculum?

As you know, WAYK is a design system for accelerating and improving the learning in any environment. So then how do you apply techniques obviously!, set-up, limit, and so on, to video?

Video presents certain challenges – the biggest is the loss of the in-person TPR (total physical response) environment. However, all the other techniques are still in play. How much can we engage the viewer, and include them in a conversation (tq fluency, everybody plays, same conversation)? How much can we apply my turn/your turn?

For us at WAYK, we’ve also been handicapped by the limitations of our technical video know-how. If you’ve been on this ride with us for a while, you’re aware of the infamous audio problems in our early videos, the confusing (via video) set-ups, and so on.

Recently we’ve had the chance to partner with videographers more skilled than us (fluent fools at last!), and so in that partnership we’ve been developing an “ideal” format that we’re modeling for you to copy-cat.

To be perfectly clear: our goal is to develop a same conversation for how language videos are made, a near-universal format so that anyone can experience accelerated learning for any heritage language video on youtube or other video hosting sites.

For video there will always be learning decelerators in play (such as the lack of TPR), but the ability to access them anywhere via the internet brings a massive amount of acceleration to learning that more than makes up for the challenges.

Compare the Chinook Jargon video at the top of this post to this video of Irish:

Yikes! Note the difference. Both videos have some important techniques applied to the video format; both have obviously! close-ups of the props in play, for example. However, the visual field for the Irish video is extremely cluttered. The Irish video is twice as long as the Chinook video. There are multiple players, but no one is pulling you (the viewer) through it. It has a lengthy intro, so you’ll need to edit it to be shorter if you want to put it on a loop and listen/watch until you’ve got it (or have it running over and over in the background). Also, one of the objects on the table is almost impossible to see (the penny owned by Patrick).

The Chinook Jargon video is ready to go; it has been stripped of an intro and outtro (application of limit) making it perfect for looping, the visual field is completely focused on play, with tq bluescreen/greenscreen applied to the environment. Now we’re talking! Keep in mind, the Chinook Jargon videos were filmed in an empty classroom at the Portland State University Native American Student and Community Center – not a specialized studio. It doesn’t take much to limit the set-up!

We encourage you to copy-cat along with the rest of these Chinook Jargon videos and experience the improved format, while thinking, “what other techniques can I apply to improve this?” One question we still have is, “how many (and which) techniques should we introduce at the beginning of each videos? How should we vary that?” For example, I mark bite-sized pieces at the beginning of each of these videos, and for the first one, also mention copy-cat.

Here’s the rest of the videos, up to want/have/give/take, I hope you enjoy them. One big opportunity for improving these videos is to have two players in the video, so that they can more obviously! model the goal conversation for the viewer-player. However, sometimes you only have one speaker who can put together a game like this for video – so these provide a good example of dealing with the toughest situation.

Chinuk Wawa 2
Chinuk Wawa 3
Chinuk Wawa 4
Chinuk Wawa 5

Recently, I watched a video of speaker/author Stephen Covey talking about the power of what he called the “Indian talking stick”.

By definition, self-sufficient indigenous communities have mastered creating and maintaining the accelerated learning environment tuned to their place and time. This is what makes them self-sufficient – everything that the community needs, the diverse array of tools, materials, skills, are learned and relearned every generation, on a very small scale. If you’re paying attention, this should strike you as miraculous! Such a variety of cross-training and specialization on the village scale is remarkable. So it makes sense that such communities could develop a robust, effective conversational process that works even when relations are strained.

When I see something that works, I immediately start applying my “fluency hunter’s eye” to it: what are the techniques that make up that approach (or tool)? What “rules of the game” have they applied to generate that particular accelerated learning environment? Doing this keeps my skills sharp and helps me to understand and borrow insightful new (or old!) techniques. WAYK isn’t a system of brand-new methods, it’s a system for using anything that works. Things that work have often been around for a while – a long while!

The talking stick can be seen as the layering of three techniques: obviously!, my turn/your turn, and total physical response.

All application of technique is a response to a specific context, with particular people. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, but only addressing the situation at hand.

1. Obviously!: Perhaps you’re in a difficult conversation, where the intensity of emotions and other factors are making it difficult to have a safe converation. Or perhaps you’re dissatisfied with a superficial exchange, and you want to make it richer. You need something that will make you obviously! aware of what to say, and how to say it.

2. My Turn/Your Turn: You employ the “traffic cop” of all game play, by trading turns in the conversation, using verbal and gestural language to indicate whose turn it is. But perhaps this still isn’t obviously! enough – you’re still getting mixed up due to emotions, or the conversation still doesn’t feel rich enough. So…

3. Total Physical Response/TPR: by passing a physical object back and forth, the participants in the conversation have a whole-body sense of the give-and-take of a healthy conversation. There is no ambiguity or guessing as to what to do, when.

Now, there’s one or two more elements to the “talking-stick” conversational process that Stephen Covey is speaking of, but that’s a good start for understanding how and why you apply techniques to improve the learning, communication, and performance environment. It really is that simple – with this approach you can generate all kinds of tools and games that enrich and accelerate whatever situation you find yourself in.

So get out there and play with your “fluency hunter’s eye”!

Our merry band of Boston-area language hunters.

In the grassroots spirit of WAYK, we held our workshop hosted at a private residence of one of the participants. For language communities, our first recommendation is to do just that; language and community begins at home! There’s nothing like playing WAYK in someone’s living room to remind us of that.

Willem (me) ran the workshop, and I wanted to try a new experiment. As my skill increases as a language hunter, I find that I need to keep upping the scale and challenge of my experimentation to “stay in the zone”: neither overwhelmed (sorry, charlie!), nor bored (heaven forfend such a thing!). This is an ongoing obligation of every player – if you don’t apply technique to keeping the “flow” state, you’ll find yourself losing the spirit of play. It takes work to to make things effortless!

My major experiment was to pick a new language, present in the group, to hunt. We had a choice of Hindi and Tamil. According to tq A Few of My Favorite Things and Same Conversation, I chose Hindi, because I have players at home hungry to hunt just that!

So the attendees got to witness an experienced language hunter at his most awkward and foolish, mumble-ing his way through the first steps of a totally new language. This allowed us to form a tq Bucket Brigade almost immediately as the various learning speeds differentiated out into different levels, after lunch on the first day.

5-year-old Shreya mugging for the camera. She played a critical role, pulling players through Hindi, though she was just learning it herself - no joke!

The hunt was such a success, I plan to do this from now on: pick an available language, and form the bucket brigade accordingly. If I can continue working languages I have at a low proficiency and pull them up to Superior, so much the better!

One of the attendees, Alex, found himself somewhat under-challenged; it manifested at first by a frustration over not understanding “the meaning” of what he was saying, but strangely he didn’t want to kill fairies – he wanted to keep playing but something was missing, something else was going on. It took him a while to realize that he had moved out of flow, in the direction of “bored”.

The ever-present carb-free food table. We do indulge the coffee habit.

This happens periodically, usually with younger, whip-crack smart players, this “falling out of flow” can happen fast because they catch on to the techniques in spurts (almost like a delayed reaction). We collaborated on a solution that would help both our attendee Alex, and others in this same situation, and we now have a new technique for language hunters with his same temperament. TQ “More, Faster!” This means just what it sounds – when Alex (and players like him) experiences a frustration over “not knowing what I’m saying”, the technique to throw is to speed up the flow of bite-sized pieces, or make them larger bites. “More, Faster!” The player then doesn’t have time to worry about “what it means”.

There was one other, major new insight that I received as a culmination from both Agile Games and the Boston WAYK workshop. I’m going to save that for its own blog post, so stay tuned!

Here’s some of the feedback from the workshop:

Rekha, Agilist and mother of 5-year-old Shreya:

A very interesting workshop. I wish I had encountered this when I was a little girl. Better late than never. The technique is very simple to use and it was fascinating to see how much Hindi was covered using simple WAYK techniques. My quest is to see how I can use these techniques at my work to learn new technology. Willem is a wonderful teacher. I had given up the hope that my daughter will ever be multilingual. WAYK technique makes me hopeful – that I can teach my daughter my native language [Tamil] in a playful, un-intimidating way. Thank you Willem and Evan for putting so much thought and effort to develop this simple, easy to use technique.

Shreya:

I love learning and my mom taught me hindi.

Alex Baranosky, Agilist:

-Use of techniques as the solution is much better than the usual “try harder” response.
-Language fluency = being the language
-Hunter can hunt the core structure of a language and has the tools to fill in the details.
-Techniques are for accelerated learning, not just languages!

Nancy Van Shooenderwort, Agile Coach:

I’m usually a big “note-taker” but this workshop helped me see that the WAYK methods are only slowed down by doing that – it really is not necessary. For Agile practitioners, I believe time will show that WAYK’s dynamics are as “game-changing” for us as Architecture’s “patterns” concept was over 10 years ago.

Doug Ross, Agile Coach:

I am afraid of NOT having you around! The workshop  unlocked my fear of learning language. I now (finally) have techniques and a game I can use to pull language to hunt fluency! Thank you so much Willem for sharing this gift.

Michael De La Maza, Agile Coach:

WAYK techniques have the potential to greatly improve workplace communication. I was surprised by how quickly and easily and painlessly I learned the techniques. My hope is that I will be able to share them with agile teams.

We had a diverse crowd at our April 1-3 workshop in the Seattle area. Some attendees came with fluency, wanting to learn more how to teach – Scots Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, Lushootseed, Latin. Others just came hungry to learn how to learn. And yet others, experienced WAYK players, came to keep pushing their play proficiency up the scale, getting closer to running weekend events themselves, without the need for help from Evan or Willem (me).

This is our goal, and the goal of the WAYK play community – to spread the ability to self-sufficiently maintain the vitality of languages, to diffuse the skill of language hunting far and wide. We (Evan and I) want to make ourselves obsolete as “gurus”, to become just two more experienced players in a thriving community of conversational play and accelerated learning.

We’re always taking player input and improving the WAYK system. WAYK is not one method, but a system for employing anything that works; and we’re constantly generating and receiving new evidence and information concerning “what works”.

In this workshop, I wanted to continue to accelerate the pace at which attendees can bring home applicable language hunting skills. To this end, we started applying technique “Último” almost right away, the idea that there is a series of games in the at different levels that players can set-up and move through. These games are most effective if they happen together in the same space – rather than splitting folks into separate classrooms. The group consensus was that “Último” was a misleading name, and we all rechristened it “Bucket Brigade”. I was very impressed! A perfect technique name; almost no explanation is required, illuminating the concept of working together moving language from a fluent speaker to the rest of the community without hierarchy or ego.

For this workshop we used Chinook Jargon (Chinuk Wawa), the trade creole of the Pacific Northwest, along with PSE (Pidgin Signed English), as a target language to demonstrate the WAYK system. Chinook Jargon is a language with a lot of rich history, with a core of Chinook language (from the Columbia River area) wrapped in French, English, Norwegian, Nootka, and more.

Jay, wisely hydrating.

This meant that when we played “Tea with Grandpa”, I needed an assistant. In the past Evan and I have hosted workshops as a pair; we recently decided to start doing separate workshops so that we can fill the tq Comedy Duo gap with a WAYK apprentice who is climbing the proficiency scale and getting close to running their own workshop. We hope to see this accelerate the pace of new players becoming self-sufficient WAYK language hunters. For Redmond, Jay Bazuzi stepped in to fill the gap.

While I sat with the language hunters at the “Tea with Grandpa” table, Jay managed the rest of the workshop – the flow of players, tq no-grief debriefs, and so on. He’s been to several previous workshops, runs his own local language games and “Tea with Grandpa” language hunts, so he was well prepared to start turning his play up a notch. This made it possible for me to focus on being the best Grandpa possible – playing the fluent fool, enjoying conversation with the players, helping them with the language (but not too much), encouraging them by example to apply their techniques of set-up, limit, obviously!, and so on.

Diana and Anjali hunting language from Grandpa (played by Willem).

“Tea with Grandpa” was such a rich, fun experience for us all, that it has made me consider again how central it is to learning WAYK. If you don’t have a fluent fool for your language night, encouraging the most fluent speaker to “play” that role really enriches the game and the accelerated learning.

I plan to emphasize this role play even more at our language nights and events. It was surprising how earnestly players wanted to hunt language from Grandpa, and how much respect and care Grandpa received as the fluent speaker. So much of language hunting is courtship of your fluent speaker, and showing them sincere care and consideration, enriching the human relationship, rather than just seeing them as an object of your hunt or intellectual pursuit of the language.

An almost carb-free breakfast spread.

Our catering partners, Harmony and Emily, did an excellent job of supporting one of the most difficult elements of WAYK – the food! Many folks are aware of the impact that carb-heavy foods can have on their mental process – resulting in the infamous “food coma”! Vital to a WAYK workshop is good food, vegetables, fruit, protein, and so on. We had several workshop participants remark on how suprised they were what a difference the food made. Do Food is a very important technique! The usual muffins and pastries you see out at workshops are an insidious element in generating fatigue and decelerating the group process. So thanks to the catering team of Harmony and Emily for the 3 days of great breakfasts and lunches.

Virginia, Michele, and Natosha, Lushootseed teachers from Tulalip, WA

We shot video of helping Emily, a Scots Gaelic speaker and instructor, with her Scots Gaelic WAYK game, and also of the Lushootseed instructors, Michele, Natosha, and Virginia, setting up their game for when they returned to the classroom. Expect to see that in the next few weeks.

Until then – good hunting!

For the first few days, I’ll be at Agile Games 2011, April 14th-16th.

From the 17th-21st I’m available to do talks and demos on “Where Are Your Keys?” and the Fluency Hunting Model of accelerated learning. If you’d like to invite me to do a talk or demo, contact me ASAP: info@whereareyourkeys.org.

Then on the 22nd-24th I’ll run a three day Boston-area WAYK weekend workshop. I don’t know when WAYK will be coming back to the Boston area, so I hope any nearby East Coast players (or wannabe players!) take advantage of this opportunity.

If you’re interested in having one, they cost $20 plus $5 shipping/handling (anywhere in the world!). Each one will be signed by Evan Gardner and Willem Larsen. We accept paypal (info@whereareyourkeys.org) and mailed checks. Address checks to:

“Where Are Your Keys?”, LLC
4846 NE 9th Ave
Portland, OR 97211

As I mentioned, there is a limited run of these books – snap them up while you have the chance. We hope to create a 2nd edition later in the year or early next year.

The founders of Lonely Planet, Tony and Maureen.

From Lonely Planet’s website (maker of guidebooks, phrasebooks, and other media):

‘Responsible travel’ means assessing our impact on the environment and local cultures and economies – and acting to make that impact as positive as possible. We’re including more information in our guidebooks and on this website on how you can personally travel more responsibly.

In the WAYK community, we think a lot about this – the relationship between guest and host, traveler and resident, learner and fluent speaker of an endangered language.

Many dying languages, and struggling communities, are very well documented, in writing, photographs, and video, and yet if help stops there it has done them little good – without inter-generational transmission, without community esteem for the language (and culture), without retaining traditional identity and sense of place in the face of colonizing forces and global corporate culture – their decline, slow for some, rapid for others, continues.

How do we continue to change the relationship between traveling guest and host community, so that visitors to communities who are struggling economically, culturally, and linguistically, make greater and greater positive impacts as the years pass?

In the work of endangered language revitalization, we had to solve this early on. We needed an answer. Learning an endangered language for your own benefit, without contributing to the language community, can speed its decline. Fluent speakers’ time spent interacting with you, rather than invested community members, is wasted, unless you can give back and support the vitalization of conversational life. This means every new learner must also immediately become a new teacher, able to “teach-off” to others what they know. In addressing this issue, a new kind of language learner emerged, the language hunter, a natural result of applying all these understandings, techniques, and accelerated language learning/teaching skills through play.

A language hunter is a person skilled enough in WAYK game play that they can learn (and teach) any language through casual conversations with fluent speakers and other learners. The more skill, the greater the community-wide impact. A language hunter doesn’t just “take” language, they vitalize it, with play and conversation, including as many people in on the fun as possible.

This means as language hunters travel the world, not only can they offer the courtesy of addressing hosts in the local language due to their accelerated ability to learn, but for all languages, both struggling and successful, they contribute to the overall vitality of the speech community due to how they interact with other speakers.

We’ve seen the spirit of the WAYK game, and language hunting, completely rewire negative attitudes toward the target language, since now the relationship has become about play with each other and a respectful, engaged visitor. Then, due to the techniques of accelerated learning and rapid success, the infectiousness of fun and conversation take over. Children and teens pick up the game and begin to play with each other. Adults see and remember the joy of their language, and its connection to family and home.

For us, this is true responsible travel – not just an economic boost, but the vitalization of personal relationships, respect for other cultures and languages, and a sharing of grassroots ways for making the world a better place.

WAYK staff Evan Gardner, Willem Larsen, and others, will be playing four days of WAYK at the Life (“Learning in Freedom Everyday”) Unschooling/Homeschooling conference in the Portland area.

http://lifeisgoodconference.com

Registration is only $60 for adults and $40 for children over 3, for 4 days. WAYK will staff an exhibitor booth with a game table from 9am to 4pm each day. If you do the numbers on this you could basically get a four day WAYK workshop for dirt cheap!

So come on down and play – bring a fluent fool you’ve always wanted to hunt, bring a friend you’ve always wanted to play with, bring your family, and join the fun as we play through all four days.

Register here.

Meaning is a complete, whole-body experience, not an intellectual one.

Discovery, revelation, insight, the “Eureka!” moments of our lives are most richly felt, and most deeply absorbed, when they are gifts we give ourselves.

In WAYK language acquisition, there are some things we talk a lot about, and there are other things we never even mention. The techniques, the “rules of the game”, setting-up games and debriefing how they went – these are constantly on our lips and under discussion. But the meaning of the language in which we play is left completely alone, and may almost seem irrelevant to play.

There is nothing so satisfying as seeing a player grasp the meaning of an interaction on a deep, personal, internal level (or being that player yourself). This is often accompanied by giggling, “a-ha!” looks of surprise, or other emotional responses, further strengthening the mnemonic hold the player has on what they just absorbed. In accelerated learning, these personal, emotional experiences are worth their weight in gold, and impossible to fabricate or coerce.

Introducing the technique in language acquisition
We introduce this just in time for translation requests, or general questions like “what does the language we’re using mean?”
Short: “Technique: Riddle-me-this. Experiencing the meaning of the language is a gift you get to give yourself – we won’t interfere or take that away from you. Besides, this isn’t a learning game. You’ll riddle-me-this what everything means at your own pace. Take all the time you need.”

Applying the technique to language acquisition
Avoid, as much as possible, any explanations of structure, meaning, or grammar. Any time a player requests such explanations, shrug your shoulders and mark riddle-me-this. Remember, meaning is something that you experience, not something you can explain. Explanations just give the illusion of answering the search for meaning – and they slow down what needs to happen anyway, which is a visceral experience of “what it means”.

But what about…?
Sometimes new players will express a strong opinion that they learn by understanding “why” things mean what they mean, or through translations. This is simply not the way humans acquire fluency, though it is absolutely one way humans learn “about” things. Though a player may sincerely want an explanation for their own comfort, and though we offer many techniques for creating the safest, most comfortable environment possible, we encourage you to not satisfy player requests for explanations.

How you run the game, is modeling for your players, and therefore how you’re asking them to run the game. Explanations breed explanations. To transmit the culture of play as quickly as possible, it’s best to start right away by jumping directly into play and staying there.

According to you go first, we are always modeling behavior – which means that our behavior is always being observed. Children, peers, elders, other animals, they’re always watching us. Humans have mirror neurons, structures in the brain that intrinsically cause us to personally experience that which we see another experiencing, and these neurons predispose us to learning from other humans and animals across a distance.

If we know this, we can design our play environment to support this ongoing observational learning that happens anyway, regardless of our intentions. This is key to involving children; no-pressure modeling, allowing them to absorb at their own pace and in their own way on the sidelines. For ages as young as early teens in the lunatic fringe, with their growing ability for mature “meta-” thinking, we can also give additional tools to accelerate their learning.

Copy-cat, Angel on your Shoulder, Sorry Charlie, with these techniques and many more, mature players can play an active role in skill diffusion and acquisition. Rather than just being an audience, the lunatic fringe can then become an asset, a community-wide safety net supporting and guiding other players.

If you’re playing a WAYK table game, the core group of players sitting around the table (“with their knees touching the table”) is called the inner circle, and any players behind them are the lunatic fringe. Anyone in an engaged, supportive lunatic fringe is called an angel on your shoulder.

Introducing the technique in language acquisition
Short: “Technique: Lunatic Fringe. Everyone outside the inner circle is in the lunatic fringe. Your only duty is to copy-cat what is going on in the inner circle. By doing so, you become angels on our shoulders, who will pull us through it.”

Applying the technique in language acquisition
The lunatic fringe can form in many ways. They can be far away sitting in the Meadow, playing in the corner appearing to ignore the game play, getting food, or sitting right behind the players in the inner circle, pulling them through it.

In the beginning, it can take some reminders to fully engage a close-in lunatic fringe. TQ Look at your Players, Look at your Angels is one we use often to remind the lunatic fringe to wake up and start pulling the inner circle through it. This technique essentially consists of saying, “technique: look at your players, look at your angels. Angels, find your players, give ‘em a wink that you’ll be there for them and pull ‘em through it. Players, find your Angels, point at them and say ‘remember to pull me through it!’”

But what about…?
Sometimes after playing for a while your lunatic fringe will have their hands in their laps, and be more of an audience than a group of angels. This tells you that they are full. Remind them to go rest up in the Meadow, get food, hit the bathroom, get whatever they need, and join back in just as soon as they feel ready.

Sometimes members of the lunatic fringe will not engage play by copy-catting or being angels, but instead will want translations (risking killing fairies) or ask distracting questions. For the most part, discourage distractions and non-player questions through limit (“limit – that’s a great question – but for later”) and offering up the Meadow (“if you’re in the lunatic fringe, but don’t have enough energy to angel, consider resting in the Meadow“).

For any players that you think “should” be playing or participating, we can’t say this enough: the most accelerated learning is contingent on sincere, complete consent. You can’t force players to learn quickly over the short-term without building long-term resentment that will eventually undermine all your work to build a learning community.

This is why the lunatic fringe is so important, and why we acknowledge so many manifestations of the fringe. We truly want players to call full right when they need to, and we truly want them to rest in the Meadow as long as they  need, until they are ready to rejoin play. We can’t stress this enough. Accelerated learning is founded on consenting, happy players.

Some players are predisposed to being in the lunatic fringe. Young children are a good example of this. Sometime inner circle players will have children in their laps as they play, but for the most part, children learn best by orbiting around play in the lunatic fringe, combining it with their own play that may have nothing to do with the language you’re playing in.