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A handy place to link to conferences that interest me

Since other intercultural trainers / language teachers may be interested in the same conferences I am, I thought I’d share my notes and links.

TESOL international submit by June the year before (June 2014 for the 2015 conference)

TESOL’s calendar – (focuses on immediately upcoming conferences for which the deadline for submissions has passed. Scroll down far enough and you may see something you can submit to)

IAICS 2014 – submit to the The International Association for Intercultural Communication Studies by Feb. 2014 for their July-August conference.

Tell me about yourself

Here’s one suggestion on how to answer one of the most common job interview questions, “Tell me about yourself.”

As one commenter rightly points out, however, the job candidate doesn’t come across as very interesting or likable. You need to have a bit of personality to have a chance at building a rapport with the interviewer.

Here, the advice is to tell the interviewer what’s in it for them, which should sound familiar to my students:

Here’s some more advice. The correct version starting at around 2:00 has the same issue, it’s focused on the job but it’s not real interesting or personal. She does at least say she’s excited about getting back to an educational setting so we learn something about her. She could be more personable though.

They suggest: relevant to the job, 1-2 rehearsed minutes, job objective, experience and skills.

I suggest, practiced but not memorized or rehearsed. Relevant to the job and personalized.

Note that tell me about yourself comes in many flavors, even why are you applying for this job is pretty similar. If you get several questions that mean “tell me about yourself,” you need to be careful not to get repetitive.

Does this coach deserve to get fired?

He warned his high school athletes not to run with shirts off but I guess the message didn’t get through. Article here. This might also lead to a discussion of high school sports and double standards: “Westwood High track coach Tom Davis was fired last week because one of his runners decided to whip off a shirt during training on a 75-degree day. This wasn’t a girl, by the way. It was a boy.”

What does it mean to be a man? Miller Lite commercials tell us something about US culture

An interesting discussion would be: “does it mean the same thing to be a man in your country?” This conversation topic has been mentioned before.

For example Americans often think Korean men are effeminate.Two of the reasons are skinny jeans and speedos. We see them in these Miller Lite commercials. Interestingly the name of the ad campaign is “Man Up”

Skinny Jeans (Kirk Zipfel)

European ManThong (Isabella Grace)

Heroes and Monsters: Understanding Live Action Role Playing Games

Interesting article here about a UW class on Liave Action Roleplaying. I’ve actually done this so it may be more interesting to me than to people who have no idea what it is, but it certainly doesn’t seem like an academic discipline.

I could be wrong though. The professor tries to spin it academically:

“My goal is to think about how games can be analytical and critical, how games can tell us about the world around us,” Chang said. “One goal of the class is to realize that live-action has a stigma. It’s about challenging those stereotypes and realizing how live-action games tells us about the different roles and personas we play in real life.”

And there is a reading list on the course page. Still the fact is they are playing a game once a week not unlike the LARP I’ve done (I assume).