For those of you who don’t know me (hello) I work in Italy teaching English as a foreign language and now that I’m good enough at the basics that I can play with the form a bit, I’ve started introducing skeptical themes into my lessons. Sometimes the material demands it, for example English File by Oxford University Press sets up the ganzfeld as a geniune paranormal event on one page, and then debunks it on the following page.
I’ve used the Marie Celeste as a way to teach vocabulary and some problem solving and that was quite successful. Sometimes I use cold reading techniques to influence what my students do. Reading out an incorrect sentence in a subtly different way will draw them towards this error, even if (strictly speaking) it’s above their ability as a student.
But other times I can use it as a game to kill fifteen minutes at the end of a lesson. For example, getting people to draw something simple, while I do the same, usually results in someone drawing a house so I get a nice hit. Asking them to draw two geometric shapes, one inside the other, always has people drawing a triangle inside a circle, so that’s another nice hit. Of course, I always explain to them how easy these tricks are, especially with “write a two-digit number in which both digits are odd, and both are differentâ€. I write 37, and normally get several people who wrote 37 or 35, which seems impressive so I need to remind them that most people write 35 or 37.
So now I have this astrology chart from www.astrology-and-science.com (and if you don’t know this site, bookmark it now: it’s fantastic) from a mass murderer, comparing it to Michael Jackson. And I typed out the findings of this chart in a vague way (removing the MJ references), and I plan to give it to my best class either tonight or next week, to see what they think.
But I’m wondering if I should change the wording of some of the categories. For example, the first is that Jupiter is at mid-heaven and so indicates material success. For an Italian living through this economic recession, there’s no way they’ll say “yes, I am successfulâ€. Should I change it?
After all, an astrologer (pardon me while I spit on the ground) would change their reading according to what they expected of their audience. And since I have an audience who I know are not going through the best of times, financially, I should adjust my guesses accordingly. Shouldn’t I? (actually, I just changed it. I’ll let you know what happened, later)
By the way, if anyone else knows any other easy mentalist tricks I can use, send me a PM, since they seem to be very popular. I would try cold reading, but I think that talking to the dead in an English class would be in poor taste.
I’ve used the Marie Celeste as a way to teach vocabulary and some problem solving and that was quite successful. Sometimes I use cold reading techniques to influence what my students do. Reading out an incorrect sentence in a subtly different way will draw them towards this error, even if (strictly speaking) it’s above their ability as a student.
But other times I can use it as a game to kill fifteen minutes at the end of a lesson. For example, getting people to draw something simple, while I do the same, usually results in someone drawing a house so I get a nice hit. Asking them to draw two geometric shapes, one inside the other, always has people drawing a triangle inside a circle, so that’s another nice hit. Of course, I always explain to them how easy these tricks are, especially with “write a two-digit number in which both digits are odd, and both are differentâ€. I write 37, and normally get several people who wrote 37 or 35, which seems impressive so I need to remind them that most people write 35 or 37.
So now I have this astrology chart from www.astrology-and-science.com (and if you don’t know this site, bookmark it now: it’s fantastic) from a mass murderer, comparing it to Michael Jackson. And I typed out the findings of this chart in a vague way (removing the MJ references), and I plan to give it to my best class either tonight or next week, to see what they think.
But I’m wondering if I should change the wording of some of the categories. For example, the first is that Jupiter is at mid-heaven and so indicates material success. For an Italian living through this economic recession, there’s no way they’ll say “yes, I am successfulâ€. Should I change it?
After all, an astrologer (pardon me while I spit on the ground) would change their reading according to what they expected of their audience. And since I have an audience who I know are not going through the best of times, financially, I should adjust my guesses accordingly. Shouldn’t I? (actually, I just changed it. I’ll let you know what happened, later)
By the way, if anyone else knows any other easy mentalist tricks I can use, send me a PM, since they seem to be very popular. I would try cold reading, but I think that talking to the dead in an English class would be in poor taste.
