In the wild summer of 1998 I conducted two seminars that left students hospitalized.
When me and my colleagues were doing well, we gave seminars on Mindset and Success. But when demoted, we gave “English for Beginners” to Germans. We didn’t like those, we preferred high-end seminars. This is how the company created competition between Teachers. If we under-performed, good stuff was given to others.
After a year of high-end seminars in prestigious companies across cities of Europe, they put as back on “English for Beginners” for several months. We thought we had left that behind long ago!
If you spend too much time teaching beginners, it becomes mind-numbing. For 6 days, 7 hours a week I’m saying stuff like “I’d like a cup of coffee please. HOW…MUCH…IS…IT? emphasizing each word while gesturing money with my fingers.
Getting back clueless looks.
Repeating, with a more exaggerated money gesture.
Sometimes I wanted to say “Oh cmon, for goodness sake people! Have you never heard the damn expression? Have you been living in a cave?”.
Instead I say “Can you repeat? Yeees. Noooo. HOW, not WHO. I just said HOW and you’re saying WHO. It’s a different word.
HOW MUCH. HOW MUCH. YEEEES. And now, HOW MUCH IS IT”.
– “But why not “What costs it?” (this is how you’d say it in German).
If you get the same damned question week by week, month by month, year by year, it drives you up the wall.
“Because it’s a different language you imbecile!” is what I wanted to say, but never did. I made a living off of being polite and gentle.
Germans learn English from school in early childhood. Any western German who didn’t know a single word of English as an adult was likely not that bright. They have a hard time learning anything at all. If you stay patient while teaching them, you magically reach sainthood.
I guess the events that transpired grew out of frustration of being demoted. It began innocently. My colleague Brian told me his group were going to play some softball after lunch. An opportunity for them to learn vocabulary in a fun way. His group against my group. None knew softball and we explained how it’s played – all in English to justify that we were outdoors playing instead of indoors working. The quickest way to learn a language is in FUN. If you’re having a good time, you’re learning.
Why do you think lovers learn so quickly?
The way schools teach stuff has nothing to do with real learning, more with dulling consciousness. Heavily indoctrinated people sometimes resisted playful learning. They enter our rooms and wonder why there are no desks or textbooks. Instead we used posters, flashcards, movie projectors, game boards, balls, comfortable recliners and large screen theaters to teach. The dumbest of the dumb say “This is not a proper learning room, where are the desks?”. In those days we often had to deal with dense consciousness.
The softball match started a tradition between me and my colleague. Each week we had a new group to coach, and each week we met after lunch for a match.
In the first two weeks it was all in good fun. We only did it twice. By the third week (each week a new group), we were becoming competitive. Students returned to the seminar room sweaty. Some went to their Hotel rooms to take a shower. We were spending more time outdoors than we should have. It began with ball play for 10 minutes but by now we were taking a chunk of 1 hour out of seminar time. Now we were playing every day. Gradually, preference turned from softball to soccer. Soccer is many times more intense. And instead of coaching our students from the sidelines, me and Brian began participating in the matches. Giving up the Director’s Chair to become actors in the scene was our first mistake.
Eager to win, I began spending a lot of time before lunch-break, drilling my group on strategy and tactics. I didn’t know it at first, but Brian was doing the same. Nothing occupied our attention more than the matches. In fact, I went home at night and drew up tactics for the next day.
Excessive focus builds a momentum. In Momentum, events take on a dynamic of their own. They move without your doing. This can be a useful and make you crazy successful, but if you never reign it in, it spirals out of control.
By the fifth week we were already inducting our new groups on Day 1, telling them of “legendary” matches of the past weeks. Our teams got names, we sometimes wore matching shirt-colors, created slogans, mascots and even songs to chant on the way to the field. The game became rougher and if women were present, they usually opted out to watch from the sidelines.
Chanting songs at the other team became a noise nuisance in the neighborhood. Suburbans complained. Their innocent afternoon tea was furiously disrupted by us hooligans marching down the road. Mom’s at playgrounds took cover of their children when these wild eyed ball players came shouting. Looking back I wonder how easily we’re fired up with passion over something insignificant. What if we were this adamant about something that really mattered? And what if we could channel our aggression for the good instead of destruction?
On week five things went south. Students returned to the seminar room with their striped $700 business slacks torn, their designer-shirts smeared in mud and grass and their veins pulsing with boiling blood. And it was only the first day!
Normally you couldn’t get newcomers this fired up on Day 1, it took some familiarity. But we were riding a momentum of our own, one that begun long before the new students arrived. They got swept up by our vibe.
The excitement and commotion led a suburban to call the police. The officer asked us to settle down. Instead, we took our ballgame to a different field, further away from civilized habitation. Instead of positive, useful vocabulary they could use in daily life, they were hearing Brian shout “We’re going to fuck you up tomorrow! Pound sand fucktards!” To retort, I had my group chanting rhymes and expletives I won’t repeat here. My students would innocently look up at me and inquire “Pound sand fucktards – what means it?”
We entered my colleagues room unannounced, mid-seminar, marching, chanting insults to them “C’mon man, I was in the middle of guided visualization! Can you at least look before you enter?” Our method of English teaching included phases of quiet and meditative guided imagery, but all the Zen had left us in those weeks.
They retaliated by beating sticks on self-made drums while marching my seminar room mid-session.
Our “english classes” had long gone off the rails. The only thing missing was a warriors face-paint. This is all part of “experiential learning”. And that’s good, except that we should have probably taught a different set of words. Instead of returning to their respective companies with a set of vocabulary such as
“make an order”,
“make a phone call”,
“appointment” and
“sales team”,
they were returning with phrases such as
“You got your asses handed to you”.
We always cracked up when an English-beginner spoke a phrase like that, in a strong German accent. “Fred – what means got asses handed?'”
On day 4 of week 5 one guy dislodged his shoulder and cried out in sheer terror. Somewhere in suburbia, an auntie spilled her tea.
What did we think was going to happen if we subject middle-aged men, who spend most of their time sitting in a cubicle pushing paper, to body-checks and foot-tripping? We interrupted the game, but he fanatically, frantically insisted
“No, no, no, you guys keep playing. We MUST win!”
It was only after the match we realized he was hurt badly and needed an ambulance as fast as possible.
Several of us descended on the Hotel reception, panting and shouting. All English seminars were done in this Hotel. For years, the Hotel appreciated the steady stream of Business we brought them. But ever since the sports matches, they had become weary. They considered themselves an “establishment for the upper echelons” and probably didn’t want people in face paint running around shouting curses to each other.
The student was picked up by an ambulance as curious onlookers gathered, throwing us ballplayers glances of disapproval. From the hospital he sent a fax message (remember those?) wishing his soccer team all the best for the Match on Day 5. The team’s mascot was drawn on the message. Instead of complaining or threatening with a lawsuit, the guy was still cheering us on. It’s remarkable what happens with people who feel they belong and are enjoying themselves. We got lawsuits for spilled hot coffee from bored students, but if a person was having fun, dislodging his shoulder wasn’t enough pain to press charges!
Me and my colleague felt like agents of liberation. We were taking boring people out of their boring lives at their boring workplaces and turning them into warriors.
We were upending their orderly daily regimen, gleefully turning it into chaos. But our bosses felt differently. With the first hospitalization they questioned our after-lunch activities. What about the noise complaints? Reckless Behavior? The workshop schedule?
The only reason they allowed us to go on is because we were delivering rave reviews they had never received before. The excitement to attend one of our seminars had become strong. Word got around. Several large business magazines (pre-Internet it was all about magazines) did feature-stories about us. The radicalism of our classes made us famous for some time. Once, a big TV channel came by to do a report. Have you ever heard of a TV Channel wanting to do a report on an English teacher?
We should have heeded the first warning but ferociously pushed on, unhinged, stubborn. By week 6 a match took about two hours including induction, the walk there and back, game play and showers afterwards. Some of us didn’t bother taking a shower which smelled up the seminar room, requiring open windows all day. With open windows, Hotel guests that weren’t partaking in our circus were now submitting noise complaints.
The behavior on the field carried over to indoors. The classes became raucous. It’s no coincidence that in the last three weeks of game play, no women were present in the courses. That’s how you know clairvoyance is real. Women didn’t know the seminar, they stayed away by intuition.
In one of the seminars during that time, students were bringing beer into the seminar room and drinking during sessions. It never happened before or after, but raucous behavior attracts similar unto itself. Laughter and shouting within the classes got so boisterous that the Hotel threatened to end their decade-spanning contract with us. Most students were sent by their employers. When one employer saw a photo of the room full of empty beer bottles, he filed a complaint to the company. An erudite way of learning language had turned into a drinking and shouting fest.
By week 7 there were still more bruises, shirt tears, wounds and retaliations for wounds. When a thing descends in consciousness-level, accidents happen. A guy broke his foot. Another ambulance came. Now we were getting heat from everyone: Our bosses, the Hotel, the students and their employers and even our envious colleagues.
The second accident ended it all. We quit meeting after lunch. We quit team sports. We quit animating our groups to humiliate each other.
Instead it was Tai Chi, Yoga or taking a walk. When our students took slow walks with flash cards across the lawn, they had no inkling of the mayhem that occurred on those battlefields. Our seminars mysteriously started attracting women again. Peace had returned to the suburb.
The gradual descent from fun and games to barbarism is why these events make up the 8th weirdest seminar of all time.
