Thursday 18 July

Religion and bibles

This week I read that the new British Government is the least religious in history. 40% of MPs chose to take the secular affirmation when they were sworn into the cabinet. The alternative was to swear an oath to God. The percentage is up by 24% from the 2019 election. You can read the article here . I’m still pondering what this means. I’m not in favour of mixing religion with politics or education so it should be a good thing. I also think it’s good that the make up better reflects that of the British public. Anyway, an interesting point, I think. I’ve lived in Spain since 1987 and there have been ongoing battles about how much power the Church should have in terms of imposing doctrine on the government, and, on Education policy. In other countries, the Church pretty much runs the country, and this can be seen in the curriculum, and in the materials that children learn from.

And bibles

I spoke about a special one when I gave a presentation at the MaWSIG PCE in Brighton a couple of months ago. When I was preparing my talk I wondered how many people in the audience would have heard of it, so I asked and nobody had. Which was good of course. I spoke about ‘The Wicked Bible’. It’s a great story of one of the most controversial ‘pulps’ in publishing history, and all because of one small typo (deliberate in my opinion). This is from Wikipedia but you can Google it to find out more.

The Wicked Bible, sometimes called the Adulterous Bible or the Sinners' Bible, is an edition of the Bible published in 1631 by Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, the royal printers in London, meant to be a reprint of the King James Bible. The name is derived from a mistake made by the compositors: in the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20:14, the word "not" was omitted from the sentence, "Thou shalt not commit adultery" causing the verse to instead read, "Thou shalt commit adultery."

Possibly the best typo ever?

Writing

This week has been a week of two distinct halves. At the beginning of the week I was feeling stressed about not being able to finish some work by the agreed date. I was faced with two choices; working flat out and trying to achieve a small miracle. Or getting in touch with the editor and explaining the situation and just asking, first, what the score was and whether there was any ‘wiggle room’. I wrote to the editor and just said it as it was. She had a choice of either pushing the dates back or relieving me of some of the work. She replied shortly after getting my email and guess what? Everything was fine. She drew up a revised schedule and everyone is OK with it. Phew! So, the second half of the week has been productive. I’ve achieved more than I would have in my stressed state, I’m sure, and I’m on target to meet the next date in the schedule.

Work has involved the above (a digital product), writing the first draft of a funny story for a graded reader, and writing an outline for another story. I didn’t want to go ahead and write a first draft of this second story because I had a few questions I needed to ask first – things to do with the target market that I’m not 100% familiar with.

I’ve also done some Admin stuff, including sending all the info for my quarterly tax returns to my accountant, reading, signing and sending an agreement for some work that I’ve actually started (more on this below) and some de-cluttering of folders.

Talking of starting work before signing an agreement

A colleague recently wrote on SM that this is something we should never, ever do. And she’s right of course. But guess what? Most of us do it. Why? Because (a) usually we trust the publisher as we’ve worked with them before and (b) time is always tight and if we wait until an agreement is signed, this doesn’t mean the hand in dates on a schedule will be revised.

It isn’t right though, obviously. And I do wonder why it should happen so frequently. It’s good to see people talking about it more though. Theres a saying in Spanish, ‘Hablando se entiende la gente’. I think it’s usually true. If we can talk calmly about things, we might reach a better understanding and things might change.

Have you ever started work before signing a contract or an agreement?

A day in the life …

Yesterday I wrote an article with some links for our weekly #WEMsday post on Writing ELT Materials. It was about ELT editors and editing. You can read it here if you haven’t done so and you think it might be of interest. While I was preparing it I did a search to find some blog posts or articles by ELT editors along the lines of ‘A day in the life of …’ and I found three that were interesting. It made me think how cool it would be to be able to read a regular post along these lines, from materials writers. The problem is that no two days are ever quite the same of course. But it would still be very interesting to see how other people organise their time and their days. I’d like to know the answers to questions like this. Feel free to answer any or all of them!

What time do you generally start (and finish) work?

How do you organise work when you a have several projects on the go?

Do you take a long lunchbreak or do you just grab something quick?

Where do you actually do your work?

What is always on your desk or within arm’s reach?

How much contact with other people do you have while you are working?

What kind of things distract you when you are working?

Do you have any tips about how to be productive and still get plenty of free time?

Do you ever take a spontaneous day off?

Do the people you share a home with respect your working norms?

What question would you ask a freelance writer (or editor)?

Professional Development

I’ve just completed week 4 of Dorothy Zemach 's course with iTDi in self-publishing. I find this fact amazing. Time is flying. As with the last three weeks, I’ve learnt a lot. This week we’ve been looking at images and we’ve been playing around designing book covers. It’s been great fun.

And, as in previous weeks, here are …

a few MORE thoughts about online courses

1. It’s really handy to have a trouble-shooting forum/space on an online course. By this, I mean a place where a course participant can post a question and other participants or tutor(s) can offer help. It has great added value.

2. For me personally, on this type of course, one of the most valuable aspects is having personalised feedback on my work. This can be from a tutor, who will know a lot more than me about the topic. And it can also come from peers who will see things I haven’t spotted and will have interesting points to make from their unique perspectives, which might be very different from mine. Participants who have taken our Writing ELT Materials course have said that this is one of the most valuable parts of our course too. I think they are right. In some cases personalised feedback can be key to the success or failure of a project.

3. It’s a good idea to schedule a specific block of time to do coursework. In my case, this week I’ve had to:

• Watch the recording of the live presentation (time zones mean I can’t be there at the time).
• Do the homework.
• Join in discussions and peer reviewing in the forum.

This week I programmed some time slots to do this, and everything was easier. I looked forward to these block in my calendar as a break between work and other stuff.

AI bits and bobs

It’s always popping up, isn’t it? This week I got an invitation from Zoom to read a blog post called ‘How to make the most of Zoom AI companion.’ It looks a bit boring but I’m sure it has useful tips and I ought to bring myself up to speed as I use Zoom a lot.

Colleague Joanna Szoke shared news on LinkedIn that she is writing a book for Delta Publishing with her colleague, Zsófia Menyhei . It’s called, ‘AI Literacy in the Language Classroom: Facilitating critical, ethical and responsible use.’ I like the sound of that. Congratulations Jo!

Two friends who are specialists in YL ELT, Laura McWilliams and Jen Dobson shared a link to this article this week. It’s about a study which has shown that AI use by children can be potentially harmful and dangerous. It’s worth a read. I found some details worrying. Apparently “50% of students aged 12-18 have used Chat GPT for school, but only 26% of parents are aware of them doing so.” I’m not surprised at this. Looking back to my school days I think it’s unlikely that my parents would have been aware of me using AI in the classroom, had it been invented earlier. Regarding AI in ELT in general, I think it’s important to be as informed as possible about what’s going on and what’s being developed, and to be cautious and thoughtful when we use AI.

A couple of days ago I asked ChatGPT whether AI was capable of writing better ELT materials than me. It responded with a pretty predictable answer which you can read on my LI wall. But what I really learnt was that no matter what prompts we use for generative AI, we should ALWAYS include a word limit!

Do you have any advice for using AI?

Thank you

As always a big thank you for reading, for writing, for commenting, subscribing, and interacting in a number of ways. It doesn’t go unnoticed.

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