Sökmotoroptimering...?

Jag sitter på en fortbildning om sökmotoroptimering. Det här är en ny värld för mig, men av någon anledning får eftermiddagen mig att tänka att jag kanske skulle börja blogga igen. Jag antar att det hänger ihop med att jag funderar på det där med att höja sin sidas synlighet på nätet. Hur gör jag min blogg synligare? Är det någon som läser det jag skriver här? (Ja, du, uppenbarligen...) Hur får jag er att bli fler?

By the desk

Very hectic day yesterday, much calmer now. I need to prepare a Literature test for my students to take on Monday, and then sit down with a Theology student and go over his Swedish assignments. But first of all I'm trotting over to the school café for a coffee when the students' break starts in ten minutes.

The global village

Just came back from the school's annual general meeting as well as board meeting, where I'm one of the two staff representatives. Five of the other participants in the meeting joined us by video link, from a couple of other places in Sweden, from Warsaw, Poland and one from Moçambique. The video streaming worked amazingly well. It's a wondrous world.

Päpple? Äpplon?

Hittade vad som måste vara en korsning mellan äpple och päron i fruktkorgen på jobbet. Såååå gott! Måste ha.

Thoughts during an English test

My students are taking a translation test. There's supposed to be 18 of then, but usually about 10 or 12 turn up. Today there were three… This leads me back to my previous thoughts on motivation and learning. The other day, my class seemed to be saying that they need the pressure of an impending test situation to motivate themselves. Today, although it's partly with a different group of people, that doesn't seem to work either.

Also, I had a conversation with a couple of students yesterday, about filesharing and video games. I was surprised to realize how much they knew, and how quickly they seemed to learn about and master things, e.g. a new game. This tells me that the correlation between level of difficulty and motivation isn't quite what I've made it out to be. Things can obviously get much more difficult in the classroom before the difficulty level is a problem. The real problem lies elsewhere.

So, the question remains – how do I, and we, tap into that source of motivation which makes it possible for them to master such complex processes in a short period of time? They're definitely capable, and it's very clear to me that they perform far below their own potential in school.

The epic struggle goes on…

Tranströmer och Hjalmar Gullberg

På väg genom skolans bibliotek bläddrade jag i "Den stora gåtan", Tomas Tranströmers samling haikudikter. När jag hade tittat på den här en stund:

Håll ut näktergal!
Ur djupet växer det fram –
vi är förklädda.

insåg jag att han måste ha tänkt på Hjalmar Gullberg när han skrev. Jag blev nöjd över att dela Tranströmers kulturella referensramar, åtminstone till dels. Sedan undrade jag lite över att T hade samlat element från Gullbergs mest kända verk. Kändes som en sampling av Greatest Hits som på något sätt var alltför populärkulturell för att anstå Tranströmer. Hm… jag kanske borde fundera lite över vilka värderingar jag lägger i begreppet "populärkulturell".

Den här var också fin:

Se hur jag sitter
som en uppdragen eka.
Här är jag lycklig.

Nu ska jag gå och sätta mig och fika med kursdeltagare och kollegor i cafét. Som en uppdragen eka.

Birthday

Celebrated my father's 70th birthday today. Corinne, Leo, Sally and I picked up my mum and dad at their house in Åkarp and then we went to Ringsjö Wärdshus for lunch. Don't think I've been since two of our oldest friends, Jens and Malin, had their wedding reception there, 13 years ago. Dad got a lithograph by Gustav Rudberg and an original colour crayon drawing by Leo Tängermark, featuring a game of football with the artist himself and his grandparents.

After the main course, Leo and I went down to the lake and talked about how the waves look like white geese, which is what we call them in Swedish on a windy day. We looked at the break-water and how the waves were higher on the other side from us.

We spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening at Wanås Castle, which was founded in 1994 as a result of a completely mad idea that Marika Wachtmeister got. Luckily, she seems to be one of those people who fail to realize that certain projects are just too wild to become reality.

Wanås Foundation is a castle with a surrounding park. In the park you'll find some 30 permanent works of art, all of which created for that very patch of the park. Over 100 artists have exhibited there, and some of the artists with permanent installations are Jenny Holzer, Per Kirkeby and Antony Gormley. (Personal favourites of mine, all three.)

I think we all had a marvellous time in the park, each in his or her own way – including Sally, who spent most of the time intently gazing at the treetops and the sky. What better works of art?

No, not Chagall

Oh, and the title of my last entry, Bouquet with Flying Lovers, is also the title of the book Jan Rubidge wrote about Keith and about their struggle with his illness.

Bouquet with flying lovers

OK, time to have a go again. Spent most of today indoors. Corinne was out and about, and took Leo and Sally to see Leo's best mate William. I went out for coffee just before six. All the cafés in or near Rörsjöstaden were closing, so I went to Barista. Nice place, they only do Fair Trade coffee and staff is friendly. AND I found a LAN that wasn't password locked.

Translating a book at the moment, one by Barbara Sher. Great stuff, about games for kids and grown-ups. The best one so far is Finding the Grumpy Bug. When Leo throws a tantrum, I'll go looking for an angry bug and eventually find one, e.g. behind his left ear. We'll dispose of it together in some cruel manner and then I'll produce an equally invisible happy bug from my pocket and put it where the grumpy bug was hiding. It works!

I was watching John Cleese's eulogy for Graham Chapman on YouTube earlier and it set me off thinking of the British sense of decorum, and the unwritten rules for breaking it. I mean, what Cleese does actually goes down perfectly in that context, doesn't it? The speech is famous for being provocative, and that it is, naturally. But no one who hears it can doubt for a moment the affection Cleese feels for Chapman. And as for being offended, well, it's not directed against any other person or group of people. It's simply an excellent eulogy.

It goes to show, I suppose, that you can break almost any social code so long as you make it clear that you're aware of what you're doing.

It made me remember what surely must have been one of the most moving funerals I've attended myself, that of Keith Rubidge, whom I'm very happy to have known. He and his wife Jan were some of the most wonderful people we got to know when we lived in London, from 1998 to 2000. One moment at Keith's memorial service which made me smile through my tears was when the church was suddenly filled with Kate & Anna McGarrigle's "Swimming Song" – an upbeat tune about summer which had been the Rubidge family's holiday theme song. Not the kind of song I'd been expecting as I walked into the church that day, but now it always springs to mind when I think of Jan & Keith, and it still makes me smile.