12 Comments

Your suggestions about questions brought to mind a website I came across many moons ago, and found it really useful (especially in my teaching). It's called The Questioning Toolkit: http://www.fno.org/nov97/toolkit.html

Expand full comment
author

Bookmarking for future consideration!

Expand full comment

I think it's still pretty good even 25 years later!

Expand full comment
Jul 27, 2022·edited Jul 27, 2022Liked by Mark Dykeman

Gosh, tonnes to think about here - thank you Mark for such a thought-provoking post!

I love the idea of 100 questions - might take me a while....

Like you I feel that curiosity and lifelong learning are essential to a fulfilling life. Your French immersion programme sounds amazing - what a great experience! I tried to brush up on my very rusty A-level French during the first UK Covid lockdown - at the time I was looking into retraining as a modern languages teacher, and although I have German as a second language I was required to have excellent skills in a second foreign language too. I really enjoyed the online French courses I was doing, but determined pretty quickly that they were useless compared to the way I'd learned German, which was by living my everyday life speaking, thinking and DOING the language.

I've been very disappointed every time I've tried da Vinci's mirror writing. Not easy for a left-hander, as in our case mirror writing requires the dominant side to be writing backwards! I've tried crossing my arms - I'll leave you to imagine how well that went!

Expand full comment
author

Thanks for the thoughtful comment! I've never tried mirror writing myself but I do occasionally experiment with writing with my left hand - always humbling. I've heard that German can be quite complex to master!

French Immersion still exists in my home province - both of my children took different flavours of it.

Expand full comment

Come on, I bet you're trying mirror writing RIGHT NOW...!

(Am I right?!)

German was extremely hard to start with but I found it became easier over time. French was the polar opposite! I began learning French at school when I was 8 and German when I was 12 - we all HATED German, especially as it felt that when we started we were already 4 years behind our French. Eventually it 'clicked', though, and I feel it's a beautiful language - people are often surprised when I say that, but I much prefer the sound, feel and rhythm of German over French!

Expand full comment
author

Also I love the way you dive into the comments section and share your thoughts, it really adds some colour to the newsletter/blog experience!

Expand full comment

LOL - thanks - I'm this garrulous in real life, too....! ;D

Expand full comment
author

Maybe I'll try the mirror writing later...

French is a no brainer choice in Canada, in the sense that the whole country is officially bilingual as is my home province of New Brunswick. I could probably take German at the university level if I wanted to but no practical applicability at the moment.

Expand full comment

Lots of great ideas here that I'd like to put into practice, especially the 100/10 questions. Saving this post for reference. I think I'll come back to this often. Thanks, Mark!

Expand full comment

You wrote, "Emotional intelligence is extremely available in both your personal and professional lives.". Did you mean 'valuable'?

Expand full comment
author

Oh, good catch. Yes, I mean valuable, I'll fix that!

Expand full comment