The Dimensions of the present moment

When I was a young(er) teacher, quite cut off and alone in a town in the Czech Rep. — one of the books that were my best friends was “The Dimensions of the Present Moment” – a collection of essays by the Czech immunologist / poet , Miroslav Holub (more on him HERE). In one essay, he outlined how each breath / line of poetry is less than 3 seconds or 1 moment. He continued to outline how a moment can be defined as 3 seconds. About the time it takes for to oxygenate over and over, the brain.

I’ve always returned to that thought, that moment.

This video really shows what moments are…. It could be used in class to great effect. Just go through and pause. Ask the students what is happening at that moment. If I have time this week, I’m going to make some learning material for this… enjoy the moments!

You can use these cards to teach with this video. (just be careful of “one” scene which is adult – get the edited version of the video on EFL Classroom 2.0!).  Students can also read the book on Gif Lingua Books. Teachers register for worksheets for all books and downloading books as pptx or epubs.

Students can read out their card as the scene appears. Or play last one standing. They sit down when their card appears. Those left standing win. Or show a scene and ask students to write 5 sentences for it, using the 5ws. Lots of rich, contextualized language production possible!

Hat’s off to David Truss for helping me find this marvelous video!

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ddeubel

Teacher trainer, technology specialist, educational thinker...creator of EFL Classroom 2.0, a social networking site for thousands of EFL / ESL teachers and students around the world.

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5 Responses

  1. David Truss says:

    Well done David!
    Hat’s off to you for being such a thoughtful teacher and taking what I thought was a cool video and making it into an ‘experience’ for the classroom.
    I’ll enjoy going to EFL Classroom 2.0 too, as I’m now in a school where that will be a useful resource. Unfortunately I’m behind the Great Chinese Filter which doesn’t like Ning networks, so I’ll have to share with my staff via my laptop with a VPN bypass.
    Thanks again,
    Dave.

  2. ddeubel says:

    David,

    Yes, it’s a shame. I noticed 3-4 months ago, the Chinese traffic just screech to a halt. You do what you can with what you got – right?

    Thank god for VPN though! I use it to get sports on universal sports – obscure stuff that I’m into….

    But thank you – this video has us on an amazing discussion on my EFl Classroom blog. Now, we are talking about science and how a lot of it is “a clutching at straws” … interesting.

    Cheers,
    David

  3. ddeubel says:

    PS. for what it’s worth, the edited version I put up on mediafire
    http://www.mediafire.com/file/xjzywhkzmf3/The Moment.avi

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