Notice: This is a private page, intended only for a few people I notified about it. Thanks for respecting that.
Hi everyone, This is a gratitude letter. Gratitude letters are a standard activity in positivity psychology (click here to see an example). ). All of us in publishing are also in the business of creating unexpected results. Here’s one most of you were involved in without knowing it. Several years ago, someone (I think K.M.) asked me to go to the LIA conference in Bali (note: I'm using initial for privacy because even though this is intended to be a private page, I didn't want to mess with passwords/security, etc. If you aren't sure who someone I refer to is, ask me.) I talked about “ELT and the Science of Happiness (positive psychology). There was a young teacher (A.H.) fresh out of undergrad in the audience. She was trying to figure out what to do with her career. She said the conference convinced her that ELT was what she wanted to do. She went to grad school in Melbourne in TESOL. When she got back to Indonesia, she became a teacher at Islam University of Indonesia, Yogyakarta. At some point, she went to a workshop J. did. Inspired, she friended J's on Facebook and, through that, she friended me. She got involved in the local professional association, JETA. This year, she was on the committee that organized the JETA conference. Indonesia is implementing a new curriculum (that many teachers are not happy with – it raised requirements/expectations while cutting hours of English.). When the committee was talking about who to invite, A.H. suggested asking me to talk about Positive Psych. Long story short, I did that. And, in the process, the Psychology Dept at the university asked me to talk to their students. This was the first time I’ve talked about the topic to non-English teachers/students. Afterwards, the dept. head told me that they have many outside lectures but it was the first time the students were activity asking questions in English, even though Bahasa translation was available. So, it was a success all around. Thanks to you all for making this (and so many more good things) possible. Best, Marc |