Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 3; May 03

A.R. Orage/Gurdjieff Exercises

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In this issue the " old exercises" date back to the 1920's and 30's and come from a rich classic : On Love and Psychological Exercises, by A.R Orage, first published in London in 1930 and again in 1957. The current edition is with Samuel Weiser, 1998.

The blurb on the back of the book says:

Psychological Exercises is the result of Orage's work with both Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and presents 200 plus cognitive and psychological exercises designed to increase the flexibility and scope of our minds by working with numbers, words, verses and images. These exercises pick up where conventional education leaves off, teaching us to hone the conscious and deliberate manipulation of our mental resources.

In one of the short essays in the book, Economizing Energy, Orage writes:

All 'unconscious actions' waste energy; only conscious action saves it. The first principle of economy is thus to employ ourselves consciously and voluntarily and not to allow any activity to escape our attention and to run away with energy itself…..Observe your fellow passengers on a bus or a train. They are not engaged in working out some definite problem. Their minds are running over the incidents of the day or of yesterday or of last year. They are not trying to arrive at any conclusion; they are not, in fact, thinking. But their mechanisms are being worked by associations of ideas; and as it grinds out chance memories and images, it consumes energy. And when later we wish really to think, and to use our brains to some purpose, we find that our day's supply of energy is exhausted.
The remedy is never to think aimlessly. When you catch your mind just thinking by itself--- day-dreaming, musing, plunged in reverie, lost in memory --- make it think definitely. Say the multiplication table backwards, or repeat some verse to yourself. Compose a letter or a speech. Think out clearly tomorrow's work. Recall exactly the day's events. Do anything so that you intend to do it, but don't allow your mind to be done. This effort to make the mind work may seem to be exhausting; but actually it is refreshing . It uses blood; whereas unconscious and uncontrolled thought is simply bleeding to exhaustion.

The above text sets the exercises that follow in the context of the thinking that informs them. As a language teacher I use these activities because they invite my students to do something fresh and new, something they have not ever done before in their mother tongue. Try the exercises and see how they work for you.

1. Tell the students to write down the names of 10 objects they have seen , eg: a mouse, the Grand Canyon, a grapefruit, a mountain, a thimble, a pickled herring, a silver coin, a goat.

   Now they picture the circumstances in which they last ( or first) saw these things, and describe them to a partner.

   Ask the students to see the objects above in their mind's eye as clearly as they saw them in reality. If their visualisation of the object is clear and vivid, they give the " picture" a maximum mark of 3, if less clear, they mark it 2; if vague, they mark it 1 and if they can't get a picture, then 0. Tell them to turn to partner and describe their pictures. These may have changed from the first visualisation

2. Ask the student to work in pairs and come up with a list of 15 names of objects places etc that, in English, start with the letter A and have exactly five letters.
   Tell them to write the words in capitals.

3. The students work in pairs and come up with a list of 15 objects or places that start with the letter or sound C and have three syllables in their mother tongue. They write the list down in English, writing as small as they possibly can. ( be everywhere, helping with translations)

4. The students work on their own and list ten objects only seen at night, eg stars, bats etc.. Tell them to write these down in capitals, spelling them backwards. They share their lists and describe how the process felt.

5. . The students work on their own and come up with ten things associated with the sea, each name containing six letters, eg: shrimp, purser etc… They are to write this list with their non-writing hand. They compare their lists and describe the process of wrong-handed writing.

What language level would you work these exercises with?