6 TOXIC RELATIONSHIP HABITS MOST PEOPLE THINK ARE NORMAL

There’s no class in high school on how to not be a shitty boyfriend or girlfriend. Sure, they teach us the biology of sex, the legality of marriage, and maybe we read a few obscure love stories from the 19th century on how not to be.

But when it comes down to actually handling the nitty-gritty of relationships, we’re given no pointers… or worse, we’re given advice columns in women’s magazines.

Yes, it’s trial-and-error from the get-go. And if you’re like most people, it’s been mostly error.

But part of the problem is that many unhealthy relationship habits are baked into our culture. We worship romantic love — you know, that dizzying and irrational romantic love that somehow finds breaking china plates on the wall in a fit of tears somewhat endearing — and scoff at practicality or unconventional sexualities. Men and women are raised to objectify each other and to objectify their relationships. Thus, our partners are often seen as assets rather than someone to share mutual emotional support.

A lot of the self-help literature out there isn’t helpful either (no, men and women are notfrom different planets, you over-generalizing prick). And for most of us, mom and dad surely weren’t the best examples either.

Fortunately, there’s been a lot of psychological research into healthy and happy relationships the past few decades and there are some general principles that keep popping up consistently that most people are unaware of or don’t follow. In fact, some of these principles actually go against what is traditionally considered “romantic” or normal in a relationship.

Below are six of the most common tendencies in relationships that many couples think are healthy and normal, but are actually toxic and destroying everything you hold dear. Get the tissues ready.

1.   THE RELATIONSHIP SCORECARD

What It Is: The “keeping score” phenomenon is when someone you’re dating continues to blame you for past mistakes you made in the relationship. If both people in the relationship do this it devolves into what I call “the relationship scorecard,” where it becomes a battle to see who has screwed up the most over the months or years, and therefore who owes the other one more.

You were an asshole at Cynthia’s 28th birthday party back in 2010 and it has proceeded to ruin your life ever since. Why? Because there’s not a week that goes by that you’re not reminded of it. But that’s OK, because that time you caught her sending flirtatious text messages to her co-worker immediately removes her right to get jealous, so it’s kind of even, right?

Wrong.

Why It’s Toxic: The relationship scorecard develops over time because one or both people in a relationship use past wrongdoings in order to try and justify current righteousness. This is a double-whammy of suckage. Not only are you deflecting the current issue itself, but you’re ginning up guilt and bitterness from the past to manipulate your partner into feeling wrong in the present.

If this goes on long enough, both partners eventually spend most of their energy trying to prove that they’re less culpable than the other, rather than solving the current problem. People spend all of their time trying to be less wrong for each other instead of being more right for each other.

What You Should Do Instead: Deal with issues individually unless they are legitimately connected. If someone habitually cheats, then that’s obviously a recurring problem. But the fact that she embarrassed you in 2010 and now she got sad and ignored you today in 2013 have nothing to do with each other, so don’t bring it up.

You must recognize that by choosing to be with your significant other, you are choosing to be with all of their prior actions and behaviors. If you don’t accept those, then ultimately, you are not accepting them. If something bothered you that much a year ago, you should have dealt with it a year ago.

2. DROPPING “HINTS” AND OTHER PASSIVE-AGGRESSION

What It Is: Instead of stating a desire or thought overtly, your partner tries to nudge you in the right direction of figuring it out yourself. Instead of saying what’s actually upsetting you, you find small and petty ways to piss your partner off so you’ll then feel justified in complaining to them.

Why It’s Toxic: Because it shows that you two are not comfortable communicating openly and clearly with one another. A person has no reason to be passive-aggressive if they feel safe expressing any anger or insecurity within the relationship. A person will never feel a need to drop “hints” if they feel like they won’t be judged or criticized for it.

What You Should Do Instead: State your feelings and desires openly. And make it clear that the other person is not necessarily responsible or obligated to them but that you’d love to have their support. If they love you, they’ll almost always be able to give it.

3. HOLDING THE RELATIONSHIP HOSTAGE

What It Is: When one person has a simple criticism or complaint and blackmails the other person by threatening the commitment of the relationship as a whole. For instance, if someone feels like you’ve been cold to them, instead of saying, “I feel like you’re being cold sometimes,” they will say, “I can’t date someone who is cold to me all of the time.”

Why It’s Toxic: It’s emotional blackmail and it creates tons of unnecessary drama. Every minor hiccup in the flow of the relationship results in a perceived commitment crisis. It’s crucial for both people in a relationship to know that negative thoughts and feelings can be communicated safely to one another without it threatening the relationship itself. Otherwise people will suppress their true thoughts and feelings which leads to an environment of distrust and manipulation.

What You Should Do Instead: It’s fine to get upset at your partner or to not like something about them. That’s called being a normal human being. But understand that committing to a person and always liking a person are not the same thing. One can be committed to someone and not like everything about them. One can be eternally devoted to someone yet actually be annoyed or angered by their partner at times. On the contrary, two partners who are capable of communicating feedback and criticism towards one another, only without judgment or blackmail, will strengthen their commitment to one another in the long-run.

4. BLAMING YOUR PARTNER FOR YOUR OWN EMOTIONS

What It Is: Let’s say you’re having a crappy day and your partner isn’t exactly being super sympathetic or supportive at the moment. They’ve been on the phone all day with some people from work. They got distracted when you hugged them. You want to lay around at home together and just watch a movie tonight, but they have plans to go out and see their friends.

So you lash out at them for being so insensitive and callous toward you. You’ve been having a shitty day and they have done nothing about it. Sure, you never asked, but they should just know to make you feel better. They should have gotten off the phone and ditched their plans based on your lousy emotional state.

Why It’s Toxic: Blaming our partners for our emotions is a subtle form of selfishness, and a classic example of the poor maintenance of personal boundaries. When you set a precedent that your partner is responsible for how you feel at all times (and vice-versa), you will develop codependent tendencies. Suddenly, they’re not allowed to plan activities without checking with you first. All activities at home — even the mundane ones like reading books or watching TV — must be negotiated and compromised. When someone begins to get upset, all personal desires go out the window because it is now your responsibility to make one another feel better.

The biggest problem of developing these codependent tendencies is that they breed resentment. Sure, if my girlfriend gets mad at me once because she’s had a shitty day and is frustrated and needs attention, that’s understandable. But if it becomes an expectation that my life revolves around her emotional well-being at all times, then I’m soon going to become very bitter and even manipulative towards her feelings and desires.

What You Should Do Instead: Take responsibility for your own emotions and expect your partner to be responsible for theirs. There’s a subtle yet important difference between being supportive of your partner and being obligated to your partner. Any sacrifices should be made as an autonomous choice and not seen as an expectation. As soon as both people in a relationship become culpable for each other’s moods and downswings, it gives them both incentives to hide their true feelings and manipulate one another.

BRILLIANT TEST ANSWERS GIVEN BY KIDS.

"Kids often say the funniest things. As innocent as their answers might be, they are hilarious and border line genius! You have to give some credit though, because although their answers are technically wrong, in a way they are also correct. So should they really be penalized for giving a simple answer to a question or should the questions be more specific? It's a debate for the comments section below!"

http://www.awesomeinventions.com/kids-test-answers/ 

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The Cure for Aging.

Here’s a depressing reality that everyone eventually notices: time goes faster as you age. The days and years seem to get behind you with increasing speed, and it’s easy to understand why: to a one-year-old, a year is a lifetime, while to a 40-year-old it’s only one-fortieth of a lifetime.

This means we are, essentially, accelerating towards our graves — but there’s something we can do to make this a non-issue, and I’ll explain how.

I turned 34 last week, and when I think about that number, it seems to belong to an entirely different stage of life than 33 does. A 33 year-old is a just a 31 year-old you haven’t checked in on for a bit, and a 31 year-old is just a 29 year-old plus a quick pair of summers, and 29 is what everyone wants to be anyway.

But 34 is the mark at which the rounding begins to go the other way. We know that 34 might as well be 35, and one president later you’re 39, which is the same as 40. And at that point, while you’re nowhere near old age, you’re probably on the leeward side of the mountain of time that is your life, and your days of being a young person are over.

All of this is just a pointless thinking exercise though. It doesn’t mean anything. Numbers make fools of us. That’s why retail prices still end in 99, statistics mislead us relatively easily, and the Monty Hall Problem still blows people’s minds.

When I put the numbers aside, and look at my actual experience of aging, life has gotten consistently better, not worse. I am calmer, happier, more confident, wiser. I get more enjoyment out of ordinary moments, I experience fewer crises and less fear. I have just as many problems but I dispatch them more quickly. I find it easier to do hard things as I get older.

Yet it’s suggested repeatedly to us, that aging is something to be feared — that an older you is a worse you, and that any birthday beyond your 29th is a small tragedy.

I am also aware that I only turned 34 and not 64, and that I’ve barely begun to experience the effects of aging. But I have every reason to believe that all of the improving qualities listed above will continue to improve until I’m about dead.

There are tradeoffs of course. When I was five I could fall down and probably not hurt myself. I used to be able to drink Slurpees for lunch and not feel like crap afterward. My skin was clearer. And eventually I’ll probably experience joint pain and other goodies. But I believe that with age I will gain vastly more than I lose.

What do we really lose as we age? Why do we think it’s such a bad thing?

Well first of all, what we’re most afraid of isn’t aging, but the thing that happens when we’re done aging — and we often confuse the two. Death and aging aren’t really the same problem, and I don’t think it makes sense to worry that aging is bringing you closer to death. The fact that life ends has been a part of the deal from the beginning, and you knew that. And death, whenever it comes, will render all of the problems of aging irrelevant.

Your body will tend to get weaker over the decades. We know that. But it’s important to note that your level of fitness and physical ability has a lot more to do with how you spend your years than how many of them you’ve spent in total. I’m a total novice in the world of fitness, but I’m already in much better shape than I was at 25, and still there are 65-year-olds who can run circles around me, or even bench-press me a few dozen times. While it’s true that our limits for physical prowess do decrease as we age, not many of us live in such a way that we’re bumping up against these limits.

We do experience more age discrimination, which is obnoxious but not exactly insurmountable. It’s also not really a function of aging; it’s a consequence of living in a culture that overvalues youth. In other words, getting younger isn’t what’s required to overcome age discrimination. As we know, many cultures (past and present) revere age.

We do get less physically beautiful, at least in terms of raw biological sex appeal. I will certainly have less hair and more lines in 20 years. But even as you gain wrinkles, you can simultaneously become a more articulate, likeable and admirable person, if admiration is important to you. While the most superficial aspect of your beauty may wilt, you can cultivate charisma and appeal indefinitely in every other area. Even outward beauty can be preserved or improved over the medium-term, with an investment in fitness and health, if that’s still something you value.

For women there is a unique aging issue: the loss of the capacity to give birth to healthy children occurs relatively early in life, so beginning a biological family is one of the few things that might be regarded with a bit of urgency (again, if that’s something that’s important to you.)

I’m willing to accept the gradual fading of my physical qualities, knowing that I’m steadily becoming more learned, more easygoing, more skilled and more wise. I have no reason to believe I will lose any of those qualities from age alone, until I’m pretty close to the end.

Of course, getting better year after year requires an intention to get better year after year. Self-improvement doesn’t happen by accident. A lot of what age apparently “takes” from us — health, possibility, optimism, confidence, personal power — is really just what we’ve given up on voluntarily. If you make a standing priority of improving in the areas that matter to you, then your birthdays will come to mark increases in capability and skill, rather than atrophy and loss.

But if you tell yourself the fitness ship has sailed, then it has. Same goes for the dream-career ship, the traveling-the-world ship, and the write-a-great-novel ship. You didn’t miss them, you just stopped thinking of them as your ship.

I think what many people particularly feel they lose is possibility. The range of what you can do with your life seems to shrink as you become more entrenched in your current obligations.

I don’t think this is due to age, but rather the cultural norm of letting your habits stagnate once you hit 30, and the subsequent slipping from improvement mode into maintenance mode. If you’re 5 or 10 years into a career, it’s harder to switch to something better because it usually means taking a pay cut. We take on family and work obligations that can easily consume all of our energy, if self-improvement is allowed to slip off the list of non-negotiable priorities.

If you’re living life in maintenance mode, then you are losing a step when you age. If you’re just getting older without a focus on getting better, then the same things become harder.

The passage of time isn’t a problem to someone who’s determined to improve every important aspect of their life over time. You still experience some tradeoffs, but it’s easier to say goodbye to your smooth skin and Olympic aspirations when you know you’re moving towards greater wealth, wisdom, skill, personal freedom and equanimity.

If you have long-term goals, age creates some pretty excellent consolation prizes. For example, if you’ve got a goal of getting into marathon-shape and doubling your income in the next three years, is it really that bad when you do find yourself three years older?

Disease and physical breakdown are inevitabilities, but they can be slowed with a long-standing commitment to health. When they do eventually set in, they can be managed gracefully with wisdom and presence — if developing those qualities has been a part of your lifestyle.

What the self-improver is really creating is ease — long-term ease. Taking five years to transition to a career that doesn’t drive you nuts might be harder in the short term, and much, much easier in the long term. Working out is harder than skipping a workout, but beyond the hour it takes to do either, the first option creates much more ease in life.

The lifelong self-improver is always setting up life so that it delivers increasing dividends in ease and joy. If it’s just a matter of course for you to spend every year of your life building skill, wealth, and wisdom, then birthdays come to feel like “leveling up” instead of losing out.

***

PHOTO BY JOE DEL TUFO

The Cure for Aging, Originally published on RAPTITUDE.COM

http://www.raptitude.com/2014/10/the-cure-for-aging/

PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

In some instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here; therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so. Thank you very much.

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Haunted Places... Hey, it's Halloween, everyone!

I particularly like when I have some spare time to make up my own horror stories, but as I didn’t have time this month, I would like to share some of the stories that I have just found on the internet. I hope you have a great Halloween.

Back in the 1800's, a woman was accused of witchcraft and was hung for her “crimes.” Before she died, she cursed the town saying it would burn to the ground 3 times. Since then, the entire town has burned down twice – so there's still a chance the curse lingers and it'll burn again. To top off her curse, it seems her spirit is still haunting the area where she was hung and the masonic graveyard where she was buried.

People claim to see her ghost throughout the cemetery, walking around the shadows, and at times she will scream at visitors -turning to run after them and chase people out of the cemetery while laughing maniacally. Even crazier is the astounding number of reports of visitors being physically attacked while being chased by the ghost, resulting in multiple razor-like cuts across their backs; many are still scarred to this day. Locals don't want to go anywhere near this place. Eventually due to the large number of reports of malevolent attacks, the cemetery was closed for good, and now bears a no trespassing sign.

 

We don't condone illegal activity, but if by chance you (independently) decided to explore it anyway, one could be certain you'd have one hell of a scary night wandering around this insanely haunted spot. Just watch your back!

Other stories: http://articlecats.com/index.php/easyblog/entry/11-scariest-haunted-places-in-oregon

PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

In some instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here; therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so. Thank you very much.

Is something important missing? Report an error or suggest an improvement. Please, I strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact me!

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MANCHESTER UNITED VS MANCHESTER CITY LIVE STREAM.

Click the imagine to watch it. 

PERGUNTO...

Bom dia, prezados leitores do blog!

Imagem da internet. 

Como temos muitos professores-leitores do blog, gostaria de fazer um pequeno “levantamento”.

Tenho certeza que vocês fazem uso de materiais didáticos com várias e várias recomendações, sugestões de atividades a serem trabalhadas em sala de aula e material de apoio.

Minhas perguntas são bem simples:

Ø Qual a importância que vocês dão a GRAMÁTICA e o ensino da mesma em suas aulas?

Ø Suas aulas são basicamente aulas tradicionais, com muita explicação gramatical, ou têm espaço para outras coisas, como conversação e leitura, por exemplo?

Ø O material que vocês utilizam em sala é compatível com o tipo de lição aplicada em sala de aula e com a realidade do seu aluno?

Ø Se você utiliza livro-texto, quem escolhe o mesmo, você ou a escola?

Poderiam responder nos comentários do blog ou usando o Facebook? Obrigado! 

Drilling-based activities: preparation light, student generated ways to build fluency. What’s not to like?

Drilling

Drilling has certainly fallen out of favour in recent years. Strongly associated with the behaviourist approach it is often seen as non-communicative, boring, patronising…. A recent ELTChat on the subject brought up all the negatives, but also provided a long list of positive reasons for drilling. For example:

Building confidence

Helping learners get their tongues round new words

Picking up pace and getting students’ attention

Developing ability to produce (and understand) connected speech

And perhaps the key reason, for me at any rate: drilling or repetition is an important step towards fluency. Especially at lower levels, it is quite natural to rehearse (at least mentally) before tackling a speaking situation.  Repeating something helps us to ‘notice’ what we are repeating and assimilate it into our store of language. The ELTChat I referred to concentrated mostly on drilling words or single chunks. There are plenty of benefits to this, but in this post I want to concentrate on some techniques which are probably even more out of favour: drilling and repeating dialogues and narratives.

Dialogue builds

I did my CELTA so long ago that it wasn’t even called that then (!). It was also at IH in Cairo, which I rather suspect was a little behind the times in terms of materials. The result was that my initial training centred around the coursebook series Streamlines and Strategies. Lots of drilling and repetition.

One of the first techniques I learnt was a dialogue build. For the uninitiated, it goes like this: Set up the situation, using a photo (or in pre-IWB days two stick figures on the board). Elicit where the characters are, who they are, what’s happening and so on. This is often a service encounter (e.g. in a café), but can be anything you like.

Then you elicit the dialogue from the students, line by line. As you accept each line, you help learners correct it if necessary and then model the final version, with appropriate connected speech and intonation, getting the students to repeat it. You DON’T write the dialogue on the board, but do indicate where each line starts and who is speaking. You might also add question marks or little visual clues. As you go through the dialogue you keep returning to the start, getting students to keep repeating the dialogue, and thus memorising it. You can do this whole class, or divide the class into the number of characters or ask individuals to do each line. It’s good to have a bit of variety here.

Once the class knows the dialogue by heart, they can practise a little more in pairs, changing roles. You can also have a bit of fun with it by getting one of the characters to change their answers, so that the first person has to react spontaneously. (Good idea to model what to do first with lower level learners) Finally, you can elicit the dialogue once more, writing it onto the board so that the students have a clear written version. Alternatively, you could get students to come up and write it on the board, giving scope for some work on correcting spellings, missing articles and so on.

A dialogue build is a great technique to have up your sleeve for a last minute cover lesson. It’s obviously most appropriate for lower level learners, but could be done with more advanced students if the chunks of language elicited were more demanding. At the end of it, the students have memorised a whole set of (hopefully useful) chunks of language and can produce them fluently at will. Fluent speakers are essentially those who have enough chunks of language that they can stick together to keep going, so teaching chunks in this way is a real help.

It’s also an excellent activity to do with learners with low levels of literacy. I can’t understand why it isn’t an ESOL staple. You don’t need any equipment except a board and pens (great for those community halls), it doesn’t rely at all on reading and writing, it can be adapted for specific situations that learners might have to deal with (ringing for a doctor’s appointment, for example) and once it’s elicited onto the board it provides a copying activity where the meaning is already very clear (and was indeed student generated).

Alternative versions

Instead of eliciting the whole dialogue, you could give them one half or the dialogue (i.e. all that one person says) and elicit the missing responses. Then proceed as above. A good alternative for learners who can read quite well, is to start by writing the elicited dialogue onto the board. Drill as a class, making sure you are giving a good model of natural pronunciation, then ask learners to practise it in pairs. As they are practising, gradually wipe off words and lines from the dialogue. As it disappears, they have to remember more and more. Finally you can re-elicit it onto the board or get them to write it down on the board, or in pairs on paper. This could work equally well with a narrative.

Another old, but great, idea comes from Mario Rinvolucri’s book, Dictation. In this activity, you do the repeating (at least to start with) and the students listen and mime the actions. It works really well with younger learners, but if you have a lively class, adults could enjoy it too. Here’s the text (slightly adapted)

You’re standing in front of the Coke machine. Put your hand in your back pocket. Take out three 50p coins. Put them in one by one. You hear the machine click. Choose your drink and press the button. You hear a terrible groan from the machine. Clunk! A can drops down. Pick it up. Open the can. It squirts Coke in your face. Take a tissue out of your pocket. Rub your eye. Lick your lips. Take a sip. Burp!

First read the text right through, just to orientate students. Then read again and elicit a movement for each line. Get all the students doing it. Then read a third time with all the students doing all the movements.  You can make this stage fast as possible if you want a bit of fun. Then give the students a version of the text with most of it missing. They have to work together to recreate the text.

This is a form of dictogloss, but the difference is that doing the actions should help them to remember what’s missing. If they get stuck, get them to do the actions and try and remember that way. This is the stage at which they should be drilling the language themselves, as they try to recall it. You can obviously differentiate this activity by giving less of the text to more able students and vice versa. Finally you get the whole class to carry out the actions while saying the text (from memory).

All of these ideas are extremely preparation-light and student generated. They provide a way to help learners appropriate new chunks of language to their store, and the challenge of memorisation also provides interest and stimulation. Maybe it’s time for a revival?

From http://zip.net/bwpyHS

PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

In some instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here; therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so. Thank you very much.

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