We ended the first week of this two-week workshop on a high note,
collecting more than 1,800 words on Friday and thereby pushing our first-half
total to just over 7,000. This was a tremendous encouragement to me, as it was
to all of the TLC and SIL staff members when we shared the news with them,
since we’ve encountered a significant number of obstacles along the way that we
had to find creative ways to get past.
What was even more encouraging was the report I received second hand
that the Crow tribal leaders were getting really excited about what is
happening at this workshop. Apparently the leadership began the week feeling rather
skeptical about the helpfulness or effectiveness of what was planned, but by
the end of the week, they were fully supportive and enthusiastic about what was
taking place. That places our workshop in a very good position for a successful
conclusion next week.
I mentioned obstacles. Thursday was a difficult day because of having
to tell so many people that they couldn’t come back on Friday. The previous
days were challenging because we were adding a new group each day, which meant
taking care of lots of logistic details and training/monitoring a new leader
and a new scribe. The pace the first few days was too slow, and it was not easy to communicate the need for a faster treatment of the semantic
domains in a way that the participants could connect with culturally.
There were key people who had missed part or all of the training that I had
given, and it took some time to help them all understand what was expected of
them. But Friday, we began to experience the rhythm of a well-functioning
word-collecting machine, which produced the kind of results we’ve been striving
for all week.
In each of the two locations (Little Big Horn College in Crow Agency,
MT, and St. Charles Catholic Mission in Pryor, MT), our Friday morning report and pep
talk highlighted three things: (1) the good (but not quite stellar) results from
Thursday, (2) the fact that having 8 or 9 people in a group on Thursday had
impeded progress rather than helping it, and (3) the need to move through the
semantic domains more quickly. On this final point, I did the math for the
participants who were there, demonstrating the need for each group to adopt the
objective of treating 30 domains each day in order to help us reach the goal of
getting through all 1800 of them.
Throughout the day, it was hard for me to judge whether my exhortations
regarding the need for speed were having the desired effect. Sitting at the
record-keeping table where groups came to turn in completed folders and check
out a new one, it felt like things were moving rather slowly. However, I
recognized that the folders the groups were working on that day contained more
domains than the ones we did on Thursday when I was being kept busy almost
continuously. So until the numbers were tallied at the end of the day, I wasn’t
really sure how well we had done. (One group worked on one very large folder
all day long, so I had no idea how many words they were coming up with until
they turned in their folder at the end of the day—when I learned that they had
gleaned more than 250 words.)
Thursday morning, I had given everyone at Pryor the challenge of coming
up with 250 words and covering a minimum of 30 domains in a single day. No
group even came close to reaching that objective that day, so I was curious to
see what would happen on Friday, given the more reasonable group sizes. I kept
a running tally on a piece of paper of the results for each group, so that I
could quickly add in the figures for the last folder for each group and give
them some idea of how they had done before they left for the weekend. When all
the numbers were in, one of the groups had indeed achieved the double objective
of 250 words and 30 domains; I congratulated each member of that group before
they left. Another group surpassed the goal of treating 30 domains; yet another
collected 255 words but fell short of the goal of 30 domains; the final group
finished with 222 words in 17 domains, which was not quite as good as we had
hoped for but was still acceptable, considering that those were our lowest
data points in the overall group.
The four groups in Pryor finished with a total of 895 words in 107
domains on Friday. The groups at the college did even better, tallying 933
words in 129 domains, with two of the word-collection groups attaining the
double objective. That gave us the excellent results of 1,828 words in 236
domains for the day. I was nearly euphoric, after having worked so hard all
week to ensure the success of this workshop.
One final note: I had encouraged each group to treat at least 30
domains on Friday. If we had met that goal, we would have completed 240 domains
in one day. Doing that same thing each day next week would actually mean that
we’d get through all of the domains before the end of the week. So I didn’t
really need them to move quite that quickly, but I wanted to give them a lofty
goal in hopes that, even if we fell short, we’d still be able to get through
all of the semantic domains by the end of next week. The combined efforts of
all 8 groups was actually 236, just 4 shy of the goal, which is simply
outstanding, and we will tell the participants so at our Monday-morning pep rally, all the while encouraging them for
a repeat performance.
No comments:
Post a Comment