Author’s Note: I’ve re-posted this article for your reading pleasure as I am on vacation.
Kids who grow up with no television in their homes either (a) make friends quick with a kid whose family worships the ‘mote, or (b) they read a lot. My utter lack of pop culture references from the mid-seventies through the mid-nineties should do all the explaining as to which path I took.
The outcome being, I ended up with a stellar vocabulary, full of words I’d only ever seen in print and therefore usually couldn’t pronounce correctly. Whatever. At least I knew what they meant.
And there were some I knew how to say. (With feeling). When I was eight my 18-year-old babysitter burned the chicken pot pies that were to be our dinner. My mother never bought us crappy processed food, which meant my brother and I were infatuated with all sugary, well-preserved, and insanely processed foodstuffs.
I was understandably pissed when the sitter burned my only shot at packaged food for the month and filled the kitchen with smoke. To vent my anger I hollered, “What are you trying to do, asphyxiate us?!” She had no idea what that meant, and almost sent me to my room because she thought I’d called her something so horrible, not even teenager her had ever heard that particular obscenity before.
There is also the common problem, among adults and too-smart-for-their-own-good children, of only ever hearing a word or a phrase and never figuring out the correct spelling. There are so many words that sound alike but are spelled differently, and each version of the stupidly exact-sounding word means something completely different. I’ve got their, there, and they’re down cold, but it took a while for me to get affect and effect straight. The English language, in my bitchy opinion, has some definite asinine qualities.
Or perhaps I should ask more questions. Until I was in college and saw this phrase written on the board as a common mistake college sophomores made when writing papers for the professor, I had always thought “For all intents and purposes” was “For all intensive purposes.”
According to Paul Brians, author of Common Errors in English Usage, I’m not the only native English-speaker to screw that phrase up. Which made me feel better for about point seven seconds until I saw the bit where he describes the phrase as “Another example of the oral transformation of language by people who don’t read much.” Ouch, Professor Brians. That was totally uncalled for.
I read plenty, thank you. The books I read (fine literature and lots of science-y non-fiction) just haven’t ever contained that exact phrase. I am still very smart and am an excellent reader. And clearly I have nary a hang-up about the whole intents/intensive blunder.
Author’s Note: I’ve re-posted this article for your reading pleasure while I’m on vacation.
I love it when highly educated, intelligent, and knowledgeable scientists find something new that’s so damn cool, the only thing they can come up with to say is, “It’s a big weird looking freaky thing.” Ichthyologist Doug Long of the California Academy of Sciences came up with that one in an interview with Wired Science.
He’s right. I mean, look at that thing. It’s fascinating, but it’s a tad bizarre. I don’t care how many degrees that guy has, even I would be too giddy to remember my super science-y vocabulary words if someone had just discovered some crazy new organism that I was going to get to play with.
Oh, it’s coming. Denying it won’t help you. Fall Term is starting up soon whether you’re ready or not. When the first week of classes have been attended and while you’re still focusing on first chapters, small quizzes, tolerable assignments, and the finer points on your professors’ syllabi, at the very least please skim this: How to Study: A Brief Guide. Learning how to learn is, how do you say, crucial, of the essence, invaluable, indispensable and totally effing necessary.
Watch it, people. Just because information is second only in volume to pollution on this planet, it does not mean all info is available for you to use and then slap your name on to it like you wrote it or something. Plagiarism, for those of you who missed that day in class, is when you take someone else’s work and falsely claim it as your own. It’s very bad, and it makes you look like an ass@$%*.
The NY Times has an article up about plagiarism and the tech-savvy information generation. The lines are blurry for Gen-Y, apparently.
If you’d like to avoid being an uninformed cheating ass@#$%, the following links are helpful.
I must go. The line above regarding information and the volume of it is freaking me out. Can digital information have volume at all? And is it possible to measure the volume of every printed word on the planet? What about all the still-intact newspapers in old landfills? Do those count as existing information? Crap!
Ah, the wonderful careers we pondered when we were young. I can only recall ever having two career dreams for myself: when in elementary school, I knew absolutely that I would become an elementary school teacher when I grew up, and in high school I changed my mind and wanted to earn my degrees in physical therapy.
Practical and lacking incredibly in imagination, I know. What a lame kid I was. Didn’t I ever want to be a queen or a ballerina? Nope. I would have totally ganged up with the Dukes of Hazard, and in the fourth grade, during the 1984 Olympics, I spent a few months trying to work out how I could actually become Mary Lou Retton (cute, short, and all gymnastics-y, just like fourth-grade me).
The most impractical my real dreams and aspirations ever were: the bizarre number of graduate degrees I felt I needed to hold in order to follow my teaching/physical therapy paths. I was always certain that my working life would not begin until I had at east one PhD on my wall. Why? I have no good answer other than the fact that I thought my grandparents were all amazing and had all been academic badasses.
There’s a study in Britain that’s been going on for over fifty years, called the 1958 British Birth Cohort Study. When this group hit the age of eleven, the children were asked to write 30-minute essays about what their lives would be like at the age of 25. It’s fascinating to read how clear their plans were at age eleven, and how things turned out when reality hit.
It’s cringe-y and funny and it just upset me and made me laugh until I snurfed green tea out my nose. I think you should read it too. Chag Holland is Cynical Dad and he is capable of making your day better.
I help out in my daughter’s class. I used to just do simple things like copy papers and cut out shapes and crap, but somewhere along the line, someone got the dumb idea that I could actually work with the kids and teach them things. Big mistake. Last week, I was working with a table of kids and teaching them how to carry ones. One of the little boys at the table spoke up.
Boy #1: I’m the best in the class at math.
Internal Chag: Um, no, or you wouldn’t be sitting here with me.
Girl #1: No you’re not! Hamid is!
Boy #1: That doesn’t count. Of course he’s the best at math.
External Chag: Why is he the best at math?
Boy #1: He’s from another country. All they do is math.
Watching this helps one to gain some perspective. And by perspective I mean finally understanding just how much money this country requires to survive, and how little Obama has actually removed. Obama’s killing himself and pissing everyone off in order to save the most pathetic sliver of money. And the fallout from the various federal programs losing their funding is fully, mind-blowingly noticeable. If there’s not a huge line at the border crossing today, I could be in Canada in less than three hours.
One must always be learning. Even if you’re one of the learning ones and you’re an educator, who’s supposed teach. Because even teachers have to keep learning. Did they not tell you that in Teacher School?
Ric Murray wrote a piece about a profound moment he had: learning something completely unexpected from a student. He’s a seasoned teacher, is incredibly involved with his school and with his teaching and coaching work. He’s not effing around when it comes to going above and beyond the call of duty, and so was caught totally off guard when he realized he had missed something that was so significant his students.
Mr. Murray is a seventh grade Social Studies teacher and some of his students, being new to the U.S., are English Language Learners (ELLs). A former student, Rocio, was a newly minted high school graduate and a Gates Millennial Scholarship recipient when she showed up to say goodbye to her old school before heading off to college.
Mr. Murray asked her to say a few words to his new class about her experiences as an ELL student and what it’s possible to achieve after coming to the States knowing how to say only “Hi” and “Yes” in English.
She began to speak, explaining her path and how she’d gotten to this moment—heading off to college. Most of the students gave a disrespectful look and turned away. To which she responded with two items:
First she said, “I know why you are looking away. You think this can’t happen for you. You think you’re not smart enough. You think you’re not meant to go to college. You think it would be disrespectful to your parents; who did not even go to high school. I know that’s what you are thinking, because I sat in your chair just a few years ago, thinking the very same thing when teachers talked about students going to college.
But let me tell you something, Your parents would not have left their families, struggled with their children to travel here, and now work 16-18 hours everyday if they didn’t want you to get your education. So make them proud. That’s why they came here. Not for them, but for you.”
Second she said, “I’m not saying it will be easy, but I am saying it will be worth it. What we know that your teachers don’t know is that we can’t even be ourselves or show our real personality to them, or our classmates, because we don’t have a personality until we own the language the people around us use to communicate. We know that you can’t be who you really are in someone else’s language. But when you do learn the language, and you will, you will be able to reveal the real you to them.”
Realizing the absolute truth of that statement, You can’t be who you really are in someone else’s language, Mr. Murray now asks his ELL students to tell him about something they’ve done recently, something fun. First he asks them to tell him in English. Then in their own language. The information is given and received satisfactorily in English. But in the second telling, when the students tell ostensibly the same story but in their native tongue, they laugh, their eyes light up, more of them comes through.
