Random Quote
Drink coffee! Do stupid things faster!
---- unknown
This may be the most interesting blog theme I've ever seen. http://eflgeek.com/index.php Definitely in my top 5 at least.
---- Steve Dembo
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
---- Arnold Lobel
Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.
---- Terry Pratchett
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
---- Gail Godwin
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
---- Isaac Asimov
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
---- John Ciardi
Don't knock the weather. If it didn't change once in a while, nine out of ten people couldn't start a conversation.
---- Kin Hubbard
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
---- Robert Frost
Sleep is a symptom of caffeine deprivation.
---- Author Unknown
It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
---- Franklin D. Roosevelt
To have another language is to possess a second soul.
---- Charlemagne
Technology will not replace teachers...teachers who use technology will
probably replace teachers who do not.
---- Ray Clifford
Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
---- Leonardo DaVinci (1452-1519)
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
---- Evan Esar
"It was on my fifth birthday that Papa put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Remember, my son, if you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm.'"
---- Sam Levenson
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.
---- Galileo Galilei
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three men, two of whom are absent.
---- Robert Copeland
The least of learning is done in the classrooms
---- Thomas Merton
We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything.
---- Thomas A. Edison
I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.
---- Terry Pratchett
Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.
---- Fred Allen
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
---- H. G. Wells
Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.
---- Abigail Adams (1744 - 1818)
It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.
---- Arnold Toynbee
Language Teachers Should Learn a Language
Language teachers should learn a language so that they do not forget what it is like to be a language learner. While re-reading How Languages are Learned by Lightbrown and Spada, I came across a passage that I remember the first time. It is about asking display or genuine questions. Display questions being ones that the asker already knows the answer too (and the interlocutor knows that the asker knows) while genuine questions are ones to which the asker truly does not know the answer.
The point here is that display questions are not communicatively genuine which negatively affects motivation in the learner. The authors also say that Teachers “well known for asking many more display than genuine questions.” I have always made a conscious effort to ask more genuine than display questions. It is unavoidable to ask some display questions in class; the point here is to reduce how many are asked. Today, I decided to self-monitor and I was really quite surprised to see how many display questions I do ask. Time to re-double my efforts.
Read the rest of this post
bye bye blogrolling
I gave up on blogrolling today because this was the second time I woke up in the morning and my site design was broken because blogrolling wasn’t loading properly.
I’ve now made a seperate file with all my links and will include it using php. Now it’s not as convenient for adding links, but at least I know my site won’t be all broken when I’m not looking.
Beating a student with your fists
See the video here
The teacher was in class at a school in Suwon, Gyeonggi-do, when he made a girl step forward and brutally struck her in the face in front of the other students. This scene was caught on a camera phone and uploaded to the Internet as a video clip on Wednesday afternoon. The clip has been downloaded numerous times since then
Finished & gmail
I finally finished the Managing Language Programs essay and now need to get to work on the SLA essay, which is due April 21. Unfortuneately because this latest essay took much longer than expected I’m behind in my readings. Fortuneately I find this topic much more interesting. One more thing I also found out that endnote is now in version 7.0 which has fixed the bug in 6.0 and 6.02 that resulted in Word becoming incredibly sluggish and crashing about every 5-10 minutes. It now works flawlessly.
On an related note, I want to get some gmail! 1gb of free email storage.
company arrived at the 1 GB figure by estimating how much storage an average user would need to store up to a decade’s worth of e-mail. “It’s a new paradigm where you don’t delete your e-mail,”
Here is a link to the G-mail page and a F.A.Q with a form to submit your current email in order to be notified of when the official public launch happens.
*update* spymac joins the 1gb bandwagon.
Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday Apr 1, 2004 at 10:04 PM
general_linguistic_study | Random_Ramblings |
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Critical Thinking part 2
Dave in Limbo wrote an interesting piece
on critical thinking in asia and another short bit at the bottom here. That I think may be of interest to those who responded to my piece on critical thinking in “non-western” learners which was a response to a post written by Jeff-in-Korea on his original blog. Jeff also responded on his new blog.
Anyhow I think the articles are all probably very interesting (I haven’t had time to read them, but will soon), so go check it out.
