Random Quote
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
---- Robert Frost
The important thing is not to stop questioning.
---- Albert Einstein
Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
---- J. Robert Oppenheimer
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
---- Lily Tomlin
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.
---- Galileo Galilei
As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
---- M. Cartmill
A magician pulls rabbits out of hats. An experimental psychologist pulls habits out of rats.
---- anonymous
I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.
---- Terry Pratchett
As soon as I buy the moose head, I have to go pick up some KY jelly.
---- Mary Roninette Kowal
Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over IBM versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs.
---- Jack Lynch
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
---- Evan Esar
Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.
---- Fred Allen
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three men, two of whom are absent.
---- Robert Copeland
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
Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.”
---- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749 -1832)
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
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
---- Lily Tomlin
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
Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
---- Malcom Forbes
Drink coffee! Do stupid things faster!
---- unknown
I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
---- Thomas A. Edison
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
---- Sheik Abd-al-Kadir
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
---- H. G. Wells
Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.
---- Terry Pratchett
"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
Stonewalled when speaking Korean
Yesterday I wrote about goal setting which got me to thinking about a conversation I had with my friend D and one of his friends J. I’m leaving names as first initials as I do not know if they want thier names published. Last week on Tuesday Myself and D met for coffee at Starbucks and D also brought J whom I hadn’t met before.
While talking the topic turned to learning Korean. Both D and J have better Korean abilities than I do. D does translation and interpretation for his faith and J has very strong conversational power; he has also attended a Korean language church regularly in Australia. It turns out that D has been feeling very frustrated by Koreans unwillingness to speak to him in Korean because he has a “white” face. This is a rant that I have agreed with D in the past but no longer do 100%. Let me illustrate with a scenario that should be familiar to anyone who has lived in Korea.
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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Wednesday Mar 31, 2004 at 09:39 AM
About_Language | Random_Ramblings | Polling_Station |
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Goal Setting
One of the things that I do with my students is teach them about goals. I’m a big advocate of learner autonomy (I wrote about it here) and I believe that setting goals is an important part that many students do not do or if they do it is inadequately done. Everytime at the beginning of this lesson I ask students what their English goal is and about 95% of the time the response I get is “I want to improve my English” the rest of the time it is “I want to get a good score on the TOEIC exam or TOEFL.”
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serendipitously over-prepared
Today my classes were extremely over-prepared though I actually thought the timing was going to be just about exactly right. I ended up not doing an activity that was scheduled for 30 minutes and truncating another one and using the left-over for homework. This is good in a couple of ways: number one I have already planned half of the next lesson and now I can just add the remaining activities to the beginning of that lesson and be done planning for this week.
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Digital Journals
When I first started my Linguistics studies I invested in the TESOL Quarterly and TESOL journal CD’s to help with research. I have found them invaluable as I can easily search the entire database of articles by key word. Where as using online databases provided by the university is cumbersome. Once you get to a journal of interest it is not particularly easy to search for key terms and I have also found the sites to not be very easy to navigate.
Today I just ordered another CD together with a friend. We ordered the ELT Journal which has a two for one special for students. It cost only 68 pounds versus over us$200 I spent on the two CD’s from TESOL. I hope that we can get as much use out of the ELT journal as I have out of the TESOL Quarterly and Journal.
If you know of any other resources that are free or available for purchase (hopefully cheaper than these ones) please let me know.
Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Sunday Mar 28, 2004 at 03:32 PM
general_linguistic_study |
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Pressure
I am under big pressure right now to write an essay and finish it this weekend. However, I cannot focus and am just wasting most of my time surfing. The essay I’m working on right now is for the Language Program Management class. It’s not a particularly long essay, but the topic is not so interesting to me as I expected.
I posted the essay question earlier. I must say that I am very happy with the quality and length of response I recived from the four teachers I sent the survey to. Their responses have been infinitely helpful.
I think that I need to re-read some of the material and take a look at what I have written so far (only 900 words out of 2000) and adjust my thoughts accordingly. The problem as I see it is that I am not currently in a management role and will not be for the near future. I do have plans, about four years from now, to open my own school with a friend. We have already drafted a plan and have the financial considerations taken into account.
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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Saturday Mar 27, 2004 at 06:42 PM
general_linguistic_study |
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