Random Quote
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
---- George Orwell
The voodoo priest and all his powders were as nothing compared to espresso, cappuccino, and mocha, which are stronger than all the religions of the world combined, and perhaps stronger than the human soul itself.
---- Mark Helprin, Memoir from Antproof Case, 1995
One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.
---- Edward Abbey
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.
---- Galileo Galilei
Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
---- Malcom Forbes
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
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
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
---- Lily Tomlin
I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.
---- Albert Einstein
To have another language is to possess a second soul.
---- Charlemagne
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
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
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
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
---- Isaac Asimov
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
---- Robert Frost
Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?"
---- Kelvin Throop III
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
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
---- Mitch Hedberg
Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
---- J. Robert Oppenheimer
We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything.
---- Thomas A. Edison
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
---- Evan Esar
Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.”
---- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749 -1832)
Technology will not replace teachers...teachers who use technology will
probably replace teachers who do not.
---- Ray Clifford
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three men, two of whom are absent.
---- Robert Copeland
"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
dictionary reliance
Last Friday night the teachers went out for dinner to start off the new semester. Over the course of dinner teachers of course share stories aboutthier classes and students.There was one particular story that I enjoyed and illustrated that some students rely a little too much on their electronic dictionaries.
Apparently this student was translating the Korean word for blue or auquamarine and using it in the sentence “I like aquamarine.” However she didn’t use the correct word from the dictionary. instead she chose the definition with a decidedly different meaning. When the teacher checked the dictionary and suggested that the correct translation would be blue or aquamarine the student, an attractive female freshmen, insisted on saying “I like sodomy”
The moral of the story is that you should not over rely on dictionaries and probably cross reference unfamiliar words. For the record the Korean word is 남색 though it doesn’t list aquamarine as a translation putting in aquamarine returns 남색.





JMac wrote 33 words on Monday Sep 10, 2007 at 08:40 AM
Nice. When I still teaching in a hogwan (years ago), I had one middle-school boy that kept insisting that he ‘wanted to BE a girlfriend’. Couldn’t dissuade him.
Wonder where he is now?!